Gay Marriage as an attack on Christianity

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That. That right there. That's you running away.

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You just can't stop lying.

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Are you saying you didn't write what you were quoted as having written?

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If I was doing that I wouldn't be defending it from your misrepresention.

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But we know she's never going to address it because...wait for it...SHE DOESN'T AGREE WITH YOU

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And how does that make her argument any better ?

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Do you honestly not see the irony in you claiming I'm misinterpreting your claims about Faith's misinterpretation of her own faith?

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I am not claimimg that Faith misrepresents her own beliefs, I do claim that Christianity is much wider than Faith's personal beliefs.

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Except it does: It is irrelevant whether or not Faith's interpretation of the Bible is based in a "good grounding of Christian doctrine." It's *her* faith, she's entitled to it, and the law still doesn't care what it is.

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Which doesn't deal with the point. Faith's personal beliefs are not the issue. Christianity is.

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Because it's *HER* faith

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Christianity is not just Faith's version of it, so why does she get to define Christian doctrine ? What makes her better equipped to do so than the Archbishop of Canterbury or an Orthodox Patriarch ?

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But mine was about Faith's right to her faith, which you seem to be of the opinion she doesn't have a right to.

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She doesn't have the right to insist that Christianity is limited to her faith, and that is all that matters for my argument.

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And yet, she still doesn't believe you

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So ? It would hardly be the first demolition of her arguments she refused to accept.

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That you don't understand how Faith's beliefs aren't tied to how we manage anti-discrimination policy in a thread devoted to anti-discrimination policy shows just how disconnected you are.

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I wonder how you can possibly evaluate my understanding of an issue that I am not even attempting to discuss.

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Question: What is the end goal of convincing Faith that the Bible doesn't say what she thinks it says?

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That isn't something I was even attempting to do in the post we are discussing.When will you cease this misrepresentation ?

First, as we have seen you complain that I won't run away.Second I have already produced an argument that you are misinterpreting my argument and it has clearly been ignored.Third doubling down on the bad behaviour when the moderator has called for an attempt to find common ground deserves sanction.And fourth the next time you wish to attempt to respond to one of my points please don't waste everyone's time. Whether you are simply incapable or just trolling I don't care.

If you aren't interested in discussing my actual points where is the common ground ?So let me offer a compromise. YOU stop responding.Why won't you do that ?It's pretty obvious to me that you just want to "win". Either I talk about your topic or I really run away. Either way you "win".That is not acceptable to me. You do not get to dictate to me. And especially not by the tactics that you have used.

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And again Paul says absolutely nothing about "legality at the secular level" and I haven't used scripture for anything remotely related to that concept at all.

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You object to certain instances of States enforcing their anti-discrimination laws, and you say that to "fix" it Federal law should be changed (for reasons that are still completely obscure)If there is no scriptural objection to secular government legalising gay marriage (which means only to grant gay couples the same rights as straight couples under secular law) why are you complaining so much about it ?

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The gay marriage law directly contradicts scripture. This is unprecedented, and it puts [conservative Bible-believing] Christians in opposition to the law, which shouldn't ever happen imho.

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So obviously you have to cite scripture to demonstrate that it "directly contradicts Scripture" (which you have yet to do) as well as show instances where "conservative Bible-believing Christians" are put in opposition to the law (because you certainly can't mean only that they oppose the law, since that is hardly unprecedented)

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The scripture doesn't address anything about secular laws or secular government, but what it does address about marriage and homosexual acts clearly condemns a law favoring gay marriage. How could it be otherwise with marriage defined as between a man and a woman and homosexual acts defined as sin?

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Arguably it "condemns" it in the same way that it "condemns" laws allowing remarriage after divorce. But the question is why it matters to you what the secular government permits - if the scriptures don't say that you should complain that the secular government permits things you consider sinful then why are you complaining so loudly ?

Sure, it is simple.The "Christians" want to stop gays getting the secular rights of marriage and the rest is just a smokescreen. You started by confusing the issue of anti-discrimination laws with the legalisation of gay marriage and kept on doing it throughout the thread. Since the subject had been covered in previous threads and is pretty obvious to anyone who actually cares about the issue it seems pretty clear you are more interested in taking rights away from gays than anything else.And you tried to excuse this by claimimg that you were to busy responding to the replies to get the original post right.In addition there seems to be no Biblical case for denying services associated with marriages to gay weddings - but there is a Biblical case for obeying anti-discrimination laws.Whether the bakers are bigots or have been duped by bigots - I'm sure we all remember the propaganda campaign against gay marriage - doesn't make much of a case for revoking the law permitting gays to marry or to consider gay marriage an attack on Christianity (although I am sure 'Christians" were offended that the Supreme Court refused to obey them). In the first instance they are culpable, in the second the propagandists are culpable.In my view, it is those who seek to link Christianity to the oppression of gays who are really attacking Christianity.

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hat's a bit odd. What does gay marriage have to do with all those forms of unfair discrimination?: Does gay marriage solve those problems? .

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Of course the legal issue here is not and never has been gay marriage. The issue is anti-discrimination legislation which does go a way to tackling those problems. Even if it wasn’t obvious from the arguments, this case comes from events in 2012, before gay marriage was legalised in 2015.

