Glenn Fleishman got into a debate with someone on the Internet who is opposed to gay rights, yet is obsessed with gay sex. Goalposts move, reason melts, arguments fall in on themselves, and even the winking irony of obvious repression is buried by the simple truth: "a bigot who lacks empathy."

  • Sean Lally

    Don’t bigots by definition lack empathy?

    • Felton / Moderator

      Either that or they dehumanize so that they don’t have to empathize.

      • Aeron

        It’s ironic that those that were unloved to the point of being that way are the self-declared experts on what kind of relationship create love and which ones do not.

        • C W

          “those that were unloved to the point of being that way”

          Plenty of bigots received love and turned out rotten.

          • http://www.tumblr.com/blog/his-divine-shadow His Shadow

            Maybe the received more attention than love.

      • http://mordicai.livejournal.com Mordicai

         Six of one, half dozen of the other…

        • Felton / Moderator

          True.  It’s all the same to those on the receiving end of the bigotry.

    • C W

      They all have gay/black/disabled friends, how could that be possible!

      • Richard Wolff

        because once your gay black and disabled its hard for people to consider you the enemy.

  • peregrinus

    someone on the Internet

    Someone like Cardinal Keith O’Brien?

    • http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza

      Yep :D

  • Aeron

    “She can have an artificial uterus. Gays will never have that.”

    Someone take a screenshot of that particular tweet. In the few years it will be dead wrong and she will swear up and down that she never said that. (Or that gay babies are the devil, or whatever)

    • dbergen

      My thought exactly, she feels that reproductive science for heterosexual couples will be limitless but reproductive science for gay couples will be limited, this is pretty baffling.

    • l337n00b

      This was the point that really grabbed me as well.  If we can implant an artificial uterus into a woman, I don’t know if it will be that long after that we can implant one into a man.

      Also, it can’t be that far off that we can make new humans out of pairs of eggs or even out of pairs of sperm.  Once fertility treatments are allowed, I think homosexual couples certainly have “reproductive potential,” and soon they may have even more reproductive potential than some heterosexual couples.

    • http://www.eff.org/ deaduncledave

       Next on Fox News: Obamacare secretly steals Christian Uteruses for The Gays.

      • Richard Wolff

        to be honest i would totally watch that. although i do find other wise entertaining pieces of satire ruined when played on fox due to the presenters taking themselves so damn serious.

        • http://www.eff.org/ deaduncledave

           Best actors outside Professional Wrestling. I can’t imagine the amount of control it takes to turn hate into dollars every day for years at a go.

          • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_BJ25CCEPCEC5N6Y4VFT2FJALEY WilliamS

             Once you turn your conscience off, the rest is easy.

    • C W

      Their parents did the same thing with regards to interracial marriage.

  • glaborous_immolate

    That report starts off pretty oddly.

    1. The poster seems amazed that a traditional religious argument is traditional. Duh.

    2. He says “she left out” of her definition of complementarity that “men rule and women are only for babies”. So he’s 1) blaming her for not including, perhaps, something she disagrees with and 2) isn’t really believed anyway by many on the traditional spectrum who call themselves complementarian (especially the thing about women are only for babies)

    • dragonfrog

      Please ellucidate for those of us who only learned today that such a thing as a “complementarian” exists, in what way, other than genital configuration and opposite imposed social roles, do complementarians consider men and women to complement one another, such that two men or two women cannot?

    • http://twitter.com/GlennF Glenn Fleishman

      Not amazed. I was surprised at how many terms she used are marked and loaded terms in her religious world but that she uses as if they are widespread, secular terms that we should all accept.

      On point 2, my reading after the fact wouldn’t support your view in the way she expressed herself. For her, and those who believe like her, complementarianism is a whole bag of principles.

  • http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher

    When it comes to trolls Fleishman forgot the lesson the computer at the end of the movie WarGames learned: the only winning move is not to play.

    Of course it’s not a perfect metaphor here since it never really was the “war” that same-sex marriage opponents would like to make it out to be. They’ve simply never had a good reason for preventing same-sex couples from marrying. They haven’t lost a war so much as they’ve simply seen their arguments that something is wrong solely because they don’t like it fail.

    • http://mordicai.livejournal.com Mordicai

      I think the point was that this WASN’T a troll; rather, an actual human being with these actual opinions with actual money & actual votes who actually has these bigoted opinions– this was the original poster trying to figure out “what is up with THAT?”

