On my Facebook feed, I see a lot of my friends have switched their profile pics to this symbol:



Cool. I am not too concerned with gay marriage. If they want to get married it’s fine with me. They’ll keep divorce lawyers busier. I just hope the Supreme Court doesn’t make a decision that will have unintended consequences that are not contemplated currently. Lawyers get really entrepreneurial and take law intended for use in one place and apply it in a different place.

What concerns me is the tenor and framing of the debate. Most of my acquaintances will be out and proud for gay marriage-yet when it comes to discrimination in other forms silent. Somehow if I say I am for gay marriage but don’t want the SOTU to decide, I am a bigot.

I also find that when its a governmental body or NGO that discriminates, somehow that’s okay. But if a corporation has even an inkling of discrimination-the world is on the road to Armageddon and we need to take all their profit away.

Since so many believe in treating people equally, do they support repeal of things like:

1. Affirmative action since it discriminates against whites

2. Gender preferences since it discriminates against men

3. (Add your own in the comments)

Let’s level the playing field and have a merit based society. I am all for it. As my daughter said, at her college they not only change standards and give aid based on skin color and gender, but they enroll minorities in a separate orientation program. This automatically isolates them from the rest of the class and puts up an artificial barrier.

There are plenty of instances codified in law where it’s perfectly legal to discriminate-generally against white males.

I am all for equality and human rights. My lifetime experience is that “equality and human rights” mean preferential treatment for some at the expense of others.

UPDATE

Found this article and thought it very pertinent. Here is how it ends.

Chai Feldblum is a thoughtful and honest proponent of same-sex marriage who serves on President Obama’s EEOC and was, before that, a professor at Georgetown Law School. Here’s Feldblum explaining the inevitable conflict between gay marriage and religious freedom to Maggie Gallagher a few years ago. This is long, but important: “Gay rights supporters often try to present these laws as purely neutral and having no moral implications. But not all discrimination is bad,” Feldblum points out. In employment law, for instance, “we allow discrimination against people who sexually abuse children, and we don’t say ‘the only question is can they type’ even if they can type really quickly.” To get to the point where the law prohibits discrimination, Feldblum says, “there have to be two things: one, a majority of the society believing the characteristic on which the person is being discriminated against is not morally problematic, and, two, enough of a sense of outrage to push past the normal American contract-based approach, where the government doesn’t tell you what you can do. There has to be enough outrage to bypass that basic default mode in America. Unlike some of my compatriots in the gay rights movement, I think we advance the cause of gay equality if we make clear there are moral assessments that underlie antidiscrimination laws.” But there was a second reason Feldblum made time for this particular conference. She was raised an Orthodox Jew. She wanted to demonstrate respect for religious people and their concerns, to show that the gay community is not monolithic in this regard. “It seemed to me the height of disingenuousness, absurdity, and indeed disrespect to tell someone it is okay to ‘be’ gay, but not necessarily okay to engage in gay sex. What do they think being gay means?” she writes in her Becket paper. “I have the same reaction to courts and legislatures that blithely assume a religious person can easily disengage her religious belief and self-identity from her religious practice and religious behavior. What do they think being religious means?” To Feldblum the emerging conflicts between free exercise of religion and sexual liberty are real: “When we pass a law that says you may not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, we are burdening those who have an alternative moral assessment of gay men and lesbians.” Most of the time, the need to protect the dignity of gay people will justify burdening religious belief, she argues. But that does not make it right to pretend these burdens do not exist in the first place, or that the religious people the law is burdening don’t matter. “You have to stop, think, and justify the burden each time,” says Feldblum. She pauses. “Respect doesn’t mean that the religious person should prevail in the right to discriminate—it just means demonstrating a respectful awareness of the religious position.” Feldblum believes this sincerely and with passion, and clearly (as she reminds me) against the vast majority of opinion of her own community. And yet when push comes to shove, when religious liberty and sexual liberty conflict, she admits, “I’m having a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.” That—right there—is the core of the same-sex marriage debate. And it’s where we’re going to end up eventually, regardless of what the Supreme Court rules.

And John Kass wrote a nice column as well.