scottsimpson.net

Whatever Means Necessary

In recent days, the tenor of the debate between those who support the rights of gay people and those who do not has reached a fever pitch. It has become blatantly obvious that those who do not support equal treatment of gays have no thoroughgoing philosophy, though they claim the opposite.

Let's start with a quick refresher. A philosophy is a system of thinking, based on reasoned arguments and principles. A reasoned argument is one which can stand alone and valid outside of contemporary mores and emotional diatribes. A principle is an argument which can be applied to a given situation to test it against the foil of reason.

To call a position which is based on emotional fear and in-group rhetoric a 'philosophy' is to do violence to the latter.

Moral Philosophy seeks to understand and define the arguably squishy concept of what is 'right'.

Moral Philosophy which stems from the opinion of a person who takes his reasoning from a text which has been translated, over the course of about two thousand years by various people with their own lenses and biases (and in some cases specifically to appeal to a king or leader's personal view), and which was written in tribal times is at best a fallible epistemological system. It is, in fact, a classical fallacy of reasoning -- an appeal to an inappropriate authority. If an engineer feels a bridge will collapse due to its weak structure and demonstrably poor construction, your belief that it will collapse (based on his word) is an appeal to an appropriate authority. If your friend Jim the botanist feels it will collapse because it 'doesn't look safe', and you agree with him based on his word, this is an appeal to an inappropriate authority. Unless you are a fluent speaker of Aramaic, or of Hebrew and Greek as they were spoken and understood two thousand years ago, you're taking a lot of argument and justification on faith.

Faith is a dirty word. Faith means that you can't justify a belief, so you choose to hold an unsupported opinion or position based on emotionality alone. Take for example the claim that "homosexuality is against God". Setting aside for the moment the ridiculousness of 'God' per se, you must accept that to claim that if you know what God wants, you must have the same understanding as God.

To say, "I personally feel that a being so powerful and all-knowing as God would create entities which he abhors the existence of" forces you into the position of either recognizing that you are wrong (God must necessarily love all that he creates, otherwise as an omnipotent being he is vengeful and arbitrary), or that God is fallible (and cannot control what he creates, thereby sometimes creating something which he abhors). The argument that God creates people with different circumstances and opinions to 'help them find their path' equates God with a purveyor of cock-fights, equal parts evil and arbitrary. To disagree that this God created people with whom you disagree is to say that perhaps the gays were created by aliens, or in a lab, or by some other craft than that of God. This then further serves to undermine the power of God. Perhaps you're thinking, "these gays, they were created by some other power, they're among us and they look like us!". Perhaps you watch too much Battlestar Galactica. As far as I understand, gays are not Cylons. Though at least one Model Six was a lesbian...

But I digress.

What is at issue is the ethical treatment of persons under the law. Believe whatever you like, but don't force it on others, especially through law. Ethical treatment of persons under the law demands that each person is equally subject to and protected by the law as the next person. No rational person in today's society (unless you're severely racist, and in which case should probably not mention it to anyone) would agree that black people or short people who commit a crime should have different sentences, different prisons, or be tried in a different court than white or asian or tall people. Likewise definitions of property and interpersonal responsibility and rights should be considered only in terms of 'persons', regardless of age, race, sex, gender, orientation, or disability (including faith). The christo-fascist nutjobs* that supported Proposition 8 argued their case very craftily -- they managed to get people to believe that their term 'Marriage' was the one at issue, not the secular definition 'marriage'. I, as an atheist, wholly support the right of the church to define 'Marriage' however they like -- everything else in their justification system is arbitrary, so why can't one of their words be? The problem is, as it relates to law, 'marriage' has had, and should continue to have a different meaning -- that contract of reciprocal rights and responsibilities between two persons, over and against the state and each other.

It is reasonable to request that this term 'marriage' in law be changed to prevent misunderstanding. This is one area where I cannot support the gay community definition of the word. It's the word that is problematic. It's emotional, and misused. If you're gay and want 'Marriage', then you best find yourself a church that believes as you do. Simply to be members of a union of rights and responsibilities is quite different than that arbitrary religious ceremony. But the distinction has been (perhaps quite intentionally) blurred by both sides of the debate.

Much of the debate around the rights withheld from same-sex couples centers around the fact that many such rights are enumerated in law with gendered or otherwise biased terms. "Married couple", "wife", "husband", etc. are terms which lend themselves to so-called 'traditional Marriage'. Solution? Find. Replace. Save. Print. Yeah, there's a lot of text to be changed. Might take a reasonably powerful computer a few minutes even.

The changes necessary to guarantee equal treatment under the law for gay persons needs to, I feel, be made at the Federal level. It's great and such that individual states recognize same-sex marriages, while other's don't. But compare this to equal treatment of women and blacks in the nation. There aren't states that are able to refuse to recognize the voting rights of women, or the legal personhood of black people. It's absurd to even think about -- I forget, is Mississippi a women's rights state? Or is it Missouri?

It would be so simple to change, one wonders why it hasn't already happened.

Ah, that's right. People who claim to have a different 'philosophy' that conveniently doesn't admit people they disagree with into the circle of rights-holders.

Ethical views based on faith, tradition, and transcendent belief are not philosophy, but religion.

If you're going to push your religious views, at least be intellectually honest enough to call them religion. You're pushing your religion, not your philosophy, into areas where religion should be absent.

So until the rights of gays are recognized as equal with 'other people' (?), I add my voice to the support of those with signs that read, "No More Mr. Nice Gay". By arms or whatever means necessary.

*I want to be perfectly clear on this point -- I think religion is silly. But I (and many others who share my opinion) typically divide religious people into two major camps: the Christianists (christo-fascist nutjobs), who are the most bellicose in their attempts to create some kind of weird christian nation, kill off the jews and gays, convert everyone to their religion, and nuke the hell out of the world until their end of days, and the Christians, who I personally think are still wrong and have a flawed outlook, but against whom I discriminate as I would against someone who likes music I don't like. Notably rap music. I don't think anyone should listen to it, and I turn it off whenever possible. The distinction is clear, and is quite important.