      • http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher

        In some cases there does seem to be a an actual human being who holds bigoted opinions who, perhaps from deep insecurity, feels compelled to defend those opinions even in the face of an avalanche of facts. Sometimes these people will continue to keep up the argument as long as the other person does, even when it’s abundantly clear that they’ve lost.

        I realize such people aren’t technically trolls, at least as I understand the definition, because they’re not trying to be disruptive for mere amusement but genuinely trying to defend beliefs that they really hold. But as far as the internet is concerned they’re indistinguishable from trolls.

        As far as I know I’ve been lucky enough never to meet any of these people in real life, but I do wonder how, given that issues like this seem to upset them so greatly, they function on a day-to-day basis.

        • Felton / Moderator

          But as far as the internet is concerned they’re indistinguishable from trolls.

          A variation on Poe’s Law?

        • http://mordicai.livejournal.com Mordicai

          You say “sometimes” & that you’ve never met these people in real life & I’m all like, marveling at the luck you’ve had. Good for you! The problem, I guess, is that these people vote & lobby & they are a major force in politics & real life.

          That said, in real life & online I stay away from those housefires, since I realize that there isn’t anything logical that will sway them. I just despair because I don’t think they are magical hate unicorns; I think they are a significant minority that JUST recently slipped from being the majority. I don’t take that crap for granted.

        • C W

          “As far as I know I’ve been lucky enough never to meet any of these people in real life”

          I’m sure you have, they didn’t unload around you because they knew you weren’t “like-minded”.

      • C W

        “this WASN’T a troll; rather, an actual human being with these actual opinions with actual money & actual votes who actually has these bigoted opinions”

        You should probably study the Creationist/ID movement more if you think that sincere douchebags can’t also be trolls who win when you engage them.

        • http://mordicai.livejournal.com Mordicai

          Ha, fair point!

    • tacochuck

      Unfortunately, silence implies consent. Speaking up also supports the groups that are marginalized or attacked if someone stands up and disagrees. It might also show people who are not idiots that the troll’s position and arguments are unsupportable.

      It is not really about the troll.

      • http://www.tumblr.com/blog/his-divine-shadow His Shadow

        In public forums, I would go so far as to say that blatant falsehoods that have the patina of validity thru repetition must be addressed, even if for the sake of the lurkers who never post.

  • glaborous_immolate

    He also makes a hash of understanding of what natural law reasoning is. “natural law” reasoning isn’t strictly speaking religious. It predates Christianity. And Christians use it precisely to account for the fact that all humans have knowledge that say, killing your progeny is wrong (is contrary to the good), even though it happens in the world (is a fact of nature), and even though the Bible tells Christians its wrong, that people without Bibles can still know its wrong.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law

    • l337n00b

      In a way I agree, but bear in mind that he is arguing against natural law as she presents it.  In the sense which you present it, something can only be rightly said to be part of natural law if it is recognizable as right by a consensus of reasonable people (I say reasonable people to leave out psychopaths and people who are deluded).  The fact is, homosexuality being wrong doesn’t fall under that.  If half the people in our society though infanticide was just fine and it didn’t strike any more chord with them, then we couldn’t use “natural law” to argue against infanticide without including some spurious argument that half of society is insane.

      So that’s the problem, in Canada, where she lives, the majority supports gay marriage, the law recognized gay marriage and an even greater majority supports equality for gays even if they are uncomfortable with the marriage thing.  Her argument is that she and the people in her religion are the only ones who can see the truth – that it is against natural law.  If appeals to natural law worked that way, then a gathering of psychopaths could use natural law to argue that killing is right because *they* all agree on it.

    • dragonfrog

      So, “natural law” is whatever corresponds with the majority’s unreasoned prejudices, when the lens of whose prejudices should be considered is framed correctly (e.g. only the prejudices of homophobes provide meaningful insight into “natural law”)

    • CH

      “account for the fact that all humans have knowledge that say, killing your progeny is wrong”
      Is it a fact? There is plenty of infantacide going on, even more so historically. Especially babies that were born disabled. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide about ancient Greece:
      “After a woman had a baby, she would show it to her husband. If the husband accepted it, it would live, but if he refused it, it would die. Babies would often be rejected if they were illegitimate, unhealthy or deformed, the wrong sex (female for example), or too great a burden on the family. These babies would not be directly killed, but put in a clay pot or jar and deserted outside the front door or on the roadway.”

