DOMA: Obama invokes incest and people marrying children

"Internet warrior?" Whatever, dude. There's not a lick of difference between me online and offline. As for what I would do as a teacher, it's a moot point. I wouldn't be a teacher because keeping my job would require a politics in which I refuse to participate. As my own boss, I am free to behave in any way I choose and I choose to behave according to my deeply held beliefs. (Insinuating that I don't, that you "live up to" offline standards and I somehow don't is insulting and stupid.) You don't seem to have any deeply held beliefs -- only soft and friendly ones, regardless of the nature of your opponent -- so I don't expect you to understand that.

 

Batman Jones;

I am still curious about how you would deal with a situation where you were dealing with a child or a young adult where your values were in conflict with the values of the parents.

I don't want to badger or get you into a rhetorical trap but I think you will find that when faced with an actual situation you may think differently.

Perhaps you are right that you are the radical and I am the polite one. Some might consider that a weakness, I do not and think you get more accomplished when you treat someone you don't agree with with the same respect you would want afforded to you.

 

I am going to stop here as I can see my posts are only having the opposite affect of what I am intending.

You are judging my beliefs as you see them here and I hope sometime to meet you personally as that might be a better way to determine who I am. You might not agree with my approach but I suspect my beliefs are as strongly held as your own.

[edit]Geez. I just reread that and I might be unintentionally shooting myself in the foot again. I don't mean to meet you in somesort of face off throwdown but in a get together where you can assess me in real ife and vice versa. [/edit]

 

Judoka:

You make a lot of assumptions about me, mostly incorrect. I also treat people with the respect I expect to receive in return. That respect is largely manifested by my speaking to them honestly and directly. I expect the same back and am disappointed when people soften their positions in the name of politeness in discussions with me. I think politeness is often dishonest and is actually therefore disrespectful.

As for the what-if you're trying to get me to address, you seem to be asking what I would do if I found myself in a situation where I was not free to speak my mind. I've already answered by saying I wouldn't put myself in such a situation, but I'll answer it differently for you since you didn't like my first answer: I would behave exactly as I am here and I would likely be fired. This would, of course, be fine with me since I never would have wanted or taken such a job in the first place.

But the funny thing is that here you are not in such a situation. You are free to say anything you like, within the rules of the board, and you still choose to favor politeness over direct honesty. Your defense is that you will wait until the parents aren't around and then try to subvert their teachings. I prefer to be up front about it and I expect the same in return. And I do so not to be rude but, in fact, to be respectful -- of the parents or anyone else with whom I disagree. I don't wait to speak my mind and I don't go behind people's backs. What you see is what you get.

 

In response to your last one, I'd be very glad to meet you in person.

I think we'd hit it off and find it easier to understand each other in the future. I just don't like being lectured on what's "appropriate" and what isn't.

 

r****ded? Nice job. The history and whether or not it's happened before has nothing to do with whether something is right or wrong. There was a time when the U.S. govt. never ever kept it's word in treaties with American Indian tribes. That doesn't make it ok. Change can be a good thing.

Sorry but you are the one that needs to learn the law. The govt. is not always allowed to regulate who can enter contracts. I know enough of the law to know that the govt. can't regulate contracts that forbid people from entering contracts dealing with race.

Not really. You claimed the govt. could regulate whatever contracts they wanted the way they wanted. I pointed out situations that made your claim absolutely incorrect.

I've shown you evidence that they can't. You show me evidence that they can, or stop trying to claim apples and oranges.

It goes beyond that. Chinese restaurants can hire only Chinese waiters if they can show that it's part of their restaurant.

That being said there are still times when the govt. is prevented from regulating contracts.

In the case of gay marriage, there is no physical fitness required that would endanger anyone, or a business being run that would suffer. You want to talk about apples and oranges... the cases where discriminating is allowed and gay marriage. That's apples and oranges.

 

How about calling them r****ded?

As Martin Luther King Jr. once paraphrased. Any law that is unjust is no law at all.

Defense of Marriage act is unjust, and thus no law at all.

 

As I stated I don't know you personally and the only way I can base my responses is off of what you post. The same as you can base yours off of mine. As I say I try to be the same person offline as I am online and am possibly nicer online than I am off. This is an imperfect media at best which is one of the reasons why I try to be careful with assumptions about people's lives but as you can see I don't do that all that well a lot of time.

As far as considering politeness being dishonest and disrespectful I fully believe we can debate issues and have strong opinions while still being polite. As I said before I hold my positions as strongly as you do but my approach is different and I have certain lines I have set up for myself. I believe if you peruse my record on Clutchfans on a variety of issues you will see that I have held some pretty strong positions.

