<p>No, they are not the same. African Americans themselves don’t go against religious values. However, the joining of two females as a married couple severely does.</p>
<p>Back in the day, many justified discrimination against African Americans on the basis of religious values and their interpretation of the bible.</p>
<p>[US</a> church bans interracial couples - Telegraph](<a href=“US church bans interracial couples”>US church bans interracial couples)</p>
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<p><a href=“http://www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2004_fall/forde.htm11[/url]”>http://www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2004_fall/forde.htm11</a></p>
<p>I highly recommend the recent HBO documentary : [HBO</a> Documentary Films: The Loving Story Trailer - YouTube](<a href=“HBO Documentary Films: The Loving Story - Trailer (HBO Docs) - YouTube”>HBO Documentary Films: The Loving Story - Trailer (HBO Docs) - YouTube)</p>
<p>Plenty of godless bigots supported slavery, Jim Crow and racial segregation in general.</p>
<p>I could literally fill pages of religious justification for slavery, many written or spoken publicly by ministers and preachers, etc. </p>
<p>We ALWAYS draw lines and defend them with arguments that reach toward sacred judgement. We rarely go back to realize that we were completely wrong and almost never then realize our arguments aren’t actually sacred judgements but rather our guesstimations and conclusions. </p>
<p>I was in Salem, MA last week. Only 1 of the witch trial judges publicly recanted and for that he was abused. The trial and execution of people, almost all women, mostly single and older, for witchcraft is so obviously idiotic we can barely comprehend that otherwise rational and respected people would do this, would believe this … but they did. </p>
<p>Interracial marriage. Gay marriage.</p>
<p>saye why should I be required to follow your religious values or you to follow mine?</p>
<p>LakeWashington: Of course there were! And many religious people opposed it. That’s because there are different interpretations of the same religious books and principles. MLK and the KKK didn’t interpret the bible the same way.</p>
<p>But making something into a public policy because of religious principles is problematic because not everyone interprets those in the same way, or takes all of them as literally. </p>
<p>For example: Leviticus 18:22 talks about homosexuality as an abomination, but Leviticus 11:10 talks about eating seafood as an abomination as well, and Leviticus 19:28 can be interpreted as forbidding tatoos and piercings. And I could go on and on.</p>
<p>Why should Leviticus 18:22 be a religious principle in which we base public policies, but not other principles mentioned in the same book in the bible? Why do we interpret one literally, but not the others? Should we forbid seafood in the country?</p>
<p>Because there is freedom of and from religion in the Constitution (and no national religion), not everyone has the same religious principles or even interprets the same religious text in the same way (as I said before the KKK and MLK both used the bible as a justification for their actions) we do not use religious principles as the basis of public policies and laws.</p>
<p>Leviticus is the perfect example.</p>
<p>If you read without context, it says no sex between men; it’s silent about sex between women. That’s one way to read and heaven knows I see a lot of that but it’s not the normal way we read because we normally see things in context.</p>
<p>The context is this prohibition is the middle of 3. The other two are specifically Canaanite worship rituals: child sacrifice and sex with animals. Hard to believe but we absolutely know that child sacrifice was real in that part of the world. We even have large scale evidence of child sacrifice across social levels in Carthage, which puts new light on the Roman disgust for Carthage.</p>
<p>In context, the prohibition of male-male sex is just as easily interpreted as “no sex between men as part of the worship of God”. That says nothing about consensual sex. This interpretation follows along not only with the trend of Israelite rejection of Canaanite worship practices but also with the story of Sodom. Remember that? They come to the city and the men of the town try to rape new comers. That isn’t consensual male-male sex but rape. Note that there never really appears anywhere a prohibition against raping women. </p>
<p>And the story of Sodom follows from the conception of creation. I can’t remember the verse but it says “the sons of God knew the daughters of the earth” or something like that. The imagery is pretty basic: a man can have children with many women and thus can bring forth life like God does from many sources. This is represented generally in the long lists of who begat whom because each named male is the bringer forth of life in that generation. (Yes, this is ridiculously sexist. Men wrote this.)</p>
<p>So if you grow up in a tradition which takes the Leviticus prohibition out of context and which applies cultural hatreds, then you believe God wants this result. If you have a brain to think about it, maybe you decide the meaning is different. </p>
<p>I note as well that John Boswell and others have located much of the animus against homosexuality to the Church’s efforts to reform its own priesthood in the Middle Ages. So in essence, we hear today the echoes of the Church trying to stamp out what it now hides.</p>
<p>Some Biblical text is more ambiguous than we want to believe and some is more bluntly misinterpreted. An example of the latter is the prohibition against adultery is nearly always interpreted wrongly if you know history. It meant sex with a married woman, not sex outside of marriage. Sex with a married woman could result in a child not of the husband and that could mix up inheritance rights and could cause violence. They were addressing the “who’s the daddy” problem. </p>