      • http://twitter.com/GlennF Glenn Fleishman

        Infanticide is practiced on the scale of at least tens of millions, if not hundred of millions, in the last several decades in India, China, and other countries. There’s a massive gender imbalance in India and China that can only be explained by the common practice of aborting female births and killing babies after birth.

    • Antinous / Moderator

      He also makes a hash of understanding of what natural law reasoning is.

      Perhaps that’s because there’s no reasoning involved in the idea of natural law.

    • http://twitter.com/GlennF Glenn Fleishman

      Whatever the origins of it, the way it is used by Christians (and you can find plenty of Christian thinking about this) is in relation to their god, who create natural rules that he apparently enforces. Christians don’t defend “natural law” (their definition) by noting that pre-Christians also believed it. They defend it by pointing first to the god.

      Non-believers know certain things are wrong, they say, because there’s a kind of natural order to things, but then they use that to define all sorts of things that they want to state are in the natural order or not based on god’s ordering.

    • http://www.tumblr.com/blog/his-divine-shadow His Shadow

      He also makes a hash of understanding of what natural law reasoning is. 

      No. The bigot does that. When “natural law” isn’t a code word for “gods did it” or a blatant attempt to infuse the inanity of the Christian bible with some inalienable value because of it’s mere existence, “natural law” is a grab bag of post hoc nonsense typical of the type of bigot in question.

  • oneswellfoop

    While I like to argue for fun and practice (hey, I’m in law school, why not?), with catholics, I just sort of laugh, shake my head, and say “You’re f*cking crazy and there’s no reason to debate you.  What has happened in, and the circumstances that surround, your church for the last few centuries totally discredit it, but you’re so brainwashed that you think it’s worthy of holding up high.  Go to hell.”

    Try to argue faith always winds up with me making personal judgments on its adherents, or, at the very least, their actions and the basis for them.

  • sdmikev

    Here’s the problem – “everyone is entitled to an opinion” is taken literally by people who are full of shit and allowed in places and by people that should know better.  We don’t give “equal time” to people that think the world is flat or the moon is made of cheese, so why should we do anything other than marginalize bigots?
    CNN and the TV and the internet make it worse by saying “here’s a filthy bigoted moron, let’s hear what they have to say on this topic.”  Why?

    • SomeGuyNamedMark

      Because it is no longer about news, it is about entertainment.  Getting people’s emotions riled somehow equates to ad revenue (personally it makes me turn the channel/leave the site).

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Shane-Simmons/100000053744641 Shane Simmons

      This headline sounds like the punchline of an XKCD comic, or an Onion headline.

    • http://www.tumblr.com/blog/his-divine-shadow His Shadow

      Because the media isn’t selling information. They are selling conflict. They are selling outrage. They are selling disagreement.

      The web counter may make some believe that “hit whore” is a concept commensurate with the creation of the internet, but “if it bleeds it leads” has encapsulated the voyeuristic nature of the average media business model long before we had electric typewriters.

  • SomeGuyNamedMark

    “Internet argument runs course”

    This could be an Onion headline

  • charliekrustovnovitchgeschalt

    Ugh. This woman does not represent Canadians.

    • dbergen

      Don’t be naive.

    • C W

      There is no country in existence without hatemongers, otherwise we wouldn’t need laws on the books to protect us from them.

      • Jerril

         He did not say “Canada has no hatemongers”.

        She does not represent a majority of Canadians. She doesn’t even represent a large minority of Canadians. Her beliefs about human sexuality are slightly more representitive of the collective beliefs of Canadians as polled, than the beliefs about a flat-earther reflect the beliefs Canadians hold about the shape of the planet.

    • Antinous / Moderator

      You wouldn’t say that if you could see commenters’ IPs. Weirdly, a lot of horrible comments come from BC. Of course, it may just be that nobody in Calgary has ever heard of Boing Boing.

  • snagglepuss

    I get into  quite a few arguments with people of faith. Once they’ve started to get good and irritated with my calm refusal to ignore their contradictions and insupportable conclusions, and they (invariably) start in with the “YOU’RE A FILTHY ATHEISTS AND I’M NOT, SO I’M RIGHT !”, I like to drop this one in their laps:

    “You’re the folks who swear to have all the answers – And when you don’t, you say ‘god works in mysterious ways’ “, along with the ever-popular “PROVE that god DOESN’T exist !’, and then expect all challengers to simply accept that”. I think it’s time that shoe was on the other foot. I ask them, “How do you KNOW that your god DIDN’T put me on this earth to bring you down a peg or two when you start getting too full of yourselves ? PROVE that he ISN’T doing that right now.”

