Except waving the donut in my face is far worse and pure evil. We have a weight loss competition at work and I am losing, partly because everyone knows they can bring donuts in and leave them near me and I won’t be able to resist. Just talking about them is making me hungry.
Is that why they’re worried gay marriage will end traditional marriage? They think all those men who thought they were happily married will suddenly switch teams and leave their wives?
Except waving the donut in my face is far worse and pure evil.
In the minds of some of these people, waving homosexuality around in front of them will cause them to break their sexual diet. They might become promiscuous with people of the same gender.
I can see since, apparently, every evangelical or fundamentalist Christian man in America is secretly a closeted self-hating gay man, that waving around a gay marriage certificate is exactly like someone eating a delicious morning chocolate donut with sprinkles at fat camp roll call.
I’m an occasional commenter on the Cranmer blog – a conservative Christian blog. Church of England.
To his credit, Cranmer allows dissent on his blog comments, and while I often disagree with him, sometimes he he is surprisingly liberal and sensible in his posts.
There are about 3 other atheists there, posting alternative views, and the Christian commenters range from as reasonable as can be expected to batshit crazy.
On this issue, many of the Christians there, as I read their posts, do accept civil partnerships for gay people, as a matter of justice.
Most of them are anti gay marriage, on one or other or both of the following grounds.
One being that marriage is traditionally, and biblically, between a man and a woman. Some of them think that civil unions are fine, but are concerned about marriage being re-defined.
Another being concerns that anti-discrimination law, and rules creep will lead to churches who are opposed to gay marriage on religious grounds will be obliged to solemnise them, against their religious principles.
They might just have a point there, despite assurances that this won’t happen.
The answer, as I see it, as an atheist secularist, is to adopt the French style of doing things, where all marriages are strictly secular, and if people want the marriage to have a religious service as well, or a humanist service for that matter, then that is up to them and the potential officiants.
Not all the Christian commenters on Cranmer have the sort of relative sanity I ascribe to the best of them, mind.
Some are outright homophobes as well as batshit crazy.
They might just have a point there, despite assurances that this won’t happen.
That’s why the answer to this is secularism: define “Marriage” as the church ceremony with no legal binding. Make “Civil Unions” the government defined legal partnership that provides benefits.
That way, if the church and state disagree, the consequences don’t overlap. Catholics could refuse to recognize divorces or remarry divorced individuals: the law will still allow civil unions to dissolve and reform. Polygamists could “marry” as many women as they want, but can only have the civil unions defined by law. Fringe cults could marry a man to a child: He might not go to hell, but he’s certainly going to jail.
It would also allow society to redefine Civil unions in ways that work best for actual families. Should the law change to better recognize extended families with multiple adults living in the same building? Should we restrict the benefits of a civil union to just two people, or extend them to larger family units?
I’m fully on board for that as long as “Civil union” is not the special category of “Not-really-married married” reserved for gay couples. “Separate but equal” has never worked out that way. Equality under the law for gay and straight couples is priority: churches should either abandon their government sanctioned role in that, or conform to government ‘s requirements for equality.
That is one solution, of course, but as that would require a rewording of massive amounts of both civil and criminal law code, as well as contracts, insurance information, and suchlike (being fought tooth and nail and claw every step by the goddists, of course), I don’t really see that it’s the best idea.
It seems like a much simpler solution would be to have marriage legally defined as a civil partnership forming a new family between two consenting adults regardless of shape or status of genetial interaction, and let the churches call whatever they want to do by some other name – I dunno, ‘Wibble’ or ‘SUPER MARRIAGE’ or ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Slavery’ or whatever. Heck, let ’em call it marriage if they want.
Just so they understand that, so long as they believe their church need not answer to the State, the State need not answer to it.
Browniansays
I’m not willing to concede their claim that they invented marriage, and neither are the fields of history and anthropology (at least, that’s what they told me in a fevered dream.)
So secular society can keep the word ‘marriage’ thank-you-very-much, and the people who coined terms such as transubstantiation and lapsarianism are more than welcome to make up their own term for specially-blessed-by-God fucking.
But gays can’t get married because The Big Guy In The Sky™ thinks what they do in bed is icky! Ask Ted Haggard or George Rekers, they’ll explain it.
I love this quote, and I’m stealing it.
I have this random quote signature image generator that I use on various forums, and I would like to add this with proper attribution.
