[moz]

Originally Posted by Andurian

Attacking people for their political views is entirely reasonable and a longstanding tradition in western culture. If you're saying that attacking people for evil political views (see Hitler, Stalin, Machiavelli) is wrong, I'm not a good target audience.

My thoughts exactly.

Moral relativism has its place, on the bookshelf next to the books on intelligent design and the celestial spheres. Judging someone because they make stupid choices is sometimes best done privately, but publicly responding to public stupidity is exactly what is required. The essay linked is not reality-based in any meaningful way.

As is common with people who have a grasp of rhetoric, he throws in enough truth to hopefully confuse people, but not enough in this case. Not to mention that the occasional truth stands out because it contradicts the rest of his argument. Oops.

Originally Posted by OSC

The laws concerning marriage did not create marriage, they merely attempted to solve problems in such areas as inheritance, property, paternity, divorce, adoption and so on.

So he's arguing that extending legal recognition of gay partnerships in exactly the same way that some (and only some) other marriages are legally recognised, is going to lead to all sorts of awful things, while solving a heap of messy legal problems for the families concerned. Problems like religions being forced to acknowledge gay people (who he admits he has serious issues with acknowledging). For someone whose co-religionists practice polygamous marriage without state sanction and complain bitterly about that (I suspect he may be alluding to this), he seems awfully keen to keep others in the same bad situation. And the bad outcomes don't seem very bad to me. Perhaps they're only bad because his imaginary friend says so, because he gives precious little in the way of reasons.


That said, I won't buy his books because he's lost the plot. Some of his earlier novels were quite good, but the later ones have gone downhill to the point of unreadability. And the more I find out about his delusions, the more I'm convinced that he wouldn't want my heathen, unnatural, gay-sex-tainted money.

Actually, speaking of weird belief systems that make no sense, our local red Cross have truly bizarre rules about donating blood. Specifically, as a bisexual male I can donate blood if I sign to say I haven't had sex with another guy for the last year. Fine. But my female partner cannot give blood, because she's had sex with a gay or bisexual male.