Do I Hate Gays; Do You?

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steve7150
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Re: Do I Hate Gays; Do You?

Post by steve7150 » Mon May 04, 2015 2:48 pm

If that's the case, Dizerner, then the word "marriage" should be used and owned only by any Christian man and woman whom the Lord has joined together, and thus have truly become one. All other unions of two people should be identified by some secular term.









I think you are on to something. These gay marriages are secular , clearly not biblical so since that is the case why should we get in a huff about it? Folks who don't believe the bible are going to do what pleases them and gays want validation from society and they are getting it. But should that be a surprise?
Gambling is getting easier, marijuana is getting legalized, pornography is much more accepted, basically any sin that feels good and doesn't directly hurt anyone else is acceptable. But this trend is predictable if you don't feel restrained by a higher authority, correct?

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Re: Do I Hate Gays; Do You?

Post by morbo3000 » Mon May 04, 2015 3:58 pm

Homer wrote: So a high school boy, at least in California, could inform his school officials that his sexual identity was female and demand to use the female restrooms, but then retain sexual attraction to girls which is separate from his "self-identification". Then if he "hits" on the girls in the restroom he can say that's his right as a transgender lesbian? I.e. he identifies as a female lesbian.
This is complete conjecture. And completely misses the issues we educators deal with.

1. You are assuming that transgender, or LGBT students are deviant. That they are more likely to be sexually inappropriate. Gender identity and sexual expression are completely different things. This is the same logic that James Dobson used when he accused bisexuals of orgies. Heterosexuals are far more likely to be sexually inappropriate because it is more socially acceptable for them to be.

2. Sexual harassment. Any student, regardless of where they are (bathroom, hallway, classroom) and how they gender identity that behaves in the manner you describe would be sexually harassing another student, which schools have no tolerance of. And again heterosexual students are far and away more commonly sexually harassing other students. Where are the LGBT sexual assault cases? Few. Comparatively, how many high school boys sexually assault female students? According to the department of justice, approximately 1 in 5 female high school students report being physically and/or sexually abused by a dating partner. Where is the christian outrage against that?

3. Bullying. Far and away, the biggest concern of schools regarding transgender, or LGBT students is bullying. If there was one issue of sexual harassment as you describe, there would be 10 or more of bullying LGBT students. Heterosexual youth don't commit suicide due to bullying about their gender identity. That's what happens to LGBT students. This has far and away been the problem LGBT's have faced historically. Violence against them. While Christians seem so concerned about protecting the institution of marriage, they seem silent in protecting gays from violence.

Educators aren't stupid when it comes to this stuff. These are real issues. That they need to address. And they do. Or are trying. Here are examples:

http://schools.nyc.gov/RulesPolicies/Tr ... efault.htm

http://glsen.org/learn/research/nationa ... -realities
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steve
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Re: Do I Hate Gays; Do You?

Post by steve » Mon May 04, 2015 5:23 pm

Educators aren't stupid when it comes to this stuff.
Some of them may not be, but many are. My wife is a college professor, serving on the Senate of a community college. She was one of only two persons out of thirty-five in the Senate to verbally object to making all the college restrooms gender-neutral (her sensible protests stopped them from going forward with the plan).

Her argument: If men (or persons who have the biological equipment of men) are allowed to walk into the same restroom she is using, then she, and other women, can never feel safe in any restroom. Her opponents accused her of suggesting that gay and transgender men are predators, which (they assured her) is not the case. Her answer was that she had said nothing about "gay" men. It is not they who pose a threat to women. However, if every person can enter every restroom, most of the men who come into the restroom she is in will not be gay men. Obviously, most men are not gay (only about 2% are), so that gender-neutral restrooms will be visited by men who are, in 98% of the cases, heterosexual (and, given the present state of the campus population, mostly sexually amoral as well).

Thus, catering to the sensitivities of 2% of the male students would put 100% of the female students at risk. Her suggestion: Continue to have men's restrooms and women's restrooms, but add or designate some restrooms for people who are confused about their gender. Then the women will have a sanctuary where men are not allowed, and the gender-confused individuals (none of whom are sexual predator-types) will have a safe haven as well.

