LGBTQ+ Rights and America

But wasn't part of Jesus's teaching him saying that things had got muddled up and we where doing it wrong? I've always taken it him basically saying "look guys the old book isn't working anymore. Let's try again"

I will look for the bit in the New Testiment when I'm home and have access to a Bible (on my iPad at college rig now)

As a future history major, this "Christian nation" historical revisionist bullshit irritates the fuck out of me.

@Starship: Then there really aren't many "real" Christians out there then, because precious few of them are particularly loving, IMO.

It's not loving to bag on the LGBT crowd, and it's not loving to think that you can "fix" someone, nor is it loving to evangelize consistently. I personally feel that the vast majority of Christians do not love me because I'm bisexual, on birth control, and have premarital non-monogamous sex, and I feel this way because they often profess that there's something "wrong" with the way I live my life, despite me being a thousand times more content with my life now that I've come out about it.

If Christians really were about "love" then gay marriage would be accepted, because marriage is supposed to be a public profession of undying love between two people.

This is drivel. I would fail you out of my history class for this, when I'm a teacher.

The Establishment Clause itself invalidates this entire idea as anything official. Judeo-Christian values, as they exist in the system, are products of the people who created it—nearing on three centuries ago—who also, mind you, thought black people were and women were property and only straight white Protestant British people with money and land should vote and hold office.

And even they wanted religion out of the legal system (and the legal system out of religion) as much as was humanly possible. Quite a few Framers weren't even Christian!

Maybe, but the Roman republic provides the backbone, starting with the form of government, due process and so on.

B But the puritans and pilgrims weren't 1. the only 2. the most importnat immigrant group.

And of course, even then, the views of people who founded a country, in my view, are less important than what is practical.

It's in Paul's letter to the Corinthians.

The Constitution has no more to do with Christianity than anything else made since then would automatically have as a result of Christianity existing. The Founders may have been largely Christian (though there were a fair number of Deists among them), but that does not mean that anything they made would be automagically a Christian document (just like just because the guy who made your, say, table, was Christian does not mean that it's a Christian table). Instead, they got together and made a secular document based on secular morality and Elightenment principles.

That said, we're getting off topic and should probably split off a thread for this. The Constitution doesn't say jack about marriage either way, so why did we start discussing it again?

I'd honestly rather make everyone who wants the status and benefits go get a Civil Union (using that term in part because "marriage" has too much baggage nowadays) and let the churches/drive-thru Elvises do the ceremonial part. But, failing that, yep, let any couple marry.

edited 5th Jan '12 10:31:10 AM by Balmung

I think what everyone here is trying to say is that conservative views of the Bible are equally valid. In fact, more valid if you take a literalist stance, since Jehovah is (by His own admission) a bad mutha.

I have a good friend with a college education in Religious Studies about to blow a gasket looking at this thread. :P

In all fairness though, regardless of how you feel about homosexuality, if the only reason why you have to deny basic civil rights to a segment of the population is that your (insert personal religious and/or spiritual persuasion) says so, then I'm going to call your sky god out and make him tell me why I'm not human enough to have full citizenship rights in a state that is supposed to keep religion out of secular policy.

More people are realizing that their beliefs are their own and they do not have a right to impose such on the rest of the population. I'm grateful for that. It makes us get along better. Plus it helps weed out the freaks from the more loving and for lack of a better word genuine faiths (including atheists and agnostics). That way we as a society can avoid them.

I'm certainly not saying that. So far the only New Testiment reference I have been given in that of Paul (who not being Jesus is more than capable of being a man of his time and wrong) and I can't even find that one (I'm looking at Corinthians 6 sexual immorality if anyone wants to help me find the correct place). So so far I can't find anywhere in the new Testiment that says that the conservative's view that homosexuality is wrong as said in the bubble is wrong.

Why is your religious studies thread about to blow a gasket over this topic?

Because professionals who have translated the original Greek scripture get irritated when us laymen talk about religion.

I've found basically two ways that Christians deal with the Bible and homosexuality thing. Either 1) They take it as literally true, that homosexuals are an abomination and should not be entitled to equal rights (not always going so far as to advocate killing them). Or 2) They engage in a bunch of complicated mental gymnastics and say that some parts of the Bible should be taken as true, while others should not.

For those in the first group, there's no arguing with them because their belief boils down to "the Bible tells me so", and indeed it does say so. For those in the second group, I wonder why they accept any part of the Bible as true, since you can "interpret" something to mean whatever you want.

And to anybody who even suggests that the framers of the Constitution relied on the Bible or Biblical principals in writing the thing, I challenge them to point to a single passage in the Federalist Papers that substantiates their claim.

Madison refers to God twice, in the "God only knows" sense. But then, his father was a clergyman.

And there you have it. Proof our Framers were all Christian zealots.

I wouldn't call saying that the Old Testament is outdated and was decreed as such by Jesus 'a bunch of complicated mental gymnastics'. Otherwise all I have done is asked for a page reference in the New Testament for homosexuality actually being called wrong.

Plus I don't even believe that the bible is completely true. From my point of view it is a book of religious stories that a religion is founded upon. Many of those stories are not true down to every detail but they (well some of them) teach us good lessons.

My faith is based around the teachings of Christ. Find a reference for me where Christ calls homosexuality wrong and I accept that such a faith will not work with my moral beliefs.

The original language of the Bible, as best we can determine, doesn't condemn homosexuality explicitly in the modern context of loving relationships - it's always mentioned in the context of rape or pagan rituals or other generally frowned-upon behavior that has additional connotations. (There is also at least one case where we literally don't know what the word means and the translators decided to make it mean gay people.) Along with the observable benefits of showing compassion to homosexual relationships, that's good enough for me, and that's not exactly complicated mental gymnastics. For those of you who feel that you've read the Bible and disagree based on English translations, I want you to tell me why we don't have unicorns.

On the flipside, I also reject, utterly, the notion that recognizing a book as imperfect automatically makes it worthless to acquire knowledge from. That's just bouncing from the extreme of blind faith to the extreme of blind rejection. The Bible not being perfectly literal, flawlessly translated and fully preserved throughout the ages doesn't make it without value - that scenario only places it on the same level as everything else. IOW, we judge each given component, each verse, each moral, each lesson by its individual and scientifically-observable merits, and not by having faith in the infallibility of the container. Just like every fracking thing else.

edited 5th Jan '12 12:25:41 PM by Karkadinn

More projection. No one has done anything of the sort. We're trying to expel Christian influence from our society as it exists now.

Right. We're more than willing to acknowledge Christianity in our history and culture. We want it out of our government, as was clearly intended by the Founders.

I think Paul refers to "homosexual offenders" in 1 Corinthians. I don't know for sure, though.