Scotland becomes 17th country to approve same-sex marriage

[Berry]

I am afraid your knowledge of Brit culture is somewhat awry.

Yes, alas, perhaps I just don't have my "finger on the pulse" of what's trendy in the uk.

[Simon E.]

The Torys tend to be very conservative in social matters. If they were American they would prefer Bob Hope to Chris Rock..
And they prefer the Sound Of Music to stand-up.
But they tend to be staunch supporters of the US..
They are like the more liberal Republicans.
I was brought up in a communist household. My grandfather was the secretary of the Southern branch of the Railwayman's Union for 35 years..
As kids we were sent around the neighbourhood with leaflets supporting the local Socialist candidate..

So in keeping with many Brits my own feelings about the US are ambivalent.

[Berry]

I was brought up in a communist household. My grandfather was the secretary of the Southern branch of the Railwayman's Union for 35 years..
As kids we were sent around the neighbourhood with leaflets supporting the local Socialist candidate..

So in keeping with many Brits my own feelings about the US are ambivalent.

I'm a socialist myself (from a Tory family with mining roots on the maternal side) and my feelings about the USA are neutral.

[greentara]

malcom, Just to quote you "This is one of the reasons why Buddhists tend to be pessimistic about social revolutions in general. When you have worldly people leading society, no matter who they are, things just get screwed up"
Yep there's a lot of truth to this!

[DGA]

I'm on the left myself. And I'm an American. My feelings about my home country are beyond ambivalent; in the language of the left, they are highly contradictory. This reflects the contradictions of the American experience.

For every Paul Robeson, we have a Sarah Palin*.

We have the purple mountains majesty... and the Hanford site, with all that entails.

Stolen land (genocide of Native Americans) and stolen lives (slavery and segregation and the rest...). Tremendous wealth in the fists of a few, and a high concentration of creativity in the rest of us.

They cut the forest down to build a piece of crap.

It's such an interesting, intense, and occasionally heartbreaking place to be. I love it unconditionally, the way one might love a parent with a serious addiction. What to do...?

sorry for the digression




*then again, in Australia, for every Rosi Braidotti, you get a Pauline Hanson; in France, for every Guy Debord you get a LePen; &c. Samsara's just a disaster

[greentara]

jikan, Pauline Hanson...Now there's a blast from the past. The press made mincemeat out of her, poorly educated, ripe for exploitation. Hanson only said what John Howard was saying and the public loved it and totally lapped up what Howard was espousing.

[Luke]

I can tell you that where I live in the US no one makes rude jokes about Arabs (or do you really mean Muslims)

I meant Muslim Arabs. While there are Arabs who practice other religions (Christianity, Yazidism, etc.) the majority of Arabs are Muslims of some variety or another. I don't think people who make jokes about Arabs are really concerned about subtle differences between different Muslim sects. lol And there is nothing horrible about a few jokes per se, but the deeper thing is the double-standards which they can illustrate.

, we (Jews like myself) all have good and respectful relations. I had and have many friends who are Twelver Shi'a, Ismaili, Sunni,Kurds, Pakistanis, Indians, Lebanese etc...

That's great that you have managed to have good relations with them, but not everyone is like you.

And yes jokes about Jews are considered horrible due to the Holocaust

Have the Palestinians suffered so much less? (If all one watches is the US media, one's knee-jerk answer will be "Yes!" because no big-budget Hollywood movies featuring charming actors are made about the Palestinians, and the news coverage in the US usually portrays Palestinians extremely negatively.)

Anyway, the key to all these problems is to treat all humans (straight, gay, male, female, Jewish, Muslim, etc.) with kindness and respect.

[Adi]

What a thread! News of another country approving same-sex marriage has led to talk of feminism, paternalism, fascism, Confucianism and so many other -isms my head hurts. Though it does remind me that the idea samsara is somehow fixable is totally erroneous.

...Anyway, the key to all these problems is to treat all humans (straight, gay, male, female, Jewish, Muslim, etc.) with kindness and respect.

I think that would be a very good place to start.

As the widely quoted Dr. Paul Farmer wrote, "The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world."

-Adi

[garudha]

If as a man, I have a good male friend. Shouldn't we be able to adopt a child too? --even if me & my friend don't have a sexual relationship? --Why would a sexual relationship authenticate the status of parent/guardian?

[Zhen Li]

[rory]

Rory: And yes jokes about Jews are considered horrible due to the Holocaust

Luke: Have the Palestinians suffered so much less? (If all one watches is the US media, one's knee-jerk answer will be "Yes!" because no big-budget Hollywood movies featuring charming actors are made about the Palestinians, and the news coverage in the US usually portrays Palestinians extremely negatively.)

Anyway, the key to all these problems is to treat all humans (straight, gay, male, female, Jewish, Muslim, etc.) with kindness and respect. [/quote]

I agree about kindness and respect. Luke, you're in Hungary aren't you. Anti-semitism is back with a vengeance, my Jewish friends living there are telling me. Anti-semitism existed and exists in Europe for about 2,000 years with many pogroms and finally the Holocaust where 6 million murdered . Christian anti-semitism was exported to the Muslim lands via such things as The Protocols of Zion in the 19th century and indeed you'll find in Egypt and Turkey shows depicting Jews killing Christian children for Passover (the blood libel)
http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/05/01/eg ... ingle-day/

Now the Palestinians created their situation by refusing the UN's 2 state solution in the 1940's. They lost the war and became refugess. No Arab or Muslim country hates them. No Western country hates them. No one hates them for being Sunni Muslims or for being ethnically Arab.

