Talk Elections

Given the gradual trend towards Americans supporting gay marriage/civil unions with older voters being replaced by younger voters who tend to be more increasingly supportive at what point will publically opposing gay marriage/civil unions and LGBT rights in general start to become an electorable liability? Has this in fact happened in any state so far?

Thoughts.

Not a liability: National Republican primary, very conservative states
A liability: National general election, very liberal states (VT, MA, etc)

We are really nearing the end of opposition to LGBT rights in the US. The public already supports ENDA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Non-Discrimination_Act) (I think even Romney supports this?) and the repeal of DADT by huge margins and we're seeing the shift towards supporting gay marriage which will lead to the end of the Defense of Marriage Act (and civil unions).

The speed on which things happen will vary. The fastest I think is if Obama moves on from supporting civil unions to supporting gay marriage (again), wins reelection, and Democrats hold the Senate allowing him to appoint more Supreme Court justices and California holds off on legalizing gay marriage at the ballot in favor of letting Perry v. Schwarzenegger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_v._Schwarzenegger) reach the Supreme Court who would hopefully give us a Loving v. Virginia-like ruling legalizing gay marriage nationwide. It could be over this decade.

I'll be kind of sad once it's all over. I don't think there will ever be another type of issue that enrages the religious right so much :(

I would argue that in more than a few places it's already happening.

Hell, Santorum's Senate career was cut short in Pennsylvania of all places because he was too "anti-gay".

In much of the country already, and nationwide by the 2020's. By 2016 or 2020 we'll see Republican nominees who at least support civil unions.

2020s most likely, 2030s if the religious right really digs its heels and shoves money into the  GOP. Hopefully Perry v Schwarzenegger results in a Brown v Board type ruling, but I'd expect opposition from conservatives for at least another decade. 

Apparently during the last NH GOP debate:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/08/rick-santorum-mitt-romney-gay-rights-gop-debate_n_1192345.html?ref=mostpopular (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/08/rick-santorum-mitt-romney-gay-rights-gop-debate_n_1192345.html?ref=mostpopular)

It already is a liability in many states, which is why most Republicans aren't even talking about social issues as much anymore.

In some states it is already a liability and I would argue my home state is one of them.

In the context of a Presidential general election, I predict that 2012 will be the final year that holding anti-gay positions will be a non-liability.  In 2016 I think it will be at least a small liability and full LGBT rights will be the default position of Democratic Presidential candidates.  By 2020 I think support for gay rights will be the view of a solid majority of Americans, though some strong social conservatives will continue to oppose it.

Anti-gay positions have already become a liability. Anti-gay marriage positions won't for a few more cycles.

In liberal and swing states, it already is. In conservative states, not until several years after a Loving v. Virginia type thing.

Don't be glum, chum. As biotechnology and Computer Science becomes more and more sophisticted, we will be give all kinds of fun, new ways to piss off  fundies.  

How about toplessness and nudity on television...uncensored?  This is America -people go apesh**t over this issue.  

Viewing this as in end in itself is extremely questionable.

Obama is the only person who is openly anti gay marriage who is winning a statewide Democratic primary in California any time soon.

Nah, we'll move on to other things like human cloning, genetic modification, and designer babies that will cause just as much uproar. Social progressivism requires an insatiable hunger for "social progress" that will not end at gay marriage. The religious right isn't going to run out of things to oppose any time soon.

Yeah. We're not giving up ;)

2014 or later

WTF? With states like Maryland and Washington passing LGBT bills, the movement is just getting started to be pick up by mainstream America. Explain how this is a fad that will die out?

Civil rights for Blacks. It was just a phase, man.

When they start alienating people over the issue and taking away states' rights to vote on the issue. I'm a big tent conservative who likes to focus on issues the bring people together. There is nothing wrong with taking either side of this issue but to make it a cornerstone of a campaign goes a little far.

I would hope you wouldn't, since I don't actually have that hunger for 'social progress' for its own sake and will probably join you when it comes to issues of re-normalizing eugenics and other such nastiness.

Obviously Man-on-Dog will be the next cultural war.

How do you define anti-gay though? If someone isn't against gays but believes a marriage should be between a man and woman are they anti-gay? I know several gay people and only two that I've ever met have actually supported gay marriage. The others think marriage is for straight people and therefore want no part of what straights identify with. Rather they want their own separate culture and system. I think too often liberals make it sound like they stand for all gays when really the only thing they want to do is appear as sensitive to guilty voters who will look to their stances as heroic. In all reality the only thing that supporting gay marriage does politically is turn an issue into something it's not.

