RottenK posted:

Reads like a slippery slope thing to me. Might be accidental, of course.

CrazyLittle posted:

Christian Dish Network satellite TV. (not a joke)

Prester John posted:

Thanks everyone, you are really flattering me here. I have spent a tremendous amount of time trying to understand the people I was raised around and I would like to think I've gotten somewhere with it all. I have created something of an internal database of concepts to describe and explain authoritarians. This may not be the proper thread for it, but if you guys like I could do a write up on one of the ideas that went into my predictions on all this with the huge caveat that it will be a bunch of unfalsifiable assertions all twisted together and stacked on top of one another. A string of assumptions strung together in a somewhat odd way as an attempt to explain the world around me. (Schizophrenics do this kind of alot, its a thing.) Basically I'm saying that it should probably be taken with a grain of salt, but might yield an interesting piece nonetheless.

evilweasel posted:

while I appreciate Prester John's effort posts, if you want to psychoanalyze your political opponents please do so in another thread and preferably in another forum because it's generally a terrible thread when people sit around and determine what mental defects people who disagree with them have

twodot posted:

I don't see why it would have anything to do with marriage equality.

UltimoDragonQuest posted:

Using religion to discriminate on racial lines is forbidden by SCOTUS.

Sharkie posted:

Well Arkansas's state legislature just passed it's own lovely bill: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/us/religious-freedom-restoration-act-arkansas-indiana.html. The Gov. has said he'll pass it, but maybe, just maybe the recent outrage will cause a rethink.

Stroop There It Is posted:

But are gay, lesbian or bi trans people doubly responsible?

Prester John posted:

Hi, I'm a transwoman and you are wrong.

ponzicar posted:

Not necessarily. Some of them believe in such rigidly defined gender roles, that even in a same sex relationship, one person has to be the dominant "Man" and the other the submissive "Woman".

Thesaurus posted:

The EEOC has already determined that discrimination on the basis of gay and transgender status is illegal in the private sector. They have already been litigating on that basis.

This new ruling just clarifies the issue for federal employees and spells out the legal reasoning in some more detail.

Edit: still a good thing for setting clear precedence and stating the position clearly.

jivjov posted:

I'm vaguely tempted to ask one of those people "So are you opposed to black people having legally protected """special rights""" too?"

Nostalgia4Infinity posted:

Yes, I remember quite a few of us being shocked about the things folks in the RAAF would casually say about aboriginals when my squadron was down in Darwin for an exercise.

Mordiceius posted:

In light of the Boy Scouts news, I'd just like to remind everyone: gently caress Robert Gates.

Yeah, it's great that they're ending bans but just listen to how he words the poo poo, basically saying "We lifted the ban because if we didn't, we would get sued a bunch and it would end up costing us a lot of money." The dude is a fucker.

Klaus88 posted:

Klaus88 posted:

And cops have AFVs as backup. AR-15s aren't poo poo against that kind of firepower.

Party Plane Jones posted:

Can't they impeach/remove this halfwit again?

fishmech posted:

So is every other Christian sect to at least a hundred million other christians, sometimes to as much as more than a billion other Christians. Shut up with your shpiel like Mormons are less christian than televangelists and megachurches, they ain't.

Choadmaster posted:

I remember when I was in high school in the 90's and I thought this was a new thing. Then some teacher made us do reports on on our day of birth, and there on the microfiche-archived copy of the local newspaper was a front-page article from 1980 about the fight for gay rights.

I think many young people (like metalloid or myself) often feel the moment(s) of peak importance for gay rights coincides with whenever they happened to gain awareness of it. The rate of change has certainly been accelerating in the last couple decades, but it's a fight that has been around for a long, long while. It's hard to peg a here's where it really started to matter.

Subjunctive posted:

Or consider employment law. If I have 3 people on a team facing layoffs, I can't lay off Jane just because she's a woman, but I can lay her off if I choose randomly. Only difference is why I perform the act, not what the act is. Acceptable?

Subjunctive posted:

I was addressing the legal situation of motivation affecting legality, not whether the laws we have of that nature are universally effective. It's not easy to prove a hate crime either, unless someone fucks up and yells a slur. Conspiracies can be hard too. Are you saying that difficulty in enforcement means they should be taken off the books?

(But what rule enforcement affects layoffs? If someone is in violation of policy you fire them, you don't lay them off.)

deadly_pudding posted:

Has anybody in these complete shithouse states actually come out and said how they plan to enforce bathroom laws? I would pay somebody for the opportunity to be a bouncer outside the restrooms at their legislature building so I could demand birth certificates from all these fine lawmakers. It's just not safe to let somebody enter the men's room unless you know what they're packing, you know?

I hope we see activists doing like the restroom version of a disputable youtube copyright claim, where they sue a business for endangering their gender purity or whatever and it becomes a big weird clusterfuck as they try to subpoena birth certificates for every person who might have used the bathroom that day. Unfortunately, we won't see that because actually it's expensive to engage our legal system; you'd have to get cooperation from the ACLU or something. It would be a wonderful circus where the court has to be shown that, although this man has very delicate and ladylike hands, his documentation indicates that he, indeed, was allowed to be in that bathroom.

See how many cases like that can hit the system before somebody realizes it was maybe a bad idea to make a civil law code about being in the bathroom while expressing ambiguous gender characteristics. Try and set one up where the plaintiff is adamant that some old lady in the third stall was Mitch McConnell in a dress. The court has to hear it, that's the point of putting the law on the books.