Responding to some anti-equality claims
Apparently, some uber-conservatives are making a movie about how gay marriage is the first step on the path to making it a criminal offence to be christian. I just watched the trailer for this film, and there was nothing in it that was not wrong.
I cannot let this sort of egregious misinformation go unanswered.
Below are the quotes spoken by the individuals who have agreed to be filmed in this movie. Following each is my response to that quote.When evil is called good, darkness is ushered into the land, and with the darkness comes a threat to our freedoms.
First of all, this statement is obviously meant to frighten the viewer from the very beginning. Way to manipulate our emotions, buttheads.
Secondly, even if we accept that your bible is the sole arbiter of what is good and evil (which it isn't), and even assuming that we accept the premise that there exists an objective measure of good and evil in the first place (which there is no such thing), no one is calling homosexuality 'good.' We're simply not allowing you to forbid it based on your personal preferences.I believe it is the single greatest threat to religious freedom in the United States of America today.
Really? Allowing gays to marry other gays somehow impinges upon your religious freedom? Please explain to me how Steve and Adam down the street having the legal protections and benefits that you and your heterosexual spouse already enjoy prohibits you from being christian.The blatant hostility to the christian faith...
This is obviously a sentence fragment. I'm not sure what the speaker meant to say. But I can tell you this: allowing same-sex marriage is in no way hostile to the christian faith. I personally know many gay christians, and I personally know many heterosexual christians who support gay rights. These people obviously don't see a conflict between the two. And quite frankly, neither do I.The most insidious and agressive assault to our religious freedom that we've ever seen. That is the cultural clash of our time.
Once again, you claim that same-sex marriage is an assault on your religious freedom. I really don't understand how that works. If you want to be christian, no one and nothing is stopping you. Even if you want to follow a particular flavour of christianity that insists that being homosexual is a sin, no one is stopping you. You go right ahead and believe that being homosexual is a sin.
I'm not even going to point out the things that your bible claims are sinful but that you don't protest, such as eating shellfish and wearing fabric woven from two different materials, or being wealthy, or shirking taxes... oh wait, I just did, didn't I? Sorry.
But I will point out that just because you think it's a sin doesn't mean that other people, people who do not think it's a sin, should be forbidden from engaging in that behaviour. For example, jehovah's witnesses believe that it's a sin to receive a blood transfusion. Should blood transfusions be outlawed because some people think it's sinful?
You don't get to do that. That's not how society works. I personally think it's sinful to be ignorant. But I'm not going to make it a crime to neglect your education. Neither do you get to tell us what we can and can't do.If homosexual activists get everything they want, it will be nothing less than the criminalisation of christianity.
I have bad news for you: all that homosexual activists want is to be allowed to marry the person they love. That's it. They don't want to criminalise christianity. They don't want to destroy your marriage. They don't want to recruit. They don't want to turn people gay. They just want to be allowed to marry one another. That's all. Nothing more.I'm Janet Porter. I was in the dark about the radical agenda to silence the truth, but after years of reasearch and observation, there is no longer any doubt. As I wrote in 'The Criminalisation of Christianity,' if they can silence the truth, they will silence the gospel. This film is to expose the assault on our freedoms, and shed some light on how we can use the freedoms we have left.
Allow me to quote Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.freedom [free-duhm] noun - the power to determine action without restraint.
You have not lost any freedoms. You are still free to determine your own action without restraint. The only difference is that once, you were allowed to limit other people's actions. No longer.
In the same way that, at one point in history, it was allowable for some people (to whit: whites) to limit the actions of other people (blacks) in a variety of ways (prohibit the use of certain water fountains, prohibit the use of certain seats on a bus, prohibit the patronage of certain businesses, prohibit the presence of the aforementioned people in certain places, prohibit the marriage of people from outside their own particular group, etc), we, as a society, eventually woke up to the inherent injustice in a system that permits such limitations on other people.
Many people fought vehemently against the reduction of such limitations. They thought it was unfair that blacks should have the same rights and freedoms as whites.
They were wrong.
And so are you.
Honestly, there is a lot more wrong in what you have said here. But I don't want to spend too much time on one topic. So we'll leave it for now, and go on to the next one...What kind of freedom of speech do we have if the person who expresses a biblical viewpoint about marriage is told they can't open their businesses in a location?
You misunderstand the concept of 'freedom of speech.' You are granted the right to say whatever you like. The government is forbidden to retaliate against you based on what you have said. But you are not otherwise shielded from the consequences of your speech.
