LGBTQ+ Rights and Religion

I'm a little confused as to what this has to do with LGBT rights.

"We must stop the gays, because no-one said so!"

Yes. That's a very common sentiment.

Heteronormativity is a line of oppression that is supported by religion and I'd argue would be supported by the lack of religion as well.

Don't be obtuse. That is a strawperson of my position and the positions that religious people have. For example, many of the religious arguments don't hinge on anyone having said anything as a justification but on teleology.

And I can imagine it going along the lines of "Homosexuality is an unnatural perversion that was a result of a reaction to the ethics of christianity and other such primitive belief systems. As more rational atheists, now, we should oppose it since it wouldn't have existed if not for religion!" Of course, as it hasn't happened yet with queer folk, I don't know how it will look like, but there are many ways it could.

edited 13th Nov '13 2:38:49 PM by deathpigeon

@peryton, as someone who was mentioned in the post you were responding to. I would just like to clarify where I sit in that distinction.

Homosexuality, Evangelicalism, and The Danger of a Single Story I watched the TED talk and I think it's very relevant to the discussion.

edited 13th Nov '13 2:45:52 PM by Soban

That wasn't a strawman, that was me showing how you would need to justify oppression with atheism's one and only tenet. "There are no gods" is atheism. "And therefore..." is the point where you shift to a different philosophy.

So what if that is the only tenet of atheism? Atheism can be used for far more than just its tenets, just as christianity and buddhism, and islam, and hinduism can be used for things for more than just their tenets.

It's true that atheism hasn't always been associated with moral libertarianism. It's been morally prescriptive & proscriptive in the past, and could always be again in the future. For every atheist concluding "without God, all things are permitted," there's been another concluding "without God, just whatever's best for the [species, country, race, proletariat, planet, etc.] should be permitted."

Among many atheists, such utilitarian moral calculus seems often on the verge of bobbing to the surface. For example: I can easily picture Huxley or Ingersoll arguing that homosexuality ought to be outlawed by alleging it to be an evolutionary/eugenic dead-end ... who's to say their heirs will necessarily be more open-minded, or will stay that way?

edited 13th Nov '13 3:41:42 PM by Jhimmibhob

Eugenics isn't really exclusive to atheism. Believing in evolution isn't either.

Eugenics is just the principles of selective breeding applied to humans. It has nothing to do with theology whatsoever.

and I happen to agree. However, even astute fellows like Huxley thought that such notions infallibly proceeded from their religion-related arguments, and he won't necessarily be the last to make such a leap. That's merely one scenario under which an overtly atheist society could conduct itself in a gay-unfriendly fashion.

Could someone remind me what the point of this is?

It's been ages since we had a derail and people need their fix?

Pretty much. As a general rule, two parents can provide more robustly, and you can demonstrate a healthy supportive relationship much more effectively if you're in one. But nothing about the process is unique or composite of either sex.

Exactly. None of their respondents are actual gay couples. They were either single parents who were already divorced/separated and happened to have been in a same-sex relationship at some point in their lives, or married to a partner of the opposite sex who had extramarital affairs with the same sex.

That said, the other side isn't immune to criticism. Studies that show gay parents are actually better tend to exhibit the opposite selection bias. In the states that allow them to adopt at all, gay parents have to go through such an absurd number of bureaucratic hoops to do so that any you're likely to find to put in your study will have unusual financial stability, good education, and saintly patience. Of course they're going to compare well to an unadjusted cross section of the rest of America.

If you want data about the efficacy of gay parenting, you need to look at countries or states that allow gay couples to adopt easily, and then control for socioeconomic strata. I'd suggest Denmark, since they've had gay marriage on the books the longest and are more likely to have equalized those circumstances since.

You're also going to have to adjust to how many of them were previously married to a partner of the opposite sex — especially if the child being cared for was not adopted but conceived by one of the parents before separation. The closest analogue you really have to that is child custody battles, which tend to be...messy.

There are plenty. The ones unable to communicate on a basic level of civility got banned, and the others just use the same level of passive-aggressive condescension as pretty much anyone else on an internet forum.

Wrong.

You mean, say, being anti-religion? Both legally and socially oppressing it?

That makes sense. I've encountered atheists who had some pretty serious internalized feelings towards specific religions (I haven't met anyone with enmity directed towards all religious groups, but they presumably exist, and keep quiet about it.)

edited 13th Nov '13 7:37:46 PM by Rem

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

More than that. This is people in power using the anti-religious sentiments that almost inevitably occur as an excuse to justify other systems of oppression, such as heternormativity. And it is as much an excuse as when they use Christianity or any other religion to do so.

It depends what you mean by emnity. I consider all supernatural religions to be untrue (though not equally harmful), which I suppose one could define as "emnity". The trouble is, a lot of religious people seem to feel that anyone who disagrees with them is either evil or mentally defective - they don't so much disagree with atheism as view it as a personal insult.

This isn't a phenomenon exclusive to the religious, it must be said: political extremists tend to exhibit it as well.

edited 14th Nov '13 2:06:44 AM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

Umm, we've wandered fairly off topic, unless you can give a single concrete example of anything like this arising from atheist or anti-religious beliefs.

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

As atheism isn't on topic here either I'd actually say that such things need to be tied to LGBT Rights. Or we could just get back in topic.

The example I gave earlier was islamaphobia. Atheists have bought into that particular line of oppression with their atheism being used as their excuse for their irrational fear and hatred of Islam and Arabic people, that is often both against the religion and the race, despite how many protest the opposite.

[[quoteblack]]As atheism isn't on topic here either I'd actually say that such things need to be tied to LGBT Rights. Or we could just get back in topic.[[/quoteblock]]

How is speaking about how atheism could contribute to oppression against LGBT people not on topic?

I, for one, am less concerned about hypothetical future opression than I am about the here and now.

China, North-Korea and Cuba are all oppressing queers and are all atheist countries. Not to mention East Europe only a few decades ago.

And it also means that simply deconversion is not a solution to the lines of oppression. We need to attack those institutions directly to eliminate them. Indeed, I'd rather live in a world without those lines of oppression, but almost everyone is religious than one where almost everyone is an atheist, but those lines of oppression are still propped up.

Aren't all of those communist countries?

North Korea is not atheist. They worship Kim Il Sung.