<p>The Bible has some blunt references to sex outside marriage as not only being ok but as good. The most famous may be Tamar. She dresses as a prostitute and has sex with Judah (I think). He’s married. He isn’t living up to his obligations after the death of her husband. Neither is castigated. So if you read the Bible with the literalness that so many want, married men can have sex with unmarried women and it isn’t adultery.</p>
<p>Here is a terrific example of belief that I hope we would find abhorrent today. This is Charles Trevelyan, the British administrator of Irish famine “relief”. I put the word in quotes because the reality is Trevelyan caused a holocaust.*</p>
<p>Here in a letter to Lord Monteagle, he says: “The deep and inveterate root of social evil remains, and I hope I am not guilty of irreverence in thinking that this being altogether beyond the power of man, the cure has been applied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence in a manner as unexpected and unthought of as it is likely to be effectual.” He is speaking of mass death and mass eviction so the landlords - mostly Protestant - could convert their property into grazing land, what was then called “high farming”.</p>
<p>Do people believe that now? Do they believe Providence wants mass starvation because the deaths will enable more economic farming?</p>
<p>Trevelyan had earlier eliminated grain imports saying “Whatever may be done hereafter these things should be stopped now, or you run the risk of paralysing all private enterprise and having this country on you for an indefinite number of years.” He means, to be clear, that public relief makes people dependent. While we hear that today, when Trevelyan wrote that it meant a death sentence for hundreds of thousands. In those days, the arguments about laissez-faire extended to letting people starve. </p>
<p>So when people tell me their belief means we must do such and such, I think of beliefs like this which have destroyed vast multitudes through a cruelty that justifies itself as the Will of God.</p>
<p>*If you read the wiki article on him, you get a white-washed version.</p>
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<p>Oddly enough…I tried passing this interpretation along to Mrs. Wolverine and she suggested I find a different Bible. Go figure!! :)</p>
<p>I think the reason some people are so opposed to same-sex marriage is that they somehow see it as a threat to “traditional family values”. Hopefully at least some of them will come to the realization that you don’t have to be a “traditional family” to have “traditional family values”.</p>
<p>Respect for the institution of marriage in this country has reached a pathetic level. People get married on a whim without ever getting to know each other, and one or two arguments later it’s off to the divorce lawyers. If the marriage lasts longer than the wedding reception they feel like they’ve actually accomplished something.</p>
<p>If two people, same-sex or opposite sex, are willing to make an actual commitment to each other I’m all for it. If they choose to have children and commit to being responsible parents and raising their children to be responsible adults…who cares if it’s Mom and Dad, or Mom and Mom, or Dad and Dad? </p>
<p>I hope that as same-sex marriages are recognized in more and more states we see a movement back towards strengthening the family unit…whomever that unit is made up of. If that doesn’t fit someone’s Rockwellian mental painting of the traditional family…time to find a new canvas and brush.</p>
<p>Lol, people arguing about religion.</p>
<p><em>grabs popcorn</em></p>
<p>I’m not sure the institution of marriage has declined as much as we believe, meaning we look at a relatively short period and extrapolate as though that is normal. If you go back in time, both in the US and in other countries where records exist, marriage with a religious or civil ceremony is rarer. People lived together. They established “common law” marriages. If you read Jane Austen, you know people would cross into Scotland and proclaim themselves married.</p>
<p>I’ve read histories that looked at English county records which find relatively few actual marriage ceremonies, with those mostly involving 2nd marriages and wealthier people where property and inheritance was an issue. </p>
<p>I’m not sure about the statistics any more - and I don’t trust the numbers anyway - but my guess is marriage had a heyday lasting substantially less than 100 years. In a humorous vein, remember Eliza Doolittle’s father Alfie gets married after he comes into money (as a moral philosopher!). So he marries Eliza’s mother.</p>
<p>One can argue marriage as we think of it became more popular as we became wealthier but that definition was never fixed as we want to believe.</p>
<p>Say…Lergnom, have you heard of this [url=<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/faq.php?faq=vb_faq#faq_new_faq_item]text[/url”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/faq.php?faq=vb_faq#faq_new_faq_item]text[/url</a>]?</p>
<p>Am I doing something wrong?</p>
<p>Niquii, given that the moderators have continued to allow this topic to be discussed to the extent of 436 comments – including, horror of horrors, allowing people to say that they’re in favor of same-sex marriage – and given that nothing Lergnom has said consists of a flame, insult, or personal attack, I am not sure what you’re talking about. If you have a problem with anything Lergnom says, why don’t you just report it? And while you’re at it, please make sure to report saye329’s post no. 421, which is far more insulting than anything Lergnom has said, given its erroneous factual assumption, in stating that same-sex marriage goes against “religious values,” that every religion opposes same-sex marriage, thereby erasing all the religions that favor it.</p>
<p>I guess some political threads are allowed…I wonder how long one would last if I started it.</p>