I doubt it because it would probably make the PETA people angry, fracturing the left.

There's really a simple solution to it all, and it can be found in virtually every other Western country's way of handling the concept of marriage.

Churches have the right to regulate their ceremonies - including marriage. The difference between the United States and many other countries is that we seem to tie it all together. Even in the US, when you have a religious ceremony, it is separate from the act of applying for your marriage license.

The two have to be considered separate. The current contract of marriage recognized by the state has legal and secular functions and is by definition a state recognition. Basically, it's a civil union. This means the church has no control over defining it; just because it's called 'marriage' doesn't mean it's seamlessly linked to the church in the modern day.

Likewise, churches get to decide what marriages they wish to perform that are recognized by their institutions and congregations. If marriage has a religious component, it can still done in whatever method the church deems fit without government involvement.

Dumb question. And this is not rhetorical. If a church refuses to marry an interracial couple, is that allowed?

And you will fail just as the homophobes failed. Simply because even if America or Belgium or istan bans GE, their will  be countries which don't ban it... no real challenge to take a short trip there, do the deed, then return home with the "designer baby" growing inside her.

Not to mention that countries which successfully restrain will be at a competitive disadvantage relative to those that allow it. And that any such ban will be most successful in restraining GE amongst the poor, thus leaving it even more the privilege of the rich then it otherwise would be.

Large-scale normalization of this sort of thing, which is somewhere in territory beyond 'human rights violation' for reasons that most people either reject or find obvious, would entail the creation of some kind of alternate mode of being where such things are frowned upon as the only acceptable recourse. Like a kibbutz but multiconfessional, maybe.

You must be ing kidding me?! Even pro-lifers don't consider sperm and ovum to be "alive"... that is the point at which genetic engineering would take place, before the fetus even exists. So how can it be considered a human rights violation(or, as you implied, worse then a human rights violation) when the subject material is not even human? Above and beyond that, how the hell is the pursuit of a more perfect human immoral?... if anything it's the epitome of morality, morality after all being that which alleviates the negative conditions suffered by humanity and promotes the presence of positive conditions.

Then why hasn't the GLBT folks tried to make a serious effort to stop us from banning gay marriage via constituitional amendment in Indiana? Also haven't ya noticed when it's been up to a vote of the people of the sovereign states gay marriage loses to traditional marriage every time. Thus Prop 8 in California is constuitional. That judge that said its unconstuitional should be removed. The federal courts have NO JURISDICTION ON THIS MATTER. Marriage is a state/local/church issue. The federal government is prohibited via 9th and 10th Amendment of the Constuition to get involved. I don't see anywhere in Article 1 Section 8 that marriage was a matter that congress (or the federal courts for that matter) could get involved so they need to step aside and let us decide this issue on the  religious/local/state level.

tl;dr - I should be able to make unconstitutional theocratic law and any judge that strikes down my religious law should be impeached.

Oh, you misunderstand me, obviously it's not the substance at the moment of the action taken upon it that's 'alive' as such. The problem is the fact that it's done with a view towards deciding what characteristics a person will have, from their mother's womb. The problem is with the intent rather than with the act. It's an assertion of absolute control over the fundaments of another person before they have anything remotely resembling, not even just a choice, but the ability to realize the matter. I understand that for somebody who's okay with constructing 'disability' as 'imperfection' that might seem appealing, but for somebody whose personality has been largely formed by the experience of living with disabilities mental and physical, this is the sort of thing that I interpret as an attack on the conditions of my existence. I've read Foucault. I know how this sort of exercise of power works. You're not going to convince me that a 'perfect' humanity is anything more than a myopic, hubristic, and fundamentally cruel dream originating from the people who have the luxury of being able to impose their fitness standards of normative. I also don't share your definition of 'morality' or even, it looks like, 'positive' and 'negative'. For instance, I view many of my disabilities as things that I would rather have than not. Sorry.

Always amusing to see that some people have not left the 19th century of the mind.

Me or him or both? Because he's reminding me a little of Herbert Spencer, but I can honestly see how I might be reminding someone of John Ruskin or Matthew Arnold (which I don't see as entirely unflattering but don't see as entirely flattering either).

But the law is constuitional. The law of nature is on my side in this matter. It's not a matter of theocracy or religious law. I'm speaking of natural law. Why do you you desire the state legality of a religious rite for couples who can't propagate the human race because the couple is of the same gender? Why should we be forced to allow what nature holds not to be natural?

The 'law of nature' is of course one of the oldest fallacies in the book of ethical philosophy. You're being impaled directly on Hume's Fork.