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However, the issue is whether there is an overarching objective standard for marriage or it's all just a matter of people's wanting it for personal reasons.

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That is an issue settled by the First Amendment if not before. The U.S. is a secular state. Your religious ideas about marriage have no bearing on the law, any more than the Mormon belief in polygamy did (the mainstream Mormons caved on the issue but there are breakaway sects who still cling to that teaching. It’s still illegal).And you have yet to show any scripture that says that Christians have the right to dictate secular law or even that Christians are required to refuse to do work for hire related to gay weddings.

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There is no animosity against gays in the Biblical understanding that marriage was ordained by God for the purpose of joining the two sexes into one flesh.

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But there is in the idea that gay couples should be denied the secular benefits of marriage. And THAT is what this is really about.Let us not forget that Christians were opposing the extension of those benefits to gay couples before gays were allowed to marry. And that is one of the reasons why giving gays the full legal status of marriage was necessary.There is no Biblical understanding that gay partners should be denied the insurance benefits given to spouses, is there? But that is one of the real issues here.Indeed your ideas about what marriage should be aren’t even a real issue. You aren’t compelled to enter into a gay marriage. Your church isn’t compelled to hold gay wedding services. There’s no real infringement of any liberty but the liberty to discriminate against gays in the secular sphere. You don’t have the right to compell the government to enforce your religious views, nor do you even have a religiour duty to demand it.Your religious arguments are just a pretext to hide your bigotry.

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Benefits were extended to married couples to encourage marriage between the sexes and the raising of children. There's really no rational basis for extending them to any other kind of "couple" although I wouldn't fight finding some way to do it without official marriage myself, some of them anyway.

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Unfortunately for you, whatever the intent there was no requirement for a couple to be capable of producing children. There was no great movement agitating to add this requirement. It only seems to be trotted out to deny marriage benefits to gay couples.And, of course, gay or lesbian couples may have children in the same ways that couples where one partner is infertile May have children. Are the children of gay couples to be denied the support that marriage is intended to provide ?

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I guess nobody will ever appreciate the concept of protecting marriage as a social institution, as opposed to this ridiculous idea that gay marriage affects individual heterosexuals' marriages. That is such a bogus piece of nonsense.

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That’s because you aren’t protecting marriage as a social institution. Extending the benefits to gay couples is no threat to that.

You have to admit that if the benefits of marriage are to help raise children it makes no sense to give them to a childless heterosexual couple while denying them to a gay couple with children.And yet that is what you wish to do. Obviously it is not about raising children.

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it used to be that "religion" was understood to mean the Christian religion, but that's no longer the case.

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It was no longer the case when Jefferson was working on religious freedom in Virginia. Before the Bill of Rights.Maybe it was when Maryland graciously allowed equal rights to the Puritans (who rebelled, seized power and revoked the law so they could oppress the Catholics)

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We are now going for full-fledged revisionist law and total paganism,

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Obviously the Christians are going for full-fledged revisionist law but I think it’s Satanism rather than paganism they want.[ABE]
Concerning the Virginia Bill, Jefferson wrote in his autobiography Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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Only half a century ago "God" would have meant the Christian God in America and probably Europe too. Yes that has changed. We've been through a huge sea change since then, going toward all out paganism, or maybe Islam will take us over first. Could be neck and neck.

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Not true. At the time of the American Revolution Deists had a more expansive view of God.

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Yes we will now have a pagan interpretation of our Constitution as we are getting a pagan culture that would support it. Quite right.

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Let us note that your pagan interpretation is the original intent, and that you wish to twist it so that the government gets to decide which religions people are free to believe. Jefferson and Madison would have been apalled.

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It's about heterosexual unions, which is the natural source of children, that principle is what the benefits honor.

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There are many heterosexual couples who cannot produce children. A number of them resort to various means to produce children. If you give the benefits of marriage to them, what is the justification for withholding them from gay couples ? And does it matter how children are produced?

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Other funds are available for other situations anyway.

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But it is not just money, and certainly not just giving money. Even if equivalent funds were available - and let’s be honest they aren’t - the official recognition of the relationship counts for a lot. Visiting rights in hospital, for instance, can depend on it.

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As I thought I said, it is the PRINCIPLE of heterosexual union which is the NATURAL source of children that qualifies for the benefits of marriage, that's what society intended to encourage.

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Why exactly should the law follow this arcane principle over more practical views of the situation ? Indeed, why has there been no move to make the law conform more to this principle, by denying marriage to known infertile heterosexual couples ? Or by making divorce between childless couples simple and easy ? (That in itself suggests that there is rather more to marriage than raising children)

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Marriage didn't have to be the solution to the dilemmas you are talking about, they should have come up with a different omnibus solution to the problems..

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As I have pointed out, one very good reason is that Christians would have worked to sabotage it.

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It might have been difficult but better in the long run..

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It would have been a lot more difficult and very likely worse because of people on your side. The sort of people who get upset when companies allowed gay partners to receive health insurance benefits.

But it’s funny how those considerations are only important when they can be used to deny rights to gays.If it was actually a point of principle I would have thought thst you would at least be agitating to reform the law so it followed the principle. But no. It’s just deny rights to gays.