LGB HistoryGay Heroes- Ric Grenell, the first gay U.S. cabinet official 🇺🇸 🏳️‍🌈

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[–]RedEyedWarriorGay | Male | 🇮🇪 Irish 🇮🇪 | Antineoliberal | Cocks are Compulsory 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (10 children)

I don’t care if another person is homophobic as long as he or she doesn’t bother me, or is willing to work with me on things that need to be worked on. There are elements of the Republican Party that blame woke culture and other problems in America on gay marriage, but those problems have existed for years prior to Massachusetts legalising gay marriage. Gay marriage didn’t cause 9/11, the invasion of Iraq or Libya, the Patriot Act (mass surveillance), the Great Recession, the border crisis or the rising costs of living. Closing down industries caused the fuel and baby formula crises. Drugs causes the homeless crisis. And transgender culture was caused by corporations wanting to make profits from medication. Also, the media and universities are to blame for woke culture.

Seriously, America should fix the media first.

Republicans definitely have problems. And even if they embrace gay rights, I still don’t like their foreign policy. And all they do is complain about the democrats without taking reasonable action. Ron DeSantis is one of the few exceptions. I must also warn that Republicans like the governors of Arkansas and South Dakota have grabbed their ankles for TRAs.

[–]PatsyStoneMaverique[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (9 children)

I don’t care if another person is homophobic as long as he or she doesn’t bother me, or is willing to work with me on things that need to be worked on.

I feel the same way. Republican homophobia is usually much easier to deal with than Democratic (meaning the party.) If a Republican is hostile to you it's usually either based on wholesale ignorance or on a belief that we're amoral or immoral in some way. If you can demonstrate that you value and respect them, that you have humanistic beliefs, they'll usually calm down and cooperate with you.

The gay marriage fight was vitriolic and brutal in the U.S. and it left a lot of open wounds that go unacknowledged. There is a tendency among people who were on the receiving end of the vitriol to fixate on it. Ireland is the only nation I'm aware that voted for gay marriage- in the U.S. it was decreed by the Supreme Court.

What will end up happening in the next few years is that court decision will be overturned and we'll have to campaign state by state all over again and actually persuade and compromise with other people this time.

I think in twenty years or so we'll end up with civil unions as the institution nationally and a few states which refer to civil unions as marriages.

[–]RedEyedWarriorGay | Male | 🇮🇪 Irish 🇮🇪 | Antineoliberal | Cocks are Compulsory 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (8 children)

I get the open wound thing. And yes, America's gay marriage fight was brutal. 30 states banned gay marriage in their constitutions, 20 of which banned civil unions as well. The fact that civil unions were banned was definitely a sore spot. The fight also lasted 20 years, which doesn't help.

In Ireland, we've had a gay marriage debate between 2003 and 2015. But it was mostly peaceful until late 2014, in the runup to the referendum. Civil unions were first proposed in 2004 and the government took 6 years to prepare them before legalising them, so it was only a matter of when they'd be legalised, which was 2011. By the time we got civil unions, more than 2/3 of Irish people backed gay marriage in polls. So the government took a chance and held the referendum 4 years later to maximise chances of it passing. Which it did, but it wasn't an easy 6 months before the referendum. But even then, we weren't called sinners or paedophiles except by a few idiots. It was mostly a debate over religious freedom and whether or not gay couples are as good at raising children as straight couples.

You see, here, we took our time. We started with civil unions, and waited 2 more years before we seriously debated gay marriage. I think American gay rights activists should have focused on getting civil unions in many states as possible before moving on to gay marriage. It would have taken much longer, but the journey would not have been nearly as painful.

[–]PatsyStoneMaverique[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (7 children)

Ireland and the U.S. have a lot of profound differences, the different approach to social progress being probably the biggest (at least that I know about.) Irish people seem to appreciate a give-and-take more and to be able to reach consensus naturally without as much formal debate. We have to treat everything like a philosophical proposition and we aren't necessarily good at doing that, either 😬

I do need to point out, when I said vitriolic and brutal I meant to pro-gay marriage side. It started within the community and moved outward toward political enemies. I was a teenager heading into college during the gay marriage campaign and, although I was a few years late to have experienced the gay community before, I watched it collapse. I had originally written a massive multi-paragraph explanation of the social changes I witnessed, but I think that's a unnecessary level of detail so I'll spare you 😉

The gay marriage campaign brought with it the isolation and lack of support services that we still see for same-sex attracted people in the U.S. This is another profound difference between you and us- Ireland has government social services that are much more detailed and are easier to access, whereas the onus is on us to take care of our own here. We don't do that.

Fundamentally, there is so much bad blood and so many burned bridges due to the gay marriage fight in the U.S. that once Obergefell is overturned, most of the country isn't going to care.

It also needs to be said that most of the arguments against gender identity that we've rehearsed here and in other places for the past decade can be persuasively used against gay marriage as a concept. Conservatives can and will do this.

I'm planning on campaigning for civil unions because I think even in the most benighted parts of the country you can get it legislated. Live by court cases, die by court cases. You'll never have security or stability until you have some sort of consensus, even from people who hate you, that your relationship deserves institutional support.