No it is quite clearly unconstitutional as marriage is not a legal license to have sex and give birth. And yes it is a matter of religious law for many people as pretty much the only opponents of gay marriage in the US are hard and soft theocrats.

Do you realize that churches have no legal role in marriage in the United States? Do you know what civil marriage is?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_marriage#Civil_marriage_in_the_world_currently

Or perhaps you do know and you just object to the concept of civil marriage itself? In either case I can see your desire to have your religion control.

Theocracy.

I'm not a theocrat. The government back in the 1800's started to interfere in marriage to deny inter-racial couples that right to marry. These were the same progressives many on the left and some on the right who believed in eugenics. Margret Sanger was one of their champions. They used racism to split the people so they could control the people of that day. The elites want marriage debated because they are trying to attack the first and most legitimate form of government given by our Creator. That would be the family.

@Nathan: The very Founders of the United States would beg to differ with you vehemently. Washington himself had a gay man thrown out of the military for just that.

Obviously him.


You mean that you worry that you might occasionally sound as if you're accidentally sounding more than vaguely Marxist?

I worry that I might be sounding like (pace Ruskin) somebody who uses slightly twee Latin puns to title his pamphlets or (pace Arnold) somebody with admittedly somewhat derivative and inconsistent views expressed in his social cirticism. The main senses in which I would perceive those comparisons as less than entirely laudatory are in terms of form, not content. Substantively I'd actually rather like to be as much 'in the tradition of' Ruskin/Arnold/Morris as contextually possible. Except Ruskin's association with certain types of planned communities. Screw planned communities. Oh, and the squabble with Whistler. I rather like Whistler.

Really you are. There's no rational justification for denying same-sex couples the option of civil marriage (that includes the "marriage is a procreation license" argument) so you hide behind "the only change to the discriminatory status quo I support is marriage privatization/civil unions for all (something that isn't going to happen)" cop-out.

Why can't theocrats just be honest and frank about their views?

I will first ask you, Nathan, whether you would maintain these objections against biological alterations to a person made after their birth(by their consent, obviously). Obviously post-birth alteration have less potential then pre-birth ones, but you may be surprised at how radical their capacity to change people will turn out to be.


Their are two obvious problems with this argument:

1)I tries to apply morality retrospectively("you sinned against me before I even existed" is inherently oxymoronic)
2)It does so from the perspective of a hypothetical alternative reality in which the individual wasn't genetically engineered.

Then surely you consider other parental attempts to determine their child's personality as equally heinous? For example inducting them into a religion before they're old enough to consent, homeschooling them with an eye towards encouraging certain personality traits, discouraging them from taking drugs...

No I'm not trolling you- you claimed your problem was with the intent rather then with the act. Therefore the fact genetic engineering is relatively more likely to succeed shouldn't matter, nor should the substance of what is being aimed at... if we're talking purely in terms of intent then their is no difference between a parent trying and failing to engineer a child's personality through conventional means so that they'll be smart, on the one hand, and a parent successfully engineering a child's personality through genetic means so they'll be smart, on the other.

Firstly this is already true to an even more extreme extent then you realize... if determining a child's genes is a violation of their freedom then what the hell does creating them in the first place qualify as? You have no guarantee the child will want to exist. And, if it has a conscience, opting out by suicide later on won't necessarily be an option because the child might feel guilty about hurting it's family and friends with such a suicide.

Secondly I find it amusing that nobody is concerned about this when it happens through nurture, even in the era decades past when nurture was considered the be all and end all. That bullsh**t about changing a babies personality by having them listen to Mozart for example... it doesn't work, but if it did work how would it be less immoral then genetic engineering?

Thirdly, how is this necessarily more immoral then letting random chance wreak it's wrath?

Fourthly I think you're overestimating the power of genes... identical twins are identical in genetic terms, yet still have choices and tend to turn out somewhat different.


 No, I construct mediocrity as imperfection.

 I have physical and mental disabilities as well. The experience of living with them coupled with my realization of how disappointed my parents were(they did try to conceal it, but it's not something that can really be concealed) is the primary genesis of my opinion on this matter.



What about a surviving humanity? The fact is that, seeing how technology is advancing and exponentially increasing the quantity of damage that can be wreaked by terrorism, we have only three choices:

1)Genetic engineering to purge those mental tendencies that facilitate an act of terrorism
2)A police state that makes North Korea look libertarian
3)Extinction.

And genetic engineering would reduce the amount of cruelty in the world. For example, by eliminating sociopaths.

