Texas A&M Student Senate Passes Discriminatory LGBT Bill

Ok. You have your belief as to what a marriage should be and i respect that you have a heartfelt belief. I disagree entirely with such a narrow definition of marriage.

The problem is that no state anywhere in the country limits marriage to the definition of a covenant marriage. You can register for a covenant marriage in Louisiana, but that's about it. Most Christian denominations do not limit marriage to the rules of a covenant marriage.

The other issue comes from the fact that we do not live in a theocracy. I just do not see how the prohibition on same sex marriage can be squared with the free exercise clause of the 1st Amendment if a recognized religious order decided to allow them.

 

Please excuse me, I was not referring to the actual covenant marriages that are allowed in Louisiana but referring to marriage as a covenant.

 

Then what you are arguing for has not been the law roughly ever and is not the practice of the vast majority of Christian denominations.

You have your moral beliefs, and I respect that. However, arguing that this should be the law is wanting to force your beliefs on other, including most Christians, by governmental fiat.

 

We've seen before that the whole 'separate but equal' thing doesn't really work. Separate is not equal. Your church shouldn't have to marry homosexual couples, but preventing others from marrying homosexual couples isn't right.

 

I think that preventing a church from marrying same sex couples violates the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.

 

My only problem with this bill is that it targets a particular club. I don't think students should have to pay "activities fees" to support activities that they are not participating in.

 

When did I say I want it to be the law? The government is going to do what they will without my help. I am stating my personal beliefs.

 

It's not a club that it is targeting, but a school resource that many of the students will never need or use. They are asking for the right to opt out of paying for the resource with the student fee because they will never use the service. All students will not be opted out. Any student that wants to continue to support the resource still can.

 

You asked for the differences between marriage and civil unions. I provided you a detailed list of differences which also explain while same sex couples don't want to settle for civil unions.

So now understanding this, do you want to deny same sex couples equal rights?

 

they took our jerbs!

 

LOL. Also funny that he claimed people would parse his words yet he then attempted to parse the words of that article.

But to me it is a simple question... either equal rights are important important as Americans or not. Everything else is simply noise to either justify or excuse why equal rights for everyone are not important.

 

Does it give the option for an individual, or do all fees no longer support the activity. At a public school it shouldn't matter, at a private school I would have no problem with it.

 

it got vetoed . No bill. But it did include all fees (which makes it impossible to justify and is unsustainable).

It would have been an embarrasment if it actually passed. I will quote the email we got yesterday from the president, Loftin:

 

It is immoral to deny people the right to be with those they love and to express that love the way they choose.

Such an act - to deny such people - is beyond immoral actually. It is cruel, it is barbaric. It is controlling and wicked. And if there is a god, it would make him or her shake her head in disgust.

As for what is natural and not natural, there have been homosexuals on this planet since the beginning of man, monkey, and mammal based on the historical record. It's only recently with the advent of religion that human kind has started to oppress these individuals. You know what's unnatural? Stuffing your religious beliefs down other people's throats.

This is America baby, land of the free. If you don't like it, and want to live some place where homosexuals are treated like criminals, you should move to Iran, Saudia Arabia, or Nigeria - where they agree with your backwards views.

 

Greek Astronomers 500 years before Christ was born were claiming a spherical Earth. Of course as has been pointed out to you already, a circle isn't a sphere. Anyone with eyes can look at the sun and moon and see their shapes looks like circles.

Flat Earth Myth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth

The myth of the Flat Earth is the modern misconception that the prevailing cosmological view during the Middle Ages saw the Earth as flat, instead of spherical.[1] The idea seems to have been widespread during the first half of the 20th century.

During the early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. From at least the 14th century, belief in a flat earth among the educated was nearly nonexistent, in spite of fanciful depictions in art, such as the exterior of Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, in which a disc-shaped earth is shown floating inside a transparent sphere.[3]

According to Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of 'flat earth darkness' among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology."[4] Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference".[5]

Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat earth error flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over evolution.[6] Russell claims "with extraordinary [sic] few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat", and credits histories by John William Draper, Andrew Dickson White, and Washington Irving for popularizing the flat-earth myth.[7]

 

Edited

 

Then there's Galileo of course. Apparently the Earth was the center of the universe according to the bible and claiming otherwise was heresy. Did the bible change somehow?

Galileo was found guilty, and the sentence of the Inquisition, issued on 22 June 1633,[37] was in three essential parts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair

Galileo was found "vehemently suspect of heresy," namely of having held the opinions that the Sun lies motionless at the center of the universe, that the Earth is not at its centre and moves, and that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture. He was required to "abjure, curse, and detest" those opinions.[38]

He was sentenced to formal imprisonment at the pleasure of the Inquisition.[39] On the following day this was commuted to house arrest, which he remained under for the rest of his life.

His offending Dialogue was banned; and in an action not announced at the trial, publication of any of his works was forbidden, including any he might write in the future.[40]

 

Says the dude actively opposing equality for gays...

 

Actively opposing... Nice one.

 

Note, the Biblical Hebrew word for “circle” (חוג—chuwg) can also mean “round” or “sphere.”

If you are overlooking the ocean, the horizon appears as a circle. This circle on the horizon is described in Job 26:10. The circle on the face of the waters is one of the proofs that the Greeks used for a spherical earth. Yet here it is recorded in Job, ages before the Greeks discovered it. Job 26:10 indicates that where light terminates, darkness begins. This suggests day and night on a spherical globe.

The Hebrew record is the oldest, because Job is one of the oldest books in the Bible. Historians generally [wrongly] credit the Greeks with being the first to suggest a spherical earth. In the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras suggested a spherical earth.