I do hope for them to reach a peaceful settlement. War does nobody any good. But no their situation isn't remotely like mine. Do tell me where I as a gay Jewish woman I would be treated equally under the law in a Muslim country.
gassho
Rory

[Simon E.]

Or even as a straight Jewish woman.
Or even as a straight gentile woman.
Or even as a woman.

[zsc]

What seems absurd to me is the assumption that in order to allow for gay marriage, we have to prove somehow (the criteria depends on the person demanding such "proof") that gay marriage would benefit society, or at least not harm it:

We'll get right on that. While we're at it, let's say that other demographics who have not "demonstrated" that their marriage benefits society cannot get married as well. Maybe we will say celebrities can't get married because they often don't last, for example. Let's think of the children as well, and start sterilizing who we deem unfit to reproduce because their demographic has "demonstrated" that they do not provide "optimum" home environments in which to raise children. I'm totally not being a bigot, it's just realism.



It reminds me of the whole ruckus over the "gay gene". For social purposes, who cares? Even if it turns out gay people are "choosing to be gay", or homosexuality is mostly determined by environment, what does it matter? The point is that there is nothing wrong with sexual orientation (and gender expression, since it's often related) that is not strictly heteronormative, regardless of whether they were born that way or not. It's almost as if most objections to homosexuality and gay marriage are based on ideological constructs, and that's it.

[conebeckham]

Most objections are based on fear, quite frankly. With all sorts of rationalizations after the fact.

So saith Cone, a left-leaning American who feels much like Jikan. This country is a Great Experiment, and has been since my forefathers landed here on that boat. I am afraid the experiment has gone awry in a major way. But I have limited perspective, right?

I'm of the belief that there's no perfect Samsara. But there are better, and worse, versions of it, relatively speaking. Same-Sex Marriage is part of the better version.

[Adi]

Most objections are based on fear, quite frankly. With all sorts of rationalizations after the fact….

I suspect the same and also wonder if some objections are simply a product of the mindset of the cost-benefit analysis, which seems to reduce any proposal to monetary economics. It's been popular for the last 30 or so years in the US to put everything to such tests. Which is another absurdity in this case, as same-sex marriage is demonstrably a net economic plus, has caused no harm, and has obviously brought immense amount of happiness to thousands and thousands of people.

Incredibly smart lawyers were paid millions of dollars to find any objections to same-sex marriage that would pass the test of law and reason and none were found. Same result (or lack of result, actually) in Europe and America, and in other parts of the world.

Adi

[zsc]

Adi, very true.

You know things are getting weird when you have to justify your existence through "science" or "economics" to be considered a "valid" person in which civil and human rights can be conferred onto.

[Adi]

...You know things are getting weird when you have to justify your existence through "science" or "economics" to be considered a "valid" person in which civil and human rights can be conferred onto.

Heh! Indeed so. Makes a person feel like they're caught up in a movie like THX1138 or perhaps an Orwell novel.

Adi

[Kim O'Hara]

Incredibly smart lawyers were paid millions of dollars to find any objections to same-sex marriage that would pass the test of law and reason and none were found. Same result (or lack of result, actually) in Europe and America, and in other parts of the world.

Adi

We are going through the same process regarding marijuana, actually, and we seem to be at a similar point - some US states now legalising it, following e.g. the Dutch having done so years ago without causing their whole society to implode.

okay ...


Kim

[zsc]

Incredibly smart lawyers were paid millions of dollars to find any objections to same-sex marriage that would pass the test of law and reason and none were found. Same result (or lack of result, actually) in Europe and America, and in other parts of the world.

Adi

We are going through the same process regarding marijuana, actually, and we seem to be at a similar point - some US states now legalising it, following e.g. the Dutch having done so years ago without causing their whole society to implode.

okay ...


Kim

I actually think this is related to the topic. Not in a let's-talk-about-weed way, but in a let's-notice-a-trend way.

I think this another good example of how the trend towards cost-benefit analyses like Adi mentioned has a huge consequence of making us more and more risk adverse. People are already having discussions on whether technological advances will eventually slow down, not because we've reached the limits of what we can possibly know for certain to make this technology reliable, but because if a venture cannot be proven to be profitable, it will not be pursued.

When it comes to foreign policy and relations, this tendency isn't completely ridiculous. Today's weaponry can cause devastation on a massive, unprecedented scale, and if a powerful country like the U.S. concedes some of it's influence internationally for the sake of diplomacy and peace, I can see how some American politicians would see this as too risky to do--it could completely blow up in their faces, and America may then find itself on the wrong side of the power balance when the missiles are launched. I don't like it, but I get it; shit's messy.

Socially though, I don't understand this risk aversion when it comes to gay marriage. It doesn't complicate things too much, since the marriage is still monogamous, things like taxes shouldn't be too much of an adjustment (legal poly marriages would present more complications IMO, not that I'm against them, I'm not), whose name to take can be reached with a compromise that the couple comes up with (they do this on a smaller scale for heterosexual marriages already), etc. It goes to show that gay marriage opponents don't really have much to base their position off of besides fear, like conebeckham said.

[Zhen Li]

Incredibly smart lawyers were paid millions of dollars to find any objections to same-sex marriage that would pass the test of law and reason and none were found. Same result (or lack of result, actually) in Europe and America, and in other parts of the world.

I'm not opposed to the proposition of same-sex marriage (I am just in favour of state non-recognition of all marriage), but I think that's a very unfair characterisation of the arguments against it. If you spend some time and effort, you will find arguments with just as much sophistication for, as against. While not always, it often comes down to some of the basic assumptions and values that people are willing or not willing to accept prior to considering an argument. People who are undecided on the matter will usually tend to agree with whatever advocate suits their own value set the most, this is at least what I have noticed in my experience with debating.