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100
3 votes
Jun 3, 2015

In the letters LGBT, I'm G.
I want our community to get equal rights. But I have spent a whole lot of the last 22-23 years studying how the US Supreme Court has been interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment, and I arrived at the decision a long time ago that I only want us to get equal rights by the voters and/or legislatures creating the new laws that give us equality. The Fourteenth Amendment was not intended to give us equal rights. I know that the Equal Protection Clause could possibly be interpreted that way, but I am certain that this was not the intent. I feel so passionately about this that when I was on one website about nine years ago, when I saw a gay man say that he wants the US Supreme Court to declare that gay people like him (and me) to have the equal right to adopt children, I responded that "I am not ashamed of being gay, but I am ashamed of the gay community."

The Equal Protection Clause was only intended to ban racial discrimination. There is no other known purpose than that. When I've said this on other sites, I often get responses that the EP Clause does not mention race. The way I ought to respond every single time is that the Clause also does not mention anything about "minorities," "bigotry," "prejudice," or "xenophobia" either. The words of the Fourteenth Amendment tell us so little. It can be so easy to use those words for your own political goals, which is a big mistake. The US Supreme Court has far too often made the mistake of putting their own political views into the words of the Fourteenth.

Eighty-four years ago, the great SC Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote the following in a dissenting opinion: "I have not yet adequately expressed the more than anxiety that I feel at the ever increasing scope given to the Fourteenth Amendment in cutting down what I believe to be the constitutional rights of the states. As the decisions now stand, I see hardly any limit but the sky to the invalidating of those rights if they happen to strike a majority of this Court as for any reason undesirable. I cannot believe that the Amendment was intended to give us carte blanche to embody our economic or moral beliefs in its prohibitions. ... [W]e ought to remember the great caution shown by the Constitution in limiting the power of the states, and should be slow to construe the clause in the Fourteenth Amendment as committing to the Court, with no guide but the Court's own discretion, the validity of whatever laws the states may pass."

The Court's rulings are still giving me that same anxiety. I want to celebrate victories at the ballot box and in the legislatures, not when courts render decisions that clearly were not intended.

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100
3 votes
Jun 3, 2015

The advantage of achieving the goals of equality through legislation or better yet, through a new amendment to the Constitution, is that those means would require more people sharing your goals than not. I come from a state where the State Supreme Court ruled that gay marriage is legal due to equal protection under the law. Regardless of the merits/demerits of that ruling, it caught many people by surprise and caused outrage, and accusations of the Court passing laws instead of interpreting them. Those people will seek to overturn that decision and/or amend the state constitution to their liking for as long as they are able to hold any political power. Though the rights of the LGBT community are the rights of a minority of people, to secure those rights, truly secure them, you will need to win over majority opinion. Look at the Roe vs. Wade decision from 1973. For decades, people, not being able to overturn the decision itself, have attempted to throw roadblocks in the way of abortion through legislation demanding waiting periods or forcing women to get an ultrasound before having an abortion. As a nation, we need to find a way to discuss such issues without vicious name-calling and hate mongering, etc. in order to come to a consensus, one way or another, about controversial issues.

For the record, I'm straight. While my church holds that gay marriage is morally wrong, I believe it has failed to show how this moral wrong affects anyone other than the consenting parties to the degree that it should be against the law. As for other rights, 14th amendment or not, I can't see any legal or moral justification for discrimination with regard to employment or housing for any group of people, so long as they are law-abiding citizens.

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100
2 votes
Jun 3, 2015

It doesn't matter what I like, does it? It doesn't concern me, does it?

I think if more citizens of this nation pulled their noses out of everyone else's business and paid a bit more attention to what they were doing, we'd have a lot less of this apparent need for the government to feel compelled to oversee every aspect of our lives...

Or am I missing a more basic and prurient force at work here?

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100
User voted Yes.
1 vote
Sep 29, 2015

Talking about "the LGBTQ" community like it's a monolith is a silly proposal. Even activists advocating for LGBTQ people are not all alike. There are many very conservative LGBTQ folks, for example.

In general, the LGBTQ community is asking for the right to do things that they should have the right to do without interference or judgment. They're not asking to have anyone else not be able to adopt: They just want to be able to adopt for their own families. They're not asking for straight people to be treated like they're mentally ill: They just want their own sexual orientation to not be viewed as an insanity or perversion.

I have some issues with common LGBTQ tropes. I think, for example, that talking about sexual orientation like it is 100% genetic is a grotesquely simple model of heritability that we would never accept in any other context but have here because it was used as a Trojan Horse argument. The issue is not whether or not being gay is a "choice", as if that was a meaningful distinction: It's whether gay behavior is wrong or should be illegal. It isn't. Still, I do think that, quibbling aside, no one "chooses" their sexual orientation. While people's orientation and interests do sometimes change over the life course as we discover more about ourselves and change developmentally, the magic of attraction is precisely that it is out of our control.

But these are ultimately quibbles. I view myself as an LGBTQ ally.

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67
3 votes
Jun 3, 2015

It isn't so much that I "like" what they are doing, because they are only trying to achieve equality in a world where they suffer bigotry and hatred, mistrust and fear. The LGBTQI community is made up of people just like everyone else ... no different in their wish to get an education, look for and get a job, have a home, buy groceries and new clothes, a car perhaps, attend movies, plays, concerts, possibly marry and have a family. Those are all HUMAN goals. The fact that an individual may be attracted to a person of the same sex or want to live life as the opposite gender just does not change those basic human goals. It is only how badly some in our societies *treat* members of the LGBTQI community that forces them have the additional goals of being safe and secure while pursuing all the other common HUMAN goals. We could all live together in peace, it is entirely possible.

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-1
1 vote
Jun 3, 2015

Open acceptance to this deformity, a biological/psychological abnormality is psychologically destructive to the rest of mankind; because most of you don't see it for the deformity it is.

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::unhide-discussion::
100
User voted Yes.
main reply
1 vote,
Jul 13, 2016

Can you articulate any reason why it is a deformity? And since you believe it is a deformity, what do you believe is the solution? Do you routinely find yourself shaming people who are deformed?

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