    It’s a room-clearer, I can tell you that. VERY few stick around to take that one on.

    • nmcvaugh

      I use a different approach that also screws with their heads. I point out that there are thousands of religions, most of which claim to be the “one true religion.” And then I tell them (honestly) that as soon as all the religions get together to agree on their beliefs I’ll be happy to listen. Until then they should concentrate on their fellow believers. Leave the heavy lifting for last is my advice.

      • http://www.eff.org/ deaduncledave

         Tell the Catholics that the Church of England is the only true faith, tell the Baptists that only the Jews will be saved, tell the B’nai that Islam is the one true way, lather rinse repeat.

    • http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher

      It’s a good argument, and I’ve tried something similar in the past only to have the other person reply, “I know I’m right and God wouldn’t do that because my faith says so.”

      Logical arguments, unfortunately, don’t work on those who refuse to argue logically.

      • http://www.eff.org/ deaduncledave

         Ha! This reminds me of an argument I got into with a guy at a bar who told me that “Logic is just liberal propoganda” after I tried to explain predicate logic. (Yes, this was a bar. I realize I wasn’t exactly playing to my audience.)

        • http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher

          There’s a Homer Simpson line, “You can use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true” that I used to think was funny because I believed it was only in a cartoon world that someone would use such a claim to dismiss an argument.

          Now I find it funny because there seem to really be people out there who think reality is conspiring against them.

      • http://www.facebook.com/dave.hustava Dave Hustava

        Every now and then I get those folks, too. I simply point out, “You said you had all the answers, Now you don’t, so you’re changing the subject. Loser. I win.”

        That’s when they start SCREAMING…..

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Rick-Adams/100000053021803 Rick Adams

       As far as the gay-marriage-argument, I always like to ask a person where they stand on hermaphrodites; people who were created by God, that possess both female and male genitalia. I’ve never gotten a straight answer from anyone though. I think most people still don’t believe hermaphrodites even exist.

      • Jerril

        Quick lesson: Humans don’t have hermaphrodites; I’m not sure there are any true mammalian hermaphrodites, although there are plenty of invertebrates and fish that fall under that definition.

        We do have intersex people, who cover the entire spectrum of morphologies between ‘male’ and ‘female’, but none of which are a complete set of female and male genitalia – that requires four gonads, two of each type, and there’s a serious geometry conflict that will prevent the arrangement ;)

        It’s not only rude to call intersex people hermaphrodites, it’s also inaccurate.

        BUT if you substitute “intersex” for “hermaphrodite” and adjust the description slightly, your argument holds water. Check out Intersex on Wikipedia if you want to prepare yourself to knowledge-bomb your opponents, not like that’ll help.

      • http://www.facebook.com/creesto Christopher W Lynch

        And boy do the same folks turn beet red in anger, indignation and fear when the topic of Gender Confusion/Reassignment comes up. They think people choose to have their organs scrambled so that they feel right, or fit with the internal identity, much like gay people choose gay, not for the hate that ensues but for the mere fabulousness of it.

      • Donald Petersen

         I think most people still don’t believe hermaphrodites even exist.

        Yet plenty of people think angels exist.  If presented with an intersex person, a devout person might just conclude they’d met some sort of demon.

        Mythology can explain anything at all, when said mythology is, you know, made up.

  • http://www.disoriented.net/ angusm

    “You can’t reason someone out of a position that they didn’t reason themselves into.”

    Glenn identifies three axioms that she has accepted uncritically, and which rest on nothing (except a – sometimes selective – reading of scripture). She isn’t going to budge from those, largely because there’s a fourth, unspoken axiom in play: what I believe is right, what you believe is wrong.

    • Boundegar

      Well if it wasn’t right, she wouldn’t believe it.  Duh.

  • duncano

    It’s worth trying to understand the argument(s) being made on the other side. It often seems to me that among the people I know opposition to gay marriage is non-existent. However, I don’t have to get very far outside my circle to find it . . . only half of Americans support the notion. Went out for dinner recently with a colleague visiting from California. His wife railed against the gay marriage proposition. They are members of a Catholic church that split from the pope – because mainstream catholics aren’t strict/obvservant/conservative enough.