In case anyone is interested in the sig generator, it’s located at http://3meese.com/3meese/random/godtroll.php
If you want to learn a bit more about it, I made a blog post at http://larianlequella.blogspot.com/2012/01/update-on-dynamic-quotes-sig-generator.html talking bit more about it.
That is definitely going into my collection of atheist quotes. I guess it will have to get an anonymous attribution.
@peterwhite #4 – I don’t suppose you have that list available somewhere? I’m always interested in expanding my own list of such quotes.
Excellent quote.
Except waving the donut in my face is far worse and pure evil. We have a weight loss competition at work and I am losing, partly because everyone knows they can bring donuts in and leave them near me and I won’t be able to resist. Just talking about them is making me hungry.
Is that why they’re worried gay marriage will end traditional marriage? They think all those men who thought they were happily married will suddenly switch teams and leave their wives?
In the minds of some of these people, waving homosexuality around in front of them will cause them to break their sexual diet. They might become promiscuous with people of the same gender.
I can see since, apparently, every evangelical or fundamentalist Christian man in America is secretly a closeted self-hating gay man, that waving around a gay marriage certificate is exactly like someone eating a delicious morning chocolate donut with sprinkles at fat camp roll call.
I’m an occasional commenter on the Cranmer blog – a conservative Christian blog. Church of England.
To his credit, Cranmer allows dissent on his blog comments, and while I often disagree with him, sometimes he he is surprisingly liberal and sensible in his posts.
There are about 3 other atheists there, posting alternative views, and the Christian commenters range from as reasonable as can be expected to batshit crazy.
On this issue, many of the Christians there, as I read their posts, do accept civil partnerships for gay people, as a matter of justice.
Most of them are anti gay marriage, on one or other or both of the following grounds.
One being that marriage is traditionally, and biblically, between a man and a woman. Some of them think that civil unions are fine, but are concerned about marriage being re-defined.
Another being concerns that anti-discrimination law, and rules creep will lead to churches who are opposed to gay marriage on religious grounds will be obliged to solemnise them, against their religious principles.
They might just have a point there, despite assurances that this won’t happen.
The answer, as I see it, as an atheist secularist, is to adopt the French style of doing things, where all marriages are strictly secular, and if people want the marriage to have a religious service as well, or a humanist service for that matter, then that is up to them and the potential officiants.
Not all the Christian commenters on Cranmer have the sort of relative sanity I ascribe to the best of them, mind.
Some are outright homophobes as well as batshit crazy.
David B
That’s why the answer to this is secularism: define “Marriage” as the church ceremony with no legal binding. Make “Civil Unions” the government defined legal partnership that provides benefits.
That way, if the church and state disagree, the consequences don’t overlap. Catholics could refuse to recognize divorces or remarry divorced individuals: the law will still allow civil unions to dissolve and reform. Polygamists could “marry” as many women as they want, but can only have the civil unions defined by law. Fringe cults could marry a man to a child: He might not go to hell, but he’s certainly going to jail.
It would also allow society to redefine Civil unions in ways that work best for actual families. Should the law change to better recognize extended families with multiple adults living in the same building? Should we restrict the benefits of a civil union to just two people, or extend them to larger family units?
I’m fully on board for that as long as “Civil union” is not the special category of “Not-really-married married” reserved for gay couples. “Separate but equal” has never worked out that way. Equality under the law for gay and straight couples is priority: churches should either abandon their government sanctioned role in that, or conform to government ‘s requirements for equality.
That is one solution, of course, but as that would require a rewording of massive amounts of both civil and criminal law code, as well as contracts, insurance information, and suchlike (being fought tooth and nail and claw every step by the goddists, of course), I don’t really see that it’s the best idea.
It seems like a much simpler solution would be to have marriage legally defined as a civil partnership forming a new family between two consenting adults regardless of shape or status of genetial interaction, and let the churches call whatever they want to do by some other name – I dunno, ‘Wibble’ or ‘SUPER MARRIAGE’ or ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Slavery’ or whatever. Heck, let ’em call it marriage if they want.
Just so they understand that, so long as they believe their church need not answer to the State, the State need not answer to it.
I’m not willing to concede their claim that they invented marriage, and neither are the fields of history and anthropology (at least, that’s what they told me in a fevered dream.)
So secular society can keep the word ‘marriage’ thank-you-very-much, and the people who coined terms such as transubstantiation and lapsarianism are more than welcome to make up their own term for specially-blessed-by-God fucking.
I’m stealing that quote.
The neighbour’s Chrome crashed my Firefox.