If you say that you believe in a 'biblical viewpoint about marriage' (which to top it off, you don't), there is nothing in the constitution or any other law, legal or otherwise, which says that those people who don't like the idea of bigotry are not permitted to treat you with suspicion and distrust. In fact, I am personally still appalled at how much business Chick-fil-A continues to do after their abhorrent anti-equality practises came to be known.And so they say in San Antonio, 'Oh, if you believe that homosexual marriage is a bad deal, we're not even going to let you run for office here, we're not going to let you have your right of conscience, we're not going to let you believe things other than what we tell you to believe.'
Nonsense. Nobody is telling you what to believe. Nobody is telling you what you are and aren't allowed to believe is sinful. But if you insist on being an intolerant, bigoted hatemonger, then it's likely that you'll not find a lot of support from those who prefer to be a little more open-minded.We're getting the lines from the media, we're getting the lines from education, we're getting the lines from politicians, and even theologians, 'well, you know, there's the gay gene.' Really? Well name it for me. Number it. Because if there's a gene that's identified for homosexuality, it would have a name, it would have a number, we'd know who the doctor was that found it.
What makes you think that something as complicated and multi-faceted as human sexuality, love, and attraction can be determined by a single gene? We're not talking about eye colour, after all. You may as well ask, 'Where is the gene that makes a person introverted instead of extroverted?' There are many genes involved, and no one gene is the determining factor.
Besides, scientists have determined some of the regions of the genetic makeup of humans that does play a role in determining sexuality. Just because there's not a single 'on/off' switch doesn't mean it's not an inherent aspect of a person.And so you believe I'm being intolerant because I believe the bible's standards, are you not being intolerant when you say that there is something wrong with me for believing the bible?
No one is telling you that there's something wrong with you for believing the bible. At least, not in regards to this particular issue. As I've mentioned above, you're welcome to believe whatever parts of the bible you want. What you aren't allowed to do is restrict the freedom of other people based on what you think is immoral.It's really not about marriage. It's about forcing the acceptance of homosexuality on people.
No, it really is about marriage. You don't have to accept homosexuals; you're free to continue thinking ill of them. In just the way that I'm free to think that anti-vaxxers are complete morons (not saying that I actually do think that; it's just an example), you're free to think that homosexuals are horrible sinners who are going to burn in hell for all eternity.
You just don't get to restrict their freedoms.If you change the public law about what marriage is, then you change what the public education system does when it talks about it.
Okay, that is true, in the sense that what you have said is factually correct. If same-sex marriage is legal, then schools are not going to teach that same-sex marriage is illegal.
What's wrong with this statement is not that it's incorrect. It's that you seem to think that public schools exists to indoctrinate all American children into believing your particular supernatural claims. Believe it or not, public education is not here to indoctrinate other people's children into your specific mindset. If you want people indoctrinated, you have to do that all on your own. The government is not going to do it for you.Governor Jerry Brown has now given us a law that allows boys to shower with girls.
The thing that bothers me most about a lot (not all) of religious mentalities is the black-and-white dichotomy that seems to be such a common characteristic amongst them. Such people think that everything in the world is good or evil, right or wrong, boy or girl, gay or straight, up or down, left or right, front or back. The real world doesn't work that way. There are always gradations.
Gender is one such issue. It's not a single switch that flips from male to female or vice-versa. There are a thousand little switches. Most of the time, the vast majority (if not the totality) of those switches are in the same position (male/female). But there's an inverted bell curve at work here. Although the staggering preponderance of people are at one end or the other, there are a few people in the middle. The closer you get to the middle, the fewer people there are. But they are there nonetheless. Such people have a more balanced number of switches flipped. They are intersex, or androgynes, or gender-fluid, or some other such thing. This is where transgender people come in. These are people for whom the majority of physical traits were set to one gender, whilst the majority of their psychological traits were set to the other gender. Such people 'feel as though they were born into the wrong body.' Governor Brown's law is designed to help minimise the discomfort felt by such people.
You may view such a law as 'letting boys shower with girls,' but that's clearly not what the law is intended to do, and more to the point, there has been not a single instance of a student using this law for sexual purposes. The law is working as intended, despite what conservatives predicted.We have these so-called gay-straight-alliances in schools, which are focused around sex. Are there any other clubs in high school or junior high school which are focussed around sex?
The fact that you can say anything like this indicates a monumental level of ignorance. Gay straight alliances are not focussed on sex. They are focussed on acceptance, both of oneself and of others. What on earth do you think these students do at these club meetings?
I can guarantee you that sexual practises and techniques are never a topic of discussion.If some young person hears in school hears it's ok to be gay and then comes down with a fatal disease as a result, school officials should be held legally liable.