Gay Republicans are going to be the ones who actually address this problem and find solutions. I'm not looking for leadership from the same people who got us into this mess to begin with.

[–]RedEyedWarriorGay | Male | 🇮🇪 Irish 🇮🇪 | Antineoliberal | Cocks are Compulsory 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

Oh yeah, the pro-gay marriage side has definitely done a lot of damage in America. In Ireland too, to a lesser extent. During the referendum, there were gay marriage supporters who called opponents and people who were on the fence homophobic, and some of these supporters even took down signs that they did not like. This angered a lot of reasonable gay marriage supporters, who threatened to vote no if that behaviour continued, so campaigners of the yes side began disavowing the charlatans. RTÉ actively took a neutral stance, even criticising yes activists for the conduct of the yes side. This is RTÉ, a neoliberal propaganda organisation backed by our corrupt government - even they were enforcing a balance in the debate.

Gay marriage will remain legal in Ireland forever, unless the government withdraws from the institution of marriage, which I’m not against. In such a scenario, you would not need marriage, only wills and power of attorney documents. The churches would still hold weddings, but they’d have no legal effect. Part of me thinks that marriage should just be a religious thing, while the other part thinks that as long as the government is involved in it, it should be open to gay couples. But I think living together and holding yourselves out as a couple should be enough. Or at least to sign a document that declares the couple as a legal entity. Laws against rape, age of consent laws and laws against duress should be enough to ensure that no one is being abused.

In America, there should be a contingency plan in case Obergefell is overturned. Personally, given that marriage is devolved to the states in America, it should have been decided by the states. Almost all Americans now would support civil unions at the very least. Hopefully if Obergefell is overturned, most states would choose to keep gay marriage legal.

I am a minarchist. Which means I believe in a small government with limited government interference. But for that to succeed, you need tightly-knit communities. We don’t have those anymore. But I would like to achieve that by building communities.

[–]PatsyStoneMaverique[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

During the referendum, there were gay marriage supporters who called opponents and people who were on the fence homophobic, and some of these supporters even took down signs that they did not like. This angered a lot of reasonable gay marriage supporters, who threatened to vote no if that behaviour continued, so campaigners of the yes side began disavowing the charlatans.

This was so wise, it's likely why they won. To put it mildly, this is not the way our version of the Yes campaign went about things. They had a very totalitarian, puritanical witch-hunt approach which has now taken over the entire left. Lol at RTÉ feigning neutrality. Our paltry version of that is NPR and it's like listening to psychological programming at a woke reeducation camp.

In America, there should be a contingency plan in case Obergefell is overturned. Personally, given that marriage is devolved to the states in America, it should have been decided by the states. Almost all Americans now would support civil unions at the very least. Hopefully if Obergefell is overturned, most states would choose to keep gay marriage legal.

As these things go, it's a process that takes several years because it involves court cases that have to make it through a couple of rounds of trials before they reach the national court (the Supreme Court.) The current court as it stands will overturn Obergefell and a couple of Justices have made public statements that they intend to. The majority opinion on Obergefell argued that couples have a "right to dignity" guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. That's difficult to prove.

Honestly, after ten years of arguing against gender theory, gay marriage as a concept is going to be too vulnerable to the same counterarguments that gender identity is. It is guaranteed to lose vote after vote.

Civil unions fulfill the same functional purpose without all of the philosophical baggage. You can get homophobic people to vote for civil unions out of tolerance or a desire to increase economic stability. I think at some point someone will take some political leadership and start mounting campaigns for civil unions in the U.S.. Probably beginning in the interior of the country. I'm a little nobody but I've certainly volunteered in elections many times and I intend to show up for these campaigns with bells on. It's the future.

[–]RedEyedWarriorGay | Male | 🇮🇪 Irish 🇮🇪 | Antineoliberal | Cocks are Compulsory 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Your media apparatus is as bad as ours. At least you have multiple news outlets, whereas here we just have RTÉ and Virgin Media.

Civil unions are certainly preferable to nothing. And even nothing is preferable to the sodomy laws being reinstated. Which hopefully is unlikely.

[–]PatsyStoneMaverique[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

I think we'll have to weather some attempts at reinstating sodomy laws, but I'm confident they aren't going to be successful. It's going to be very ugly for a while.

I've never heard of Virgin Media, I guess I should feel lucky. The U.S. has absolutely awful media.

[–]RedEyedWarriorGay | Male | 🇮🇪 Irish 🇮🇪 | Antineoliberal | Cocks are Compulsory 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Virgin Media are not as bad as RTÉ. That’s all I can say.

I hope the sodomy laws don’t come back. If they do, I urge gay people in those affected states to buy guns.

[–]PatsyStoneMaverique[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Lol they probably already have them, given which states we're talking about. There isn't nearly the appetite to reinstate sodomy laws that there is to get rid of gay marriage. Most gay marriage opponents see it as an infringement of their rights or a risk to their rights, whereas gay sex is seen by these same people as something private that doesn't involve them.

There are obviously Christians who would support it, but my guess would be not even a third of the amount of people who would vote against gay marriage.