Ashers Baking Company: 'Gay cake' row could end up in court

[C0ckney]

Current research in psychology says otherwise. (It's possible, yes, but by no means easy.) Our focus should be on brainwashing the children of bigoted people to be gay-friendly. That's significantly easier.

fair enough, but the point still stands if you remove the word easily from what i wrote.

i agree with your second line, and would say that part of that is creating a social environment where homophobia is seen as unacceptable.

[Ben Kenobi]

no wonder your tribe didn't want you back after your roomspringa

Anglicans do that sort of thing?

[Ben Kenobi]

i agree with your second line, and would say that part of that is creating a social environment where homophobia is seen as unacceptable.

Why on earth did England bother fighting the second world war?

[C0ckney]

Why on earth did England bother fighting the second world war?

so we could have gay pride and burn catholics.

[Sava]

Anglicans do that sort of thing?

you said you were like some ghetto ass menonite or something

[Ben Kenobi]

you said you were like some ghetto ass menonite or something

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mennonite_Brethren_Church

I was a member of a Mennonite Brethren Church and attended there from January of 2001 to the fall of 2004, when I became a Catechumen in Catholic church. I joined them at Easter in 2001. I formally left in 2005.

I was baptized Anglican, but did not practice.

So from 1981 to about 2001, I was Anglican. Nearly 20 years.

I was a Mennonite from 2001 to 2005, and Catholic since.

[Sava]

you are truly a lost soul

[rah]

I'm beginning to believe that he didn't voluntarily change those times, but was forced out and had to find another religion. Which is may also be why he ended up in Texas. My opinion of Canada has gone up.
All we have is his word on it, and we all know how good that is.

[DaShi]

Probably the same accusations that followed him to Texas caused him to leave Canada.

[Ben Kenobi]

I'm beginning to believe that he didn't voluntarily change those times

Perhaps you have some evidence of this allegation?

I left the Anglican church because I met a wonderful friend in college who invited me to his Russian speaking Mennonite church. I was very happy there, and I'm still friends with the pastor.

I left the Mennonite church because Menno Simons was a former Catholic priest (by his own admission), and after examining his reasons for leaving, I believed they no longer applied today. Given the fact that the Catholic church came first, I believed that as Christians we had a duty to be in communion with His Church.

You can even track the development of those thoughts here - I had a thread with Shi Huangdi back in the day.

Which is may also be why he ended up in Texas.

I was offered a job teaching in a Catholic school. Nothing more nor less. I'm happy here and it's a good fit for me.

All we have is his word on it, and we all know how good that is.

As opposed to idle speculation?

[Ben Kenobi]

Probably the same accusations that followed him to Texas caused him to leave Canada.

Texas offered me a teaching position. I'm not sure why it's so hard to understand that someone with credentials seeking a teaching position would choose to take one here.

[Elok]

To describe this as a simple problem of bigotry is to drastically misunderstand the situation. Are there people who just flat-out fear and hate gay people and lesbians? Yes, of course. But there's also the matter of several thousand years of Judeo-Christian belief. As we discover anew every time MrFun tries to explain his position, it's really quite hard to come up with a gay-tolerant take on any Abrahamic faith; every scripture and tradition is uniformly dead-set against it. You pretty much have to make support for gay rights up as continuing revelation or some such, and most people just ain't going to go for that.

In this specific case, the bakers' objection was not to serving these people, but to celebrating their lifestyle; there is no reason to believe they would not have made a cake which said "Happy Birthday Tom" or something. Personally, I'm agnostic on that aspect of Church teaching, and consider it none of my business; in the bakers' shoes, I'd have likely shrugged and baked it. But not everyone takes that view of Christian public life, and when you start talking about classing them with the KKK they view it as quite simply an attack on traditional religion--an attempt to drive their entire way of life into oblivion.

That may well seem absurd to you. I don't believe it myself--at least, not yet. I don't really have time to explain my POV on the evangelical mindset, the direction of modern culture, the gay rights debate, etc. For now, let me just point out that just about every dominant cultural institution (outside of churches themselves, and they're waning) is explicitly or latently hostile to organized religion. News media, entertainment, higher education, and most intellectual circles are strictly divided into a secular norm and a sort of Jesus ghetto: Christian music, Christian colleges, Christian this-and-that. Now, that's at least partly American Christians' fault (as is much of the antipathy itself), but the long and short of it is that our ostensible majority is mostly nominal and apathetic: they answer "Christian" to surveys, sleep in most Sundays and laugh at all the RELIGIOUS PEOPLE ARE DUMB****S HA HA HA jokes on Family Guy/South Park/whatever. The cultural trend is hostile to us, and has been for most of my lifetime. It worries me, somewhat, and I believe in a strong separation of Church and State; I can't imagine how it is to somebody who believes in a much more robust role for the faith in public life.

Anyway, I'll probably get called a screwball and/or apologist for bigots, etc. But you were warned: we're settling in for a much bigger fight than we think we are. We could save ourselves a lot of grief down the line by being reasonable today.

[Sava]

cry me a ****in river

[DinoDoc]

cry me a ****in river

That comment belongs in the Ukraine thread.

[Elok]

Mind you, I'm sure these bakers have a marked distaste for all things gay, but only in the same sense that they have a marked distaste for potheads, prostitutes, and Satanists, i.e. as sin. If anyone had asked them to bake a cake with a huge pot leaf, or a naked chick, or a pentagram, I assume their refusal would cause no fuss. But, since we've come to think of homosexuality as a civil rights matter, we can't think of rejection of homosexuality in apolitical terms anymore. We've equated gay people today with southern Blacks in 1960; it therefore follows, even when it doesn't, that everyone against them goes in the Bull Connor slot.