I am frankly amazed that, in 2015, anyone can still say something so astoundingly stupid.
First of all, being gay does not mean that you'll catch a disease, fatal or otherwise.
Secondly, there is no disease that can be caught by gay people that can't also be caught by straight people too.
I really can't go on with this quote. I'm so overwhelmed by how stupid it is.I would scream at the television, 'That a lie! I was born this way! That's not true!' But deep down, I'm going, 'Oh god, is it true? I don't have to be like this? This isn't really who you meant me to be?'
What most people don't realise is that one's culture has a much larger impact on their mental state than they think. Culture is where a person learns what is 'normal' and 'weird,' what is 'acceptable' and 'not acceptable.' These lessons are ingrained so deeply that we mistake them for our own inherent understanding of how the world works, when in fact, it's merely the internalised notions that we've absorbed from seeing such ideas in practise for our whole lives.
When you have that small voice in the back of your head telling you 'God doesn't want you to be gay,' that's really just the biases you've picked up from a lifetime of living amongst people telling you that god doesn't want you to be gay.What's coming next is going to be an assault on the church like you've never seen before. There's going to be a dividing of sheep and goats.
I know it must be comforting to think that you and people like you are being persecuted, rather than to admit that you're wrong. But unfortunately, in order to make any progress in living harmoniously with other human beings, you have to learn to accept that sometimes, you're not being persecuted. You're just wrong.
Besides, homosexuals are not the enemy of the church. You're thinking of atheists (and even they aren't necessarily the enemies of the church; they just want the church's influence to stop corrupting the advances that are made possible through logic, reason, science, and rationality). If you think that homosexuals are going to be the downfall of your religion, you are looking in the wrong area.
And ironically, one of the best ways to appease those atheists who are intent on tearing down your religious institutions is to stop being so openly bigoted. Learning to accept homosexuals as human beings, just like you, will do a lot to convince atheists that your religious ideas deserve to continue existing.To silence any aspect of gospel truth or moral truth is ultimately to silence the gospel. So if you think that those who are trying to keep you quiet about one particular issue, like homosexuality, are going to limit it to that, you've underestimated your opposition. They want to silence the whole gospel. And if that's what it takes to accomplish their goal, that's exactly what they will do.
You too are confusing homosexuals with atheists. No one wants to 'silence the gospel.' We just want to be allowed to have the same freedoms that you have.
That's all.
I cannot let this sort of egregious misinformation go unanswered.
Below are the quotes spoken by the individuals who have agreed to be filmed in this movie. Following each is my response to that quote.When evil is called good, darkness is ushered into the land, and with the darkness comes a threat to our freedoms.
First of all, this statement is obviously meant to frighten the viewer from the very beginning. Way to manipulate our emotions, buttheads.
Secondly, even if we accept that your bible is the sole arbiter of what is good and evil (which it isn't), and even assuming that we accept the premise that there exists an objective measure of good and evil in the first place (which there is no such thing), no one is calling homosexuality 'good.' We're simply not allowing you to forbid it based on your personal preferences.I believe it is the single greatest threat to religious freedom in the United States of America today.
Really? Allowing gays to marry other gays somehow impinges upon your religious freedom? Please explain to me how Steve and Adam down the street having the legal protections and benefits that you and your heterosexual spouse already enjoy prohibits you from being christian.The blatant hostility to the christian faith...
This is obviously a sentence fragment. I'm not sure what the speaker meant to say. But I can tell you this: allowing same-sex marriage is in no way hostile to the christian faith. I personally know many gay christians, and I personally know many heterosexual christians who support gay rights. These people obviously don't see a conflict between the two. And quite frankly, neither do I.The most insidious and agressive assault to our religious freedom that we've ever seen. That is the cultural clash of our time.
Once again, you claim that same-sex marriage is an assault on your religious freedom. I really don't understand how that works. If you want to be christian, no one and nothing is stopping you. Even if you want to follow a particular flavour of christianity that insists that being homosexual is a sin, no one is stopping you. You go right ahead and believe that being homosexual is a sin.
I'm not even going to point out the things that your bible claims are sinful but that you don't protest, such as eating shellfish and wearing fabric woven from two different materials, or being wealthy, or shirking taxes... oh wait, I just did, didn't I? Sorry.
But I will point out that just because you think it's a sin doesn't mean that other people, people who do not think it's a sin, should be forbidden from engaging in that behaviour. For example, jehovah's witnesses believe that it's a sin to receive a blood transfusion. Should blood transfusions be outlawed because some people think it's sinful?
