Explain why being anti gay union equals bigot.
It's undoubtedly bigoted not to grant them equal rights as fellow citizens.
madmick got exposed in this thread
The sweet tears of minnows.
So tell me how that affects the government in a way that it needs to be labeled differently. Hint, it doesn't.
Who said anything about separate government labeling? I said that the unions should be
perfectly equal in the eyes of the state. Consummate. Identical. I don't care what they call it. Those who argue differently stand apart from me.
Per this issue, except on FOX news, the usage of the words "marriage" and "civil union" are typically used to indicate a distinction in the the private and public spheres. The public sphere is the government sphere, and there equality must be absolute. Conversely, in the private sphere- for example, churches- the rational citizens will acknowledge the right of that subculture to govern itself, and its own definitions. I thought this was rather apparent in my above posts.
Do I believe that most religious people are bigoted on this issue- specifically those who desire to maintain this distinction? Yes. Do I believe that this is necessarily true? No, as I said above, and went to the trouble of explaining why (a point that you continue to evade... although in fairness to you that appears to be so because you are a touch green when it comes to this debate). I am not religious. Furthermore, I don't care about labels. I only support what I feel I can rationally support, and that is equality in matters of civil (i.e. legal) rights.
Frankly, you're dogmatic. It's "your way or the highway". You appear to represent the very type of person who applies pressure to men like this when you have no justifiable reason to attack his position as a businessman for his privately held beliefs. You hurt the gay rights movement with your rigidity. You have no right to dictate if some people want to call one union "marriage" and even have a formally recognized institution unique to that label, so long as that institution exists outside the government sphere.
If you argued that, as I do, then the conservatives would quickly lose this argument, and we would achieve that equality more rapidly. It wouldn't take long for the stubborn and (yes,
probably) bigoted chicken littles to see how normal and acceptable those unions are; that the sky isn't falling. The rest would fall in place so easily.
But too many are so stuck on this goddamn "my way or the highway" rather than what cannot be rationally denied by any party, and so we run mostly in circles- creeping forward at a laborious pace.