    It’s out there.

    • http://www.facebook.com/creesto Christopher W Lynch

      I have a cousin-in-law that is a grad school professor, novelist and consults with the gubmint on natural language algorithms, and he told me he believes that gays, muslims and atheists are the biggest threat to this country, and that gay marriage will result in bestiality. I caught three flies before I remembered to pick my jaw up off of the floor

      • Antinous / Moderator

        On the plus side, he has a bright future as a character in an Orson Scott Card novel.

      • Donald Petersen

        But what happened then?  Could you resist the temptation to laugh in his face?  I don’t believe I could have.

  • CH

    Hmm, well… she did get it right with ”Adoption is meant as a solution to the kid’s lack of parents, not a couple’s lack of kids” (for instance, Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption). But that really has nothing to do with the issue at hand, so I don’t know why she pulled it up.

    But what I have never understood is that if they are so adamant about marriage being about procreation, then why do they also often insist on sex only being for marriage. Shouldn’t a couple demonstrate first that they can procreate before they get married, in that case?

    • l337n00b

      Yeah, can’t get a marriage licence until you’re pregnant, that just make sense.

    • http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher

      I once asked someone who adamantly insisted that marriage should solely be about procreation whether he believed heterosexuals who are infertile or who simply don’t want to have kids should be denied the right to marry. After some shuffling he finally said that, yes, he did believe that, but that determining which heterosexual couples were infertile or which ones simply didn’t want to have children would be prohibitively expensive, intrusive, and time-consuming.

      The funny thing is it was clearly an answer even he was uncomfortable with. 

      • CH

        One could pretty cheaply rule out a bunch of people. After any hysterectomy operation… hand in your marriage licence. Or when getting hormone treatment for menopause symptoms… again, hand in your marriage licence. I guess vasectomies/having your tubes tied would be forbidden if these people had their say, but if not… hand in your marriage licence.

        But your comment made me think about this a bit deeper… If marriage is about procreating… why is fidelity an issue? As long as you don’t get pregnant by or knock up anybody else than your assigned spouse (Or do we get to choose our spouse ourselves? I don’t think that’s a good idea.), then it shouldn’t matter. And we can just marry them, too, then! Oh, and no need to stay and raise the kids, if we are done procreating with our spouse. Ooooooh! I know! We turn marriage licences into work contracts in baby farms! I mean, if marriage is (just) about procreation, that’s ultimately where you end up, right?

        • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_BJ25CCEPCEC5N6Y4VFT2FJALEY WilliamS

          That’s why there were adultery laws–to make sure the child conceived was indeed the genetic offspring of the father.  (They stoned the woman, but that’s no big deal–she was only property.) 

          That’s where the 16th century reformer Martin Luther turned things around.  He taught that the 6th commandment, “You shall not commit adultery” was to be seen as a gift for reinforcing and protecting family bonds, and that’s why a lot of Lutherans like myself see that as a gift justly belonging to gay couples as well as “straights”.

          Luther also suggested that the husband should wash the diapers, but that’s another topic.

  • Roose_Bolton

    I wring my hands and tear out my hair at the thought that people like this, with such disparate views than mine, exist in the world, simply because they are preventing us all from attaining unity and forming the hive mind necessary to generate a floating, pulsating, glowing brain, which can jet around the universe at the speed of thought and have all sorts of crazy adventures….

    • CH

      Are you absolutely sure that they haven’t formed a hive mind? Because they sure sound like it. And I’m also pretty sure they would love nothing more than incorporating everybody into their hive, with or without consent.

    • C W

      What makes you think there aren’t stupid, malignant bees?

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Rick-Adams/100000053021803 Rick Adams

    Talking is important.

  • sdmikev

    One more thing.  “gay marriage” isn’t about religion.  It’s about the law.  And as long as the state is handing out marriage certs, yet still saying that gay people cannot get married, they need to provide a LEGAL reason why they cannot have said cert.
    As soon as some dopey religious freak starts in on me about this issue, I remind them of that and tell them to shut the fuck up.

    • http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher

      Unfortunately the absence of a legal reason never seems to be enough to shut them up.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Drop/100000929402049 Robert Drop

    I don’t know why he bothered.  The “logic” of the anti-gay-marriage crowd is pretty obvious: it’s either circular or just based on declarations.  Can’t argue with either, nor can you understand any reasoning beyond “I think it’s wrong because I think it’s wrong.”