You don't get to do that. That's not how society works. I personally think it's sinful to be ignorant. But I'm not going to make it a crime to neglect your education. Neither do you get to tell us what we can and can't do.If homosexual activists get everything they want, it will be nothing less than the criminalisation of christianity.
I have bad news for you: all that homosexual activists want is to be allowed to marry the person they love. That's it. They don't want to criminalise christianity. They don't want to destroy your marriage. They don't want to recruit. They don't want to turn people gay. They just want to be allowed to marry one another. That's all. Nothing more.I'm Janet Porter. I was in the dark about the radical agenda to silence the truth, but after years of reasearch and observation, there is no longer any doubt. As I wrote in 'The Criminalisation of Christianity,' if they can silence the truth, they will silence the gospel. This film is to expose the assault on our freedoms, and shed some light on how we can use the freedoms we have left.
Allow me to quote Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.freedom [free-duhm] noun - the power to determine action without restraint.
You have not lost any freedoms. You are still free to determine your own action without restraint. The only difference is that once, you were allowed to limit other people's actions. No longer.
In the same way that, at one point in history, it was allowable for some people (to whit: whites) to limit the actions of other people (blacks) in a variety of ways (prohibit the use of certain water fountains, prohibit the use of certain seats on a bus, prohibit the patronage of certain businesses, prohibit the presence of the aforementioned people in certain places, prohibit the marriage of people from outside their own particular group, etc), we, as a society, eventually woke up to the inherent injustice in a system that permits such limitations on other people.
Many people fought vehemently against the reduction of such limitations. They thought it was unfair that blacks should have the same rights and freedoms as whites.
They were wrong.
And so are you.
Honestly, there is a lot more wrong in what you have said here. But I don't want to spend too much time on one topic. So we'll leave it for now, and go on to the next one...What kind of freedom of speech do we have if the person who expresses a biblical viewpoint about marriage is told they can't open their businesses in a location?
You misunderstand the concept of 'freedom of speech.' You are granted the right to say whatever you like. The government is forbidden to retaliate against you based on what you have said. But you are not otherwise shielded from the consequences of your speech.
If you say that you believe in a 'biblical viewpoint about marriage' (which to top it off, you don't), there is nothing in the constitution or any other law, legal or otherwise, which says that those people who don't like the idea of bigotry are not permitted to treat you with suspicion and distrust. In fact, I am personally still appalled at how much business Chick-fil-A continues to do after their abhorrent anti-equality practises came to be known.And so they say in San Antonio, 'Oh, if you believe that homosexual marriage is a bad deal, we're not even going to let you run for office here, we're not going to let you have your right of conscience, we're not going to let you believe things other than what we tell you to believe.'
Nonsense. Nobody is telling you what to believe. Nobody is telling you what you are and aren't allowed to believe is sinful. But if you insist on being an intolerant, bigoted hatemonger, then it's likely that you'll not find a lot of support from those who prefer to be a little more open-minded.We're getting the lines from the media, we're getting the lines from education, we're getting the lines from politicians, and even theologians, 'well, you know, there's the gay gene.' Really? Well name it for me. Number it. Because if there's a gene that's identified for homosexuality, it would have a name, it would have a number, we'd know who the doctor was that found it.
What makes you think that something as complicated and multi-faceted as human sexuality, love, and attraction can be determined by a single gene? We're not talking about eye colour, after all. You may as well ask, 'Where is the gene that makes a person introverted instead of extroverted?' There are many genes involved, and no one gene is the determining factor.
Besides, scientists have determined some of the regions of the genetic makeup of humans that does play a role in determining sexuality. Just because there's not a single 'on/off' switch doesn't mean it's not an inherent aspect of a person.And so you believe I'm being intolerant because I believe the bible's standards, are you not being intolerant when you say that there is something wrong with me for believing the bible?
No one is telling you that there's something wrong with you for believing the bible. At least, not in regards to this particular issue. As I've mentioned above, you're welcome to believe whatever parts of the bible you want. What you aren't allowed to do is restrict the freedom of other people based on what you think is immoral.It's really not about marriage. It's about forcing the acceptance of homosexuality on people.
No, it really is about marriage. You don't have to accept homosexuals; you're free to continue thinking ill of them. In just the way that I'm free to think that anti-vaxxers are complete morons (not saying that I actually do think that; it's just an example), you're free to think that homosexuals are horrible sinners who are going to burn in hell for all eternity.
You just don't get to restrict their freedoms.If you change the public law about what marriage is, then you change what the public education system does when it talks about it.
