LGBTQ+ Rights and Religion

And what if, say, it is a relationship where neither party wants kids, hm?

People are people, Soban. Despite what your church taught you, having a different sexuality or gender identity than you doesn't mean we're from outer space. And saying the worst hetero couples are better than the best gay couples is pretty damn extremist. Of course, you didn't actually say that, to your credit. But it wouldn't be the first time I heard it.

Kind of acknowledged that.

edited 12th Nov '13 12:15:54 PM by Morgikit

If we actually care about kids having the best possible parents, perhaps all parents who want any sort of child by any method should have to take an aptitude test before they are allowed a child.

He actually said the best gay couples are better than the worst hetero ones.

What I'm more interested in is the meat and drink of Soban's argument that Male/Female is better on average than gay families. Prima facie, that's a statement about reality that can be scrutinized, rather than an unfalsifiable spiritual claim.

edited 12th Nov '13 12:17:41 PM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

Leaving the parents who have kids "by accident" where, exactly? I think we've settled on morals as a society that say we shall not under any circumstances restrict the right of reproduction, even if we reserve the right to take kids away from parents that neglect or abuse them. This may not be ideal from a social engineering standpoint, but it's where we are.

The idea that homosexual parents are somehow worse at raising children than heterosexual ones has no scientific backing whatsoever.

edited 12th Nov '13 12:24:50 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

which is kind of like saying that the best fat kid is better than the paraplegic with terminal aids.

Evidence [1] suggests otherwise. And why would there even be a difference?

It increasingly seems that the healthiest family structure is one where there are two parental figures, regardless of gender. One parent families are more likely to have behavioral problems for the kids down the line, but two parent families, regardless of the gender mix of the parents, seem to be more stable.

Not Three Laws compliant.

The correction on Catholic doctrine was illuminating, helpful, and not at all what I was complaining about. I merely do not wish to see religion afforded special protection from criticism.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

i've suspected the same, but it seemed like it was verboten to point it out.

No comment.

edited 12th Nov '13 12:52:58 PM by Morgikit

Somewhat random: I'm suddenly missing Maxima something fierce. -_- Dunno about anybody else.

*cough* Sorry about that.

Aye, he's better at this then me.

When it comes to most of the current research on Same Sex couples, the majority of them are convenience samples that have a high probability of finding a false negative. They also often lack a comparison group. One of the best ones that has been done is the New Family Structures Study It compares a large, national, random sample of such children with their peers from intact families on 40 outcomes and finds significant disadvantages across many of the outcome areas for children whose parents had a same-sex relationship. However, overall, we need to do better and more generous examination of this issue.

edited 12th Nov '13 12:56:37 PM by Soban

How much of that can be chalked up to prejudice and discrimination faced by gay couples?

That's a good subject for further research. I don't think that all of it is. If I ever become a Professor, I'm going to be figuring out how to tie it to marketing and publish a few studies.

There is a lot of criticism of that study.

X5 Me to, he made Soban look sane.

Plus, we never got to read the end of Star Trek: Deep Space Trope.

X6, To add to this, I was in fact pleased that my factual error was corrected, I don't like making factual errors, it just would have just been nice if the correction didn't have to also imply that I was deliberately making stuff up to attack Catholicism, especially when I wasn't even attacking Catholicism (I was attacking Soban ).

X4, Care to sum up what the 40 studied outcomes were? That way we can make estimates as to how they may be effected by people being biased against LGB Ts (as in people in society, not the people doing the study).

edited 12th Nov '13 2:12:11 PM by SilasW

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

I'm pretty sure there are only, like, five people max who both survived their formative years and never committed a sin (For simplicity's sake, I'm defining, "sin," as, "Crime or immorality as described by the then-current edition of the Christian Bible, and the interpretation thereof.") :P

To play devil's advocate, to what degree does this apply? If we were to learn that households comprised of extended family (Aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins, nephews and nieces, et cetera) were more stable than Male/Female ones, would we make them mandatory when possible? Personal freedom is tricky.