    • Donald Petersen

      I do prefer to hear the somewhat more intellectually honest “I think it’s wrong because I find it yucky.”

    • http://twitter.com/GlennF Glenn Fleishman

      Robert, I honestly never heard it all articulated before, and it was worthwhile to know (or research) the basis of so many assumptions. It makes me (and now others) more effective debaters on the topic against those that regurgitate talking points.

  • Jonathan Roberts

    I was “converted” partly through a few months of internet discussions with atheists. I came out with a number of the same ridiculous arguments that this person and others have given and was often turned off by the dismissive nature of some people (and also inspired by many people who continued to talk patiently with me without showing too much frustration at the latest logical fallacy). I actually came to the discussion as a committed Christian who was just very uncomfortable about the way the game was rigged so that the church could continue quite comfortably without any need for an actual god to be there, and the way that critical thought was actively discouraged where it challenged basic beliefs. It still took a long time (about two years) and a lot of reading and discussion before I actually felt comfortable calling myself an atheist.

    In many cases, you’re dealing with someone who has been taught their belief system from childhood and may have very few friends or family members with other opinions. Their belief and value system is thoroughly ingrained at this point, so even if what you say to these people is understood, you may never know as it will take a long time to process the different arguments. So basically what I’m saying is that it is worth talking to people (even online), both to appreciate their humanity and with the knowledge that you may actually be getting through to them.

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Drop/100000929402049 Robert Drop

      Twitter seems a pretty poor platform for having a substantive discussion that might change minds, however.  And his stated purpose was to understand her position more than to argue his own.  Given that there’s fundamentally nothing there to understand, seems like wasted effort in this case.

  • http://www.facebook.com/hillary.rettig Hillary Rettig

    in cases like this sometimes the “win” happens later on, if you’ve planted a seed in the other person’s thinking. I wouldn’t rule that possibility out. Or, it can happen when onlookers get to witness bigotry, illogic, and lack of empathy vs. rationality, empathy, and compassion.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Shane-Simmons/100000053744641 Shane Simmons

    As a church-going person I’d love to defend her.  But I can’t.  I checked out her blog, BIG BLUE WAVE, and it amazes me.  A Catholic bigot.  Yay.  A church that has often been the victim of bigotry (historically) seems like it’s home to some of the worst offenders.

    It’s not as if the Catholic church has shied away from using the law when it suits them.  Look at the history of public education in 19th Century New York, when schools required students to study the King James Bible and taught of the evils of Catholics and the Irish.

    • http://www.facebook.com/creesto Christopher W Lynch

      Didn’t the Catholic Church also recently declare that fetuses that die before birth due to malpractice are not protected because they are not people? Most Catholics I know are lovely accepting people, btw.

      • http://www.facebook.com/people/Shane-Simmons/100000053744641 Shane Simmons

        Sort of.  There was a Catholic-affiliated hospital in Colorado which was sued for wrongful death after a mother pregnant with twins died.  The husband sued for wrongful death on all three, but under Colorado state law, a fetus isn’t a person until it’s born.  The hospital’s lawyer chose to go with that tactic.

        Given the Church’s stance on human life, it was especially appalling.

  • jackbird
  • UncaScrooge

    I don’t enjoy arguing with people, so I’ll immediately turn an adversarial discussion about gay marriage into a discussion about divorce. I’ll say, “You know what’s really destroying marriage? Divorce!”

    The discussion that follows is often illuminating. They may end up defending something they know is wrong and discouraged by scripture, but is also legal, widespread and often personally practiced by the Marriage Defender.

    • http://twitter.com/GlennF Glenn Fleishman

      When asked about the state of the institution of marriage, her reply is that marriage was a kind of eternal immutable thing that was in great shape.

      Even if the Catholic Church defined it as a sacrament only in the 12th century. And that modern marriage of the last couple hundred years largely has nothing to do with historical marriage, most of which was authorized by states, not religions.

      Marriage is fine!

  • Mark_Frauenfelder
    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Drop/100000929402049 Robert Drop

      I thought for sure that was an Onion headline.  I forgot Al Qaeda had a magazine.  I’m digging their infographic about how we’re a gay marriage-loving country.  I guess they’re afraid that, as Anne Coulter said, We’re going to “invade their countries, kill their leaders and force them into gay marriages.”