Okay, that is true, in the sense that what you have said is factually correct. If same-sex marriage is legal, then schools are not going to teach that same-sex marriage is illegal.
What's wrong with this statement is not that it's incorrect. It's that you seem to think that public schools exists to indoctrinate all American children into believing your particular supernatural claims. Believe it or not, public education is not here to indoctrinate other people's children into your specific mindset. If you want people indoctrinated, you have to do that all on your own. The government is not going to do it for you.Governor Jerry Brown has now given us a law that allows boys to shower with girls.
The thing that bothers me most about a lot (not all) of religious mentalities is the black-and-white dichotomy that seems to be such a common characteristic amongst them. Such people think that everything in the world is good or evil, right or wrong, boy or girl, gay or straight, up or down, left or right, front or back. The real world doesn't work that way. There are always gradations.
Gender is one such issue. It's not a single switch that flips from male to female or vice-versa. There are a thousand little switches. Most of the time, the vast majority (if not the totality) of those switches are in the same position (male/female). But there's an inverted bell curve at work here. Although the staggering preponderance of people are at one end or the other, there are a few people in the middle. The closer you get to the middle, the fewer people there are. But they are there nonetheless. Such people have a more balanced number of switches flipped. They are intersex, or androgynes, or gender-fluid, or some other such thing. This is where transgender people come in. These are people for whom the majority of physical traits were set to one gender, whilst the majority of their psychological traits were set to the other gender. Such people 'feel as though they were born into the wrong body.' Governor Brown's law is designed to help minimise the discomfort felt by such people.
You may view such a law as 'letting boys shower with girls,' but that's clearly not what the law is intended to do, and more to the point, there has been not a single instance of a student using this law for sexual purposes. The law is working as intended, despite what conservatives predicted.We have these so-called gay-straight-alliances in schools, which are focused around sex. Are there any other clubs in high school or junior high school which are focussed around sex?
The fact that you can say anything like this indicates a monumental level of ignorance. Gay straight alliances are not focussed on sex. They are focussed on acceptance, both of oneself and of others. What on earth do you think these students do at these club meetings?
I can guarantee you that sexual practises and techniques are never a topic of discussion.If some young person hears in school hears it's ok to be gay and then comes down with a fatal disease as a result, school officials should be held legally liable.
I am frankly amazed that, in 2015, anyone can still say something so astoundingly stupid.
First of all, being gay does not mean that you'll catch a disease, fatal or otherwise.
Secondly, there is no disease that can be caught by gay people that can't also be caught by straight people too.
I really can't go on with this quote. I'm so overwhelmed by how stupid it is.I would scream at the television, 'That a lie! I was born this way! That's not true!' But deep down, I'm going, 'Oh god, is it true? I don't have to be like this? This isn't really who you meant me to be?'
What most people don't realise is that one's culture has a much larger impact on their mental state than they think. Culture is where a person learns what is 'normal' and 'weird,' what is 'acceptable' and 'not acceptable.' These lessons are ingrained so deeply that we mistake them for our own inherent understanding of how the world works, when in fact, it's merely the internalised notions that we've absorbed from seeing such ideas in practise for our whole lives.
When you have that small voice in the back of your head telling you 'God doesn't want you to be gay,' that's really just the biases you've picked up from a lifetime of living amongst people telling you that god doesn't want you to be gay.What's coming next is going to be an assault on the church like you've never seen before. There's going to be a dividing of sheep and goats.
I know it must be comforting to think that you and people like you are being persecuted, rather than to admit that you're wrong. But unfortunately, in order to make any progress in living harmoniously with other human beings, you have to learn to accept that sometimes, you're not being persecuted. You're just wrong.
Besides, homosexuals are not the enemy of the church. You're thinking of atheists (and even they aren't necessarily the enemies of the church; they just want the church's influence to stop corrupting the advances that are made possible through logic, reason, science, and rationality). If you think that homosexuals are going to be the downfall of your religion, you are looking in the wrong area.
And ironically, one of the best ways to appease those atheists who are intent on tearing down your religious institutions is to stop being so openly bigoted. Learning to accept homosexuals as human beings, just like you, will do a lot to convince atheists that your religious ideas deserve to continue existing.To silence any aspect of gospel truth or moral truth is ultimately to silence the gospel. So if you think that those who are trying to keep you quiet about one particular issue, like homosexuality, are going to limit it to that, you've underestimated your opposition. They want to silence the whole gospel. And if that's what it takes to accomplish their goal, that's exactly what they will do.
You too are confusing homosexuals with atheists. No one wants to 'silence the gospel.' We just want to be allowed to have the same freedoms that you have.
That's all.