Employment IS a special right. I cannot be employed as a nurse without a license, doctors cannot operate without a license. Registered sex offenders or persons with a DFS record cannot work in day care.
But apparently homosexuals want SPECIAL rights--the right to potentially infect a helpless patient, the right to change diapers or give advice to a helpless child, the right to force churches to say they aren't sinners, and the right to compel churches who do to marry them and employ them.
Question for you: Is the Bible (pick a version, any mainstream translation) hate speech?
Judith: This may surprise you but I have no objection to what you have written. My interest has been to strip away all the usual smoke which this issue generates.
If you have a moment, please go back to the first postings in this debate. Principled arguments were raised. Probing questions were asked. But, as I suggested early-on, the REAL objection to same-sex marriage has little or nothing to do with those principles or those arguments.
Instead, in the last 30-50 messages we see the TRUE objection. To your credit, you have not euphemized the issue or tried to weasle your way out of the clear meaning of your words. When I pointed out that some messages in this thread were characterizing gays in terms calculated to evoke fear, disgust, and revulsion, you implicitly agreed and called me a "sissy" since I initiated this discussion.
In short, the underlying dynamic here is now obvious. You and several others here want EVERYONE to view gays with the same disgust and revulsion that YOU do. You want EVERYONE to deny gays employment. You want EVERYONE to perceive gays as diseased, sex-craved, perverted animals who have utterly no redeeming qualities and are totally un-deserving of respect or protection or rights.
So let's drop the pretense that we are having a calm, respectful, and rational discussion about Constitutional principles or about public policy alternatives. When you demonize your opponents and attribute the worst possible motivations to them (such as "the right to potentially infect a helpless patient") -- you are no longer fooling anyone into believing you are motivated by religious values.
There ARE serious questions that can and should be raised about acceptance of same-sex marriages. Some of the messages in this thread actually tried to address those concerns, and I respect that. I suspect that 50 years from now gay marriage will be commonplace in most Western nations and nobody will even remember what all the fuss was about.