This solution is so obvious and sensible (and the alternative so insane) that we can by no means assume that all educators (the majority of whom, in this case, had never thought of these obvious considerations, or did not care enough to protect the women's interests) "aren't stupid when it comes to this stuff." If the college-level educators are this clueless, what hopes can we entertain for the superior intelligence of educators in the lower levels?
The gay wedding cake fiasco demonstrated one thing. The "radical homosexual" movement was not responsible for the outrage against Indiana and Arkansas. It was the friends, family, employers, and Christians who stood up and said we aren't going to stand for this discrimination. People who perpetuate stereotypes or are hateful are now marginalized and will be called out. But not people who disagree.
This seems totally disingenuous. Those who refused to celebrate or contribute to a gay wedding by providing its cake did not "hate" anybody. They simply disagreed, and wished to stand by their disagreement. They did not dislike gay people (they served many gay clientele), nor did they attempt to prevent a gay couple from marrying or having a cake at their wedding (they recommended an alternative bakery, where the proprietors held no such convictions). The only "haters" were the ones who sought to destroy these innocent people's lives and their business by bringing a frivolous lawsuit against them—though they had suffered no injury from them.

Your assurance that people will only be "called out" if they are "haters" rings rather hollow. Who is calling out the haters who are bringing the lawsuit? The bakery owners simply disagreed. You said such disagreement will be tolerated. This can be true only in a free society, which is what the radical gay activists are seeking to dismantle. Hatred, though wrong, cannot legitimately be outlawed, since, in a free society, the law must only punish criminal behaviors, not private emotions and attitudes.

If a black baker refused to bake a cake for a KKK party, would you call the man a hater, or simply a man of principle? Many establishments display a notice, "We reserve the right to refuse service to anybody." Is such a right denied only to those who refuse service on the basis of their religious convictions? If I ordered a ham sandwich at a bakery run by Jews or Muslims, and they directed me to a different deli instead of serving me, should I accuse them of "hatred" and bring suit against them? Are Christians the only religious people whose right to stand by their religious convictions is unprotected by law?
The "Marriage Equality" movement, which is now made up of more "straight" people than gays, is seeking that legal definition: "Equal rights." Conservatives call it "special rights."
To give people a right to redefine "marriage" is not giving them "equal rights"—"equal" to whom? I don't have the right to redefine "marriage" (which already has an established definition). In a free society, I can live with, or sleep with, anyone I choose, without incurring legal penalties. The same is true of a gay man—he can do the same. That is "equal" rights.

However, if I want to sleep with my neighbor's wife, sharing her with him half the time, I have no right to change the lexicons, for the rest of you, redefining the word "marriage" to include this novel arrangement. Nor can a gay couple legitimately change the meaning of "marriage" for the rest of us. Their rights, in this domain, are exactly equal to mine! If they insist on being granted the power to make such changes, which none of the rest of mankind have ever been permitted to make, then this very definitely is insisting upon "special" rights.

Words mean things, and words for fundamental institutions cannot be changed without changing societal thinking about those institutions. You and I are not given the right to redefine marriage—nor has society as a whole that competence—since marriage is not our invention. God created it and defined it rather clearly. If 2% of us decided we wished to rename Buckingham Palace, and call it, henceforth, "the White House," should the world rewrite its dictionaries for us? We cannot legitimately change the definitions of institutions that lie outside our provence to alter.

No other special-interest group is granted the right to change the meaning of the word marriage. A man may still be arrested in this country for bestiality. If the laws should change to allow a man to engage in this perverted practice with impunity, this new liberty should not include the right of this man to change the English lexicons for everybody else, so that he can demand that the rest of us must refer to him and his goat as a genuine "marriage," indistinguishable from traditional marriages which have always been the foundation of normal families. I may wish to refer to my vegetable garden as a "marriage," but I am not permitted to change the definition so that the whole of the English speaking world must now include vegetable gardens within their dictionary definition of "marriage."

Why can't new terms be adopted for new arrangements? Why deprive 98% of English-speakers of a useful descriptive term, for the sake of 2% of people who could as easily find (or coin) a new term to describe their own novel new institutions? You see, if the definition of marriage is changed, for the convenience of the 2% (most of whom, according to recent polls, are not even interested in being "married"), then the 98% will be inconvenienced with the very difficult task of finding, for the sake of conversing about the older concept, a new term to use when describing what used to be called "marriage."

All English Bibles, dictionaries, and literature published prior to the 21st century, will have to be edited and revised in order to replace every troublesome occurrence of the word "marriage" (by which the authors intended a specific meaning) with whatever new word the English language will be forced to adopt for the concept. Think of the expense in burning all the old books, which contain the newly-misleading word "marriage," because they all used the term to designate the older concept, and reissuing them all with the new terminology. Sounds very Orwellian to me. Why change the historic English word, when the addition of some new word for a new concept would obviously be more convenient for everybody?

