A weird, strange, sad argument against gay marriage

shotgun-wedding

A different group has sided against gay marriage before the Supreme Court: gay men who are married to women. This is not at all unusual, that homosexual individuals enter into a marriage contract with heterosexuals, and in fact it’s actually what the right-wing wants to promote, by compelling people to only have heterosexual relationships. As is always the case when one group wants to deny rights to another, though, their arguments are sad and petty. The gay-men-married-to-straight-women have to actually argue that allowing gay-men-married-to-gay-men would somehow mean their relationships would be excluded. It always boils down to some group claiming that removing a restriction from another group is exactly the same as adding constraints on them.

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There go my plans for creating an atheist thinky-tank

brain-jar

I had it all planned out. I was gonna get a spiffy name — how about the “Establishment Atheist Establishment”? — and a website, and then I was going to sign up my cat as the first member, because she’s a cat and an atheist and everyone loves cats and she’s evil, and then I was going to put my zebrafish on the roster to pad it out, and then with all those credentials established, I was going to lecture everyone else from my lofty perch on how to be a True Atheist™…

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You cannot protect a forest if you don’t give a damn about the trees

monarchf

Jonathan Franzen pissed off a lot of environmentalists by criticizing the strategy of the environmentalist movement, which is committing wholesale to climate change remediation at the expense of biodiversity. I think fighting to get CO2 emissions down is essential, but the problem is that bit about “at the expense of”. How we achieve a sustainable climate is as important as getting there.

He starts off with an example that is close to home.

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Creationists ♥ Hitler

I thought Expelled was the king of creationist Godwins, but a new challenger has stepped forward: a biography titled “Kent Hovind : An Atheist’s Worst Nightmare”. The trailer has to bee seen to be believed: it’s all Hitler, interleaved with shots of Obama (what?) and George W. Bush (double what?). HE EXPOSED THE LIES OF ATHEISM AND EVOLUTION. HE IS IN PRISON FOR PREACHING THE TRUTH. HE OBEYED ALL LAWS AND THEY STILL THROUGH [sic] HIM IN PRISON. Shrill music. Hitler Hitler Hitler.

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