re: Proud of Garrett Temple

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Free to who, the folks you deem as acceptable

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The motto of the progressive left for decades. Don't actively support homosexual lifestyles? You must be silenced, vilified and eradicated as unacceptable. Don't go out of your way to espouse every conceivable environmental alarmist proclamation? You must be silenced, vilified and eradicated as unacceptable. Don't eagerly embrace the notion that everyone deserves to have every whim met by the state at taxpayer expense? You must be silenced, vilified and eradicated as unacceptable.

It is galling how many times we have to listen to the people clamoring for tolerance, acceptance, and respect for all points of view telling everyone who disagrees with them to shut up under threat of hate crime prosecution. When are we going to hear a liberal stand up with a national audience and demand that we as a nation show respect for diversity and all points of view and give this same degree of love and tolerance to, say, the Tea Party?

It's easy to be passionate about someone's freedom of speech when you agree with them. It's when they don't agree with you that is the real test. And your reaction to the people who disagreed with you is pretty much exactly the same as their reaction was to Jason Collins. Pot, meet kettle.

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When are we going to hear a liberal stand up with a national audience and demand that we as a nation show respect for diversity and all points of view and give this same degree of love and tolerance to, say, the Tea Party?

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The ACLU does this kind of shite all the time.
ACLU stands up for Rush Limbaugh

Let's not pretend that persecution of the Tea Party's political ideas are the same as the persecution of homosexuals. This is a ridiculous false analogy.

You're acting as if this is a First Amendment dispute. The government isn't denying your right to slur gays. Maybe you're just pissed that people won't high-five you anymore after you beat up a sissy kid and take his lunch money.

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Let's not pretend that persecution of the Tea Party's political ideas are the same as the persecution of homosexuals. This is a ridiculous false analogy.

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Are you shitting me? In many places, you would fare better telling people you are gay. It's amazing how people demonize things they don't understand.

Yeah, because Tea Partiers are known for having been persecuted harshly. Like being brutally murdered or being dragged to death behind a truck.

Can you link a single story about a person being murdered for being a member of the Tea Party? How about some statistics that show the shame of being a Tea Partier leads to a higher risk of suicide?

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Are you shitting me?

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I am against spending my tax dollars for male gays. They are not as a whole a stable segment of society.

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It may be a big deal for the female engineers but it really isn't for anyone else.
It may be a big deal for the American brewmaster but it really isn't for anyone else.
It may be a big deal for the Chinese human rights activist but it really isn't for anyone else
It may be a big deal for the Jamaican bobsledders but it really isn't for anyone else

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Exactly. Fear is almost always overblown.

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But if the moral dilemma involves a willing adult versus a non-willing person, I do not fear society shifting in favor of the aggressor.

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But your language here proves the point. You apply terms like "non-willing" and "aggressor" to a situation which suggests neither. Pedophilia, as understood and addressed by the moral consensus of our society, is simply a matter of numbers. Neither willingness nor aggression are necessary factors. In fact, willingness is typically specifically excluded from being a factor because "we" have deemed those unfortunate enough to fall below the proper numbers incapable of consent. And as for the "aggressor", our contemporary view towards pedophilia is, again, a matter of numbers that ignores motive. In many ways, a 40 year old man acting on a sexual interest in an unwilling 4 year old is considered the same as an 18 year old "man" acting on a sexual interest in a willing 16 year old.

You are confirming and participating in the moral consensus by terming all these situations as involving "non-willing persons" and "aggressors".

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We shouldn't be concerned about the societal shift toward tolerance of homosexuality in the sense that it will open up Pandora's Box.

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No, this particular "Pandora's Box" has been open for quite some time. We decided decades ago (perhaps longer) that we would not allow the notion of hard and fast morality. No notion of right and wrong is tolerated in our society; only notions of what we decide to allow and what we don't. And this has resulted in the demonizing of the very concepts of right and wrong. Just watch any discussion or debate, in real life or on the internet, and see the effects whenever someone lets slip the fatal words, "because it's wrong" or "it's the right thing to do". As soon as someone expresses an opinion in those terms, they might as well have tossed out the "Nazi" bomb because their credibility will usually nosedive.

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This is just another evolutionary step in our collective morality.

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That would be less troubling if there were any pattern of morality to that evolution. Tell me, what significant examples can you can think of where our "morality" evolved to a less-tolerant view of anything other than intolerance?

Drugs? More tolerant. Sex? More tolerant. Homosexuality? More tolerant.

About the only things that we have become less tolerant of are smoking, drunk driving, and straight white Christian men.

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That's the Old Testament. When Jesus came his teachings became law. He kept some and not the rest. So once again, learn the bible.

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Where did he throw out the part about touching pigs?

On the bible, Jesus and laws thing, though, the Gospels don't deal with homosexuality. The parts of the New Testament that deal with it were written by Paul and others, who, I understand, wasn't speaking for Jesus in those passages. So if Jesus is the only one in the book we're supposed to listen to, and he didn't go out of his way to condemn homosexuals then your whole argument is fallacious.

Just be honest: you don't like gay people the same way some kids don't like peas. Leave it at that and leave religion at the door on this one.

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You asked for an instance where the far left stands up for the right. I gave you an instance. Now it's not a grand enough stage?

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No, I asked,

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When are we going to hear a liberal stand up with a national audience

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. No, it's not grand enough until it is precisely as grand as the stage they take for homosexuals, women, african-americans, anti-war activists, or any other group out there. What they are doing is lip service, as evidenced by the rarity and relative obscurity of their efforts. The Westboro Baptist Church is vilified on a regular basis across the country, and I haven't seen Obama or any other Liberal leader speak at length on 20/20, in Time magazine, or a State of the Union address passionately demanding respect and tolerance for them and denouncing those who criticize and demonize them for expressing their views. Why? Because everyone knows that the Westboro Baptists are fricking assholes and the truth is that Liberals don't give any more of a shite about the First Amendment than the Conservatives do; they both ignore it until someone they agree with needs protecting.

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By making the analogy of homosexuals to Tea Partiers, yes

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I didn't make an analogy of homosexuals. I was talking about the Liberals use of the First Amendment as a matter of convenience. I mentioned environmental alarmists and caretaker state proponents, too; I wasn't analogizing them to the Tea Party or homosexuals. The paragraph I wrote above isn't comparing homosexuals or the Tea Party to Westboro Baptists, either. Just because two things are mentioned in different parts of a conversation does not mean they are being analogized.