Even same-sex couples will face inconvenient misunderstanding in their using the word "marriage" when speaking to people who still think of it by its older meaning, during the transitional period while the new word for the old concept is being debated and agreed upon. Does such a gratuitous imposition upon western civilization make sense to somebody? Any special interest group that is asking to inconvenience the entire English-speaking world by redefining its most long-standing institution is certainly demanding a very "special right," which none of the rest of us 98 per-centers have ever been granted.

Few people (if any) these days would wish to outlaw gay relationships, or even to deny them the civil privileges of a married couple. Nonetheless, there will always be those of us who think that the English word "marriage" already has a servicable definition, such as Jesus outlined in Matthew 19:1ff. Changing the laws of the land will not change the contents of Jesus' words, and will therefore not change the minds of people who stubbornly refuse to give up their loyalty to Christ's teachings.

It is not the legal definition of marriage that lies at the root of the social friction over the gay lifestyle. It is, rather, the (for the time being, "constitutionally-protected") religious convictions of individuals who reserve to themselves the "equal" right to disagree with a culture that has lost its moral bearings. A new definition of marriage will not remove the revulsion that some people will always feel toward the gay lifestyle, nor make gay "haters" love them more. Good will and sympathy toward gays would more effectively be sought by the gay people taking a less adversarial posture toward the majority of human beings, and showing themselves to be the good people that they wish to convince us that they are.

Changing the legal definitions, therefore, will have no positive impact upon the present controversy over the legitimacy of gay people's lifestyles. Nothing will end that tension other than the forcible eradication of religiously free thought—which can only be accomplished through the forcible eradication of religious people.

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mattrose
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Re: Do I Hate Gays; Do You?

Post by mattrose » Mon May 04, 2015 10:03 pm

I wish Steve had made this latest post on facebook so I could officially 'like' it

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Homer
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Re: Do I Hate Gays; Do You?

Post by Homer » Tue May 05, 2015 9:52 am

Matt wrote:
I wish Steve had made this latest post on facebook so I could officially 'like' it
Me too; that was good.

Earlier I had written:
So a high school boy, at least in California, could inform his school officials that his sexual identity was female and demand to use the female restrooms, but then retain sexual attraction to girls which is separate from his "self-identification". Then if he "hits" on the girls in the restroom he can say that's his right as a transgender lesbian? I.e. he identifies as a female lesbian.
To which Morbo objected and Steve replied making my point:
However, if every person can enter every restroom, most of the men who come into the restroom she is in will not be gay men. Obviously, most men are not gay (only about 2% are), so that gender-neutral restrooms will be visited by men who are, in 98% of the cases, heterosexual (and, given the present state of the campus population, mostly sexually amoral as well).
Most of those here will probably not recognize the good (quaint) old days when folks didn't parade their aberrations. In my mind I was thinking of the time in high school when we had a "career day" where we travelled by bus to another high school to attend sessions with speakers talking about various careers. Back in those long ago days (perhaps only Paidion here will remember) it was unheard of for a man to choose secretarial work as a career. We were free to choose which career sessions we wished to attend and some of my male friends elected to attend the secretarial session so they could meet lots of girls. And as Steve said, if restrooms are gender neutral there will be many male teenagers heading for wherever the girls are. So the privacy of the many is sacrificed for the tiny minority. If this isn't special rights I do not know what is.

Regarding the wedding cake issue reminds me of the situation of many of the Mennonites (there are a large number of "old fashioned" ones in our area) who deliberately choose to have a small business farming, building houses, painting houses, etc. so that they are not unequally yoked to an employer. They can thus avoid any situation where they are pressured into doing anything they consider sinful. Baked goods are one of the enterprises they are involved in. The way things are headed their freedom (and ours) will be further limited regarding what business we wish to pursue. The courts would think nothing of a businessman who, because of his religious convictions, refused to do electrical work on stage lighting for a strip club, but the wedding cake issue? Be prepared to pay a $100,000 plus fine.

So who has special rights?

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Re: Do I Hate Gays; Do You?

Post by Paidion » Tue May 05, 2015 10:21 pm

Speaking of definitions. How did the word "gay" get changed from "happily excited" or "merry" to "homosexual" or "sexually attracted to someone of the same sex"? I refuse to use the word in the altered sense.
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Re: Do I Hate Gays; Do You?