Fire, air, water, earth...legend has it that when these four elements are gathered, they will form the fifth element...boron.

You mean one of the worst.

For starters there were severe ethical lapses in letting that thing get published in the first place since the reviewers also happened to members of the research team. The second big one is that it did not control for confounding factors. If a respondent answered that a parent had at any point been in a same sex relationship they were analysed solely in that cohort, even if they could fit into other categories as well that might have a negative impact on outcomes.

I could go on, but here's a letter from a group of 200 scholars giving their objections to the study in more detail. (The letter itself is in the block quotes. Scroll down if you don't want to read the commentary.

"The correction on Catholic doctrine was illuminating, helpful, and not at all what I was complaining about. I merely do not wish to see religion afforded special protection from criticism."

This. And I do have a chuckle when a rational response to a bigoted statement is "passive-agressive", while agressively demanding submission somehow is not.

I suppose it is only a misconduit if it offends my attempts at stripping other human beings of basic rights.

"Almost everything that hurts other people breaks one of the two rules that everything can be boiled down to. Love others as you love yourself."

I believe we've already adressed how this is not a viable conduit. For one thing, you're engaging in a double standard, demaning to some people submission and opression while others get scott free.

edited 12th Nov '13 2:28:01 PM by peryton

Me either. However, this thread seems to be about taking religion as a given, for better or worse, and then looking at gay-related issues in that context.

Example time: Take the "Swords vs. Guns" thread in OTC. Let's suppose that I pacifistically believed weaponry to be an evil in/of itself, and that ideally no one would keep or manufacture them. That is 100% my right, and though I don't think everyone in OTC would agree with me, it wouldn't make me a pariah here. I'd have just as much right to speak as anyone else.

However, if I hung out in the "Swords & Guns" thread, posting about the evils of weaponry, it'd be fair to point out that my preconceptions make it kind of tough to say anything really germane to the thread's purpose. That certainly wouldn't make it right to say "weapons get special protection from criticism in OTC," or that my fellow posters were being censorious; it's just that picking that particular conversation to criticize them probably wouldn't yield anything relevant to the thread.

"She was the kind of dame they write similes about." —Pterodactyl Jones

technically, its usually more about taking Christianity as a given because most other religions dont come up.

Rem, 1 about 2,000 years ago. I'll be honest, my answer to a lot of your devil advocating is, I don't know. If I had my way, Homosexuals, poly, and the guy who decided he wanted to marry a duck have you would be able to call them selves whatever they want and have the same rights as married. (Or lack there of considering what I want is Government out of the Marriage business.) Ironically, I think this would lead to the possibility of more adoption by homosexual couples. On the other hand, I think it's the fairest way to deal with the situation. Our current system is supposedly designed to encourage stable heterosexual relationships for raising kids by giving them more bennies. If we were to keep that same mindset, then we would shift our handing out of bennies to encourage the whole family raising method.

There was a lot more to this post, but I decided to cut it down.

Knightof Lsama, I disagree with their assessment of the merits of the study.

@Jhimmibhob:

Taking religion as a given doesn't mean it's absolved from criticism. The thread is for every discussion within the intersection of LGBT rights and religion. It's not even allowed to talk about religion and LGBT rights anywhere else on OTC. If it is not allowed to criticise it here, than it is not allowed to criticise it at all.

What else should the thread be about? Simply stating and approving every rule religion (or as midgetsnowman pointed out; christianity) has about LGBT's?

edited 12th Nov '13 4:11:26 PM by Antiteilchen

The study had 0 homosexual couples who were together raising their children. As such it can't really say jack shit about how homosexual couples raise children. It didn't include any of them in the study.

Instead it used couples where someone cheated with someone of the same sex and called them homosexual.

edited 12th Nov '13 6:18:26 PM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Sounds like homophobe propaganda at its finest.