SMBC Comics Forum

Salacious Schoolmate wrote:Hahahaha, yes that must be it. I certainly didn't ask that because I couldn't think of any secular anti-homosexual groups. No, I can think of thousands.

NOM, AFTAH, and the FRI come to mind.* And I know for a fact that Heterosexuals Organized for a Moral Environment is run by an agnostic. There's also a lot of large secular companies that support openly to anti-gay groups like Staples and Dell. I realise even in the groups I mentioned, there's a lot of overlap between people who are religious and people who fight against equal rights for gay people but correlation is not causation. And I'd be careful about making the mistake of thinking that only very religious people are capable of being bigots.

*At least as far as I could tell. I'm going by the criteria that they don't make reference to any religious affiliations, and their talking points aren't based in religious arguments.

smiley_cow wrote:

Salacious Schoolmate wrote:Hahahaha, yes that must be it. I certainly didn't ask that because I couldn't think of any secular anti-homosexual groups. No, I can think of thousands.

NOM, AFTAH, and the FRI come to mind.*

That's what you're calling secular, really? NOM has as it's leadership a whos-who of the Christian Right, AFTAH talks about "God Ordained sexuality" on it's About page. I mean really now. We've seen plenty of Christians try to hide in secular clothes before, using pseudo-science to do it ("Intelligent Design" for example). These guys are paper thin obviously doing the same thing.

If we removed everyone who had an objection to homosexuality that had at it's core a religious motivation, the anti-homosexual crowd would be roughly the size of the flat-earthers and faked moon landing conspiracy theorists, rather than a major constituency.

To act like anti-homosexual activism isn't primarily and almost exclusively a religiously motivated problem is flatly wrong.

Jest wrote:

smiley_cow wrote:

Salacious Schoolmate wrote:Hahahaha, yes that must be it. I certainly didn't ask that because I couldn't think of any secular anti-homosexual groups. No, I can think of thousands.

NOM, AFTAH, and the FRI come to mind.*

That's what you're calling secular, really? NOM has as it's leadership a whos-who of the Christian Right, AFTAH talks about "God Ordained sexuality" on it's About page. I mean really now. We've seen plenty of Christians try to hide in secular clothes before, using pseudo-science to do it ("Intelligent Design" for example). These guys are paper thin obviously doing the same thing.

If we removed everyone who had an objection to homosexuality that had at it's core a religious motivation, the anti-homosexual crowd would be roughly the size of the flat-earthers and faked moon landing conspiracy theorists, rather than a major constituency.

To act like anti-homosexual activism isn't primarily and almost exclusively a religiously motivated problem is flatly wrong.

Your selective quoting skill will serve you well in life.

Jest wrote: That's what you're calling secular, really? NOM has as it's leadership a whos-who of the Christian Right, AFTAH talks about "God Ordained sexuality" on it's About page. I mean really now. We've seen plenty of Christians try to hide in secular clothes before, using pseudo-science to do it ("Intelligent Design" for example). These guys are paper thin obviously doing the same thing.

If we removed everyone who had an objection to homosexuality that had at it's core a religious motivation, the anti-homosexual crowd would be roughly the size of the flat-earthers and faked moon landing conspiracy theorists, rather than a major constituency.

To act like anti-homosexual activism isn't primarily and almost exclusively a religiously motivated problem is flatly wrong.

All I'm saying is that not everyone who campaigns against gay rights is religious. I gave one very prominent example. I'm not saying that most of it isn't religiously based, even among secular groups, in fact I mentioned a large amount of overlap. I think the issue people took with the comic was that it seemed to imply that homophobia was only religiously motivated. And that's what I was trying to back up. Telling me that in fact, yes, most of it is religiously based, after I said exactly that, doesn't actually disagree with anything I said.

yeah but he said it much more rudely

smiley_cow wrote:

Jest wrote: That's what you're calling secular, really? NOM has as it's leadership a whos-who of the Christian Right, AFTAH talks about "God Ordained sexuality" on it's About page. I mean really now. We've seen plenty of Christians try to hide in secular clothes before, using pseudo-science to do it ("Intelligent Design" for example). These guys are paper thin obviously doing the same thing.

If we removed everyone who had an objection to homosexuality that had at it's core a religious motivation, the anti-homosexual crowd would be roughly the size of the flat-earthers and faked moon landing conspiracy theorists, rather than a major constituency.

To act like anti-homosexual activism isn't primarily and almost exclusively a religiously motivated problem is flatly wrong.

All I'm saying is that not everyone who campaigns against gay rights is religious. I gave one very prominent example. I'm not saying that most of it isn't religiously based, even among secular groups, in fact I mentioned a large amount of overlap. I think the issue people took with the comic was that it seemed to imply that homophobia was only religiously motivated. And that's what I was trying to back up. Telling me that in fact, yes, most of it is religiously based, after I said exactly that, doesn't actually disagree with anything I said.

Actually, I don't think this is true. Given how much more common atheist and agnostic homophobia is to what one might think (12% of those with "no religious identity" oppose gay marriage, which is not exactly a majority, but certainly much higher than anti-religious individuals would have us believe), I think that it might be more along the lines of this: People use religion to justify their homophobia.

It isn't uncommon for people to take religion and twist the meaning (or throw out other aspects of it) to justify beliefs with which their culture (culture being everything from parental interaction to events occuring on the world stage) endowed them. Heck, this is how Christian stances on monogamy happened.

So there you go.

Edit: Oh. Right. Source for opposition of gay marriage: http://www.gallup.com/poll/154529/Half- ... riage.aspx