By definition a disability is something that limits your capacity to live as you desire(society has constructed that as being "relative to the norm", so for example the inability of humans to fly is not considered a disability... personally I disagree and think our inability to fly should be considered by definition a disability, but whatever).

My definition of positive is that which increases the capacity of people to live as they desire, and negative as that which decreases it. Letting a disability manifest itself even though it could have been averted decreases the capacity of that person to live as they desire, ergo immoral.

Gay atheist theocrat checking in.

(Although if the system of marriage licensing instituted to prevent white-black intermixing can't be done away with, I'd support extending it to any two or more individuals, if only for tax reasons).

My objections certainly wouldn't be as absolute or serious, though depending on the alterations in question I might be somewhat troubled.


It's entirely possible to wrong future persons or entities, though it's obviously immensely difficult to wade through when doing these investigations of ethics. This part of the argument isn't as important to me as the human diversity part, anyway, it's just that it's the part that's easiest to make from the perspective of individual rights and self-determination, which I am given to understand most people care about a lot more than I do in these sorts of situations.


Sorry, let me clarify. It's the absoluteness of the intent that I have a problem with it. It's its character as an exercise of total power. To directly answer your question, yes I have serious moral issues with conventional authoritarian parenting styles as well; less authoritarian styles that still attempt to guide the child (like, well, pretty much all parenting) at least allow for some sort of dialogue with the child ('dialogue' broadly defined, of course). The child has the option of navigating the guidance. Saying that the problem was with the intent without clarifying what I meant by the intent was poor argumentation. Sorry about that.


Eh, I consider the state of existing as somewhat incomparable to other, more specific states. You're perfectly free to disagree on this.


At that stage it is indeed somewhat questionable, though again I point out that it provides, at least theoretically, a somewhat greater set of options to the child. The parent does have rights over the child in many areas. I'm not denying that. I just don't think that biopower is really one of those areas.


My answer to this would be religious in character, so I doubt it would be convincing. This is another area where there are just intractable differences of worldview.


Possibly. To be honest I might be projecting other aspects of the medicalization of people and their issues on to this somewhat.


Define 'mediocrity'.


As my experience of living with them coupled with my realization of the absoluteness of my family's love for me is the primary genesis of mine. Although thank you, now that you've brought this to light I understand better now where you're coming from. I do understand, believe me.


I'm...really not sure that you've exhausted the potential options here. If you have I'd be willing to at least consider the deployment of limited and targeted ways to deal with it.


Yes, we're not going to agree on any of these definitions. I'm willing to sit down and continue this conversation, including explaining how I would define these terms, if you like, but I'm actually pretty busy with both friends and schoolwork this evening and I have church and more schoolwork tomorrow, so if you're interested you might have to wait a little while. I'll warn you in advance that some of my definitions and examples will, again, be spiritual (though I hope not sectarian) in character and as such might once again indicate a difference of opinion that is irreducible.

Why?

I believe we've reached an impasse here, since I suspect you believe that people possess genuine freedom of choice whereas I would consider the option a child(or any other person) selected to be based entirely on the impact of prior biological and social influence.

I suspect we've reached an impasse here as well, since I consider the distinction between biological and non-biological in humans to be arbitrary and flawed(since the brain is biological matter therefore a hypothetical influence of Mozart music would constitute biopower in my opinion)... whereas you probably adhere to the concept of a separate and distinct soul.

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

Being comparatively less able to live as you would wish to live then you otherwise would be if you lacked/possessed a given trait. Contemporary society typically constructs mediocrity as being relative to other humans, although I'm more inclined to broaden the scope of comparison to include beings of hypothetically greater potential then modern humans.

It depends entirely on how technology develops(both destructive technology and defensive technology). It's entirely plausible that limited and targeted ways will be sufficient. But it's also entirely plausible that they won't be sufficient. I'd really rather be safe then sorry, so I'm inclined to think that the government should plan in accordance with the latter.

Not much point discussing this, we are at another impasse and it would be an exercise in futility and frustration.

You've slightly simplified many of my beliefs and opinions but you haven't actually mischaracterized any of them, so you're right that we've probably reached an impasse.

Anyway, let's get back to discussing homophobic politicians. I tend to think that by 2016 not supporting marriage would be a fatal or near-fatal liability in a Democratic primary at least, and not supporting at least civil unions and employment-discrimination protections probably would be in a general election. Maybe not in some states, but nationwide.

Of course it's also possible that some sort of national trauma and/or weird new political movement would cause us to backslide on this as on other issues.