Post by dizerner » Tue May 05, 2015 11:16 pm

Good question... I know this is one of first uses of it's current meaning in any major film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCymsoQL49c

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TheEditor
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Re: Do I Hate Gays; Do You?

Post by TheEditor » Wed May 06, 2015 12:16 am

This from Wikipedia (they do footnote the sources, so it should be confirmable):

The word may have started to acquire associations of immorality as early as the 14th century, and had certainly acquired them by the 17th.[1] By the late 17th century it had acquired the specific meaning of "addicted to pleasures and dissipations",[9] an extension of its primary meaning of "carefree" implying "uninhibited by moral constraints." A gay woman was a prostitute, a gay man a womanizer and a gay house a brothel.[1]

The use of gay to mean "homosexual" was in origin merely an extension of the word's sexualised connotation of "carefree and uninhibited", which implied a willingness to disregard conventional or respectable sexual mores. Such usage is documented as early as the 1920s, and there is evidence for it before the 20th century,[1] although it was initially more commonly used to imply heterosexually unconstrained lifestyles, as in the once-common phrase "gay Lothario",[10] or in the title of the book and film The Gay Falcon (1941), which concerns a womanizing detective whose first name is "Gay." The "gaya ciencia" was a Provençal/French/Castilian term for poetry. Similarly, Fred Gilbert and G. H. MacDermott's music hall song of the 1880s, "Charlie Dilke Upset the Milk" – "Master Dilke upset the milk/When taking it home to Chelsea;/ The papers say that Charlie's gay/Rather a wilful wag!" – referred to Sir Charles Dilke's alleged heterosexual impropriety.[11] Well into the mid 20th century a middle-aged bachelor could be described as "gay", indicating that he was unattached and therefore free, without any implication of homosexuality. This usage could apply to women too. The British comic strip Jane was first published in the 1930s and described the adventures of Jane Gay. Far from implying homosexuality, it referred to her free-wheeling lifestyle with plenty of boyfriends (while also punning on Lady Jane Grey).

A passage from Gertrude Stein's Miss Furr & Miss Skeene (1922) is possibly the first traceable published use of the word to refer to a homosexual relationship. According to Linda Wagner-Martin (Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and her Family (1995)) the portrait, "featured the sly repetition of the word gay, used with sexual intent for one of the first times in linguistic history," and Edmund Wilson (1951, quoted by James Mellow in Charmed Circle (1974)) agreed.[12] For example:

They were ...gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, ... they were quite regularly gay.

—Gertrude Stein, 1922


I suppose as is true with all words, colloquial usage could insulate a word from it's change in direction, but it appears to have sexual connotations as early as 300 years ago.

Regards, Brenden.
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Re: Do I Hate Gays; Do You?

Post by Paidion » Wed May 06, 2015 3:21 pm

Thanks for quoting from the Wikipedia article, Brenden. I looked at the article myself, and couldn't find anything definite which indicates that, prior to the 20th century, it was used otherwise than its traditional meaning of "easygoing, carefree, and happy." It seems to me that the author(s) of the Wikipedia article read more into the historic quotes than was actually expressed. For example, I would like to see a quote in which the word, prior to the 20th century shows unequivocally that it came to mean something like "sexually uninhibited by moral constraint." Some descriptions of people as "gay" who are so uninhibited, may actually still be using the word in the traditional sense.
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Re: Do I Hate Gays; Do You?

Post by TheEditor » Wed May 06, 2015 5:01 pm

Hi Paidion,

I used to have an old dictionary, but I can't locate it. Roget's from 1922 gives as synonym's for "unchaste" the following:

UNCHASTE, light, wanton, licentious, adulterous, debauched, dissolute; of loose character, of easy virtue; frail, gay, riggish [obs.], incontinent, meretricious, rakish, gallant, dissipated; no better than she should be; on the town, on the streets, on the pavé [F.], on the loose [colloq.].

I suppose language isn't static and words will mutate. Over time the term will likely be dropped in favor of something else. Right now, young people frequently use the term to mean "stupid" or "aggravating"; ie, "this tool/game/car/ what-have you, is "gay", and this despite the efforts of the gay community to stop this from happening. Languages do what they do, and there appears to be little we can do to stop it. That's why I get annoyed when people tell me I "shouldn't" say thus and so, because I know that in 10 years, the meaning could be quite different.

Regards, Brenden.
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