That is a valid position and one that is philosophically consistent but speaking for myself I feel that my role as a member of society is to work on advancing society in the direction that I believe is the best. To do that does mean working with other people, understanding other belief systems and respecting those belief systems (without destroying your own.)

I've been in the position of being the rhetorical bomb thrower and in my younger days my approach was more radical and have taken it to the streets both literally and figuratively. There is a need for that sort of radicalism but not as my primary approach to things.

I am free to say anything I like within the rules but I don't consider this just a place to spout off but an actual community that I enjoy company of. I learned the hard way a few years ago on a forum, where I was a founding member of, what happens when you lose your cool and personalize things. I had huge blowup with someone at the time of the first battle of Fallujah and it poisoned the environment of the forum so much that I banned myself and that forum went debunk shortly afterwords. I liked the people in that forum and still keep in touch with some of them in other ways but after that I realized that it wasn't worth it to go after people like that.

So my feeling is that yes I could say anything I want to, as long as Clutch allows, but I also enjoy the camraderie of CF.net and would prefer to treat the people on CF.net civilly as I would offline. That doesn't mean that I don't hold my positions as posters who have met me offline will attest.

As far as getting back to the discussion regarding parents with views that I disagree with. As I stated before I don't feel I am going behind their backs, since I will tell the parents directly that I don't agree with their positions, but respecting their role as parents and my role as teacher, or some other member of society. I will state my disagreement but its not my place to raise someone elses children.

As you say different strokes for different folks and my approach is one based upon my own experience.

 

Thank you and I would definatly be want to meet you in person. I will let you know the next time I am down in Houston and please feel to drop me a line if you ever find your self in the Great White North.

I apologize for lecturing you. One of my biggest problems is my pedantic style of posting that turns off a lot of people. I disagree with your approach and that is my opinion, as you note we can express our opinions within the bounds of what Clutch allows us. I felt your statement to LL was over the line, you don't agree but I hold no ill will and am sorry for dragging this out.

 

The fact that it is so misleading tells you something about the quality of articles you are reading, and choosing to post.

 

we all draw the line somewhere. that line is always arbitrary and always compromised.

 

Sishir, why apologize? You should stand by your opinion, if that's what you believe. Apologizing for "standing up for politeness" has to possess more than a bit of irony, but being polite is a virtue. Sometimes, being polite just doesn't cut it.

Parents need some pretty wide latitude in dealing with their kids and they have quite a lot of it in this country. Landlord Landry is a bigot. That's as clear as the sky in Austin this morning. He's obviously teaching his children bigotry, which is appalling, but his "right" as their parent. We can only hope that they shrug it off as they grow older, as children are apt to do. I have a couple myself, with one starting his university career in the Fall, and so far, at least, you couldn't ask for two kids that are more open minded than ours. Yes, that's something my wife and I have tried to teach them, as my parents taught my sister and I while growing up, but what sticks is ultimately up to the individual.

I've posted here before equating racism and homophobia, just as I've posted before that Americans in the future will look back in dismay at the bigotry so very well displayed by Landlord Landry. There is nothing "radical" or "shocking" about giving equal rights to all Americans. What is shocking is that it is still a fight that needs fighting. While it disgusts me that people like Mr. L. Landry are still teaching bigotry to their kids, it will continue as long as equivocation about the rights for all Americans remains. That was why I always said, during the couple of years leading up to the election, that judicial appointments trumped every other reason to change the control of Congress and the White House. Until we have a judiciary that will clearly state that bigotry, in all its forms, is wrong, then we will have people like Mr. L. Landry, who is busy "landlording it" over his children. Someday, those kids will leave the house and find their own way. I wish them luck and wish them well. They will need the luck.

 

Great post.

 

It's a constant wonder to me that you guys still get sucked in by Basso posts. How many years will you play into his ego game?

But a couple of points:

I think it's become quite apparent that homosexuality in and of itself is not 'wrong' or 'evil'. It is simply the expression of a certain genetic and/or psychological development pattern in a significant percentage of human beings.

It's just a matter of time before their minority rights will become accepted. The constant pressure of what is right usually prevails politically in this country. There are any number of examples, civil rights and womens sufferage are probably two of the more predictive for this issue. There will most likely be court mandated cracks in the legal code that lead legislators to make more conciliatory law that lead to the full integration.

It matters less what parents teach their children that what they see around them or what their peers think. Teaching directly against the tide of these only serves to invalidate the parents. Parents can inluence their children's values but they cannot dictate them.

 

...it's really just a matter of who you choose to have a beer with

 

Obama's duty is to defend the law. He has stated that he wants Congress to to repeal this law. unfortunately they have been busy with other pressing issues.

 

because you voted for him because of this issue right?

 

sarah palin supports constitutional ban on gay marraige