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> I support his right to be a bigot According to Google, "bigotry" is defined as "having or revealing an obstinate belief in the superiority of one's own opini

> I support his right to be a bigot According to Google, "bigotry" is defined as "having or revealing an obstinate belief in the superiority of one's own opinions and a prejudiced intolerance of the opinions of others." I'm getting confused here, since English is not my native language -- but how's Eich a bigot, and the other side of the barricade not? In fact, according to that definition, how are the people who ousted him not the bigger bigots? Just wondering.

Justsignedup 13y ago
Bigotry is usually referred to someone who puts down a group of people, based on their race, sexual orientation, sex, etc. Things that people cannot control: "I hate all left-handed people." In his case he was (at least partially) trying to deny a group of people (homosexuals and other derivatives) the right to Marry a same-sex partner and have equal protection under the law. Note this issue is similar to people protesting that a black man should not be allowed to legally marry a white woman just a few decades ago.
glesica 13y ago
One very common meaning for the term "bigot" is basically someone who dislikes a group of people for no good reason. The term is often used as an umbrella term for "racist", "sexist", "xenophobe" and other terms. In this case, I used it as a synonym for "homophobe". If it makes you more comfortable, you could replace the word "bigot" in my comment with the word "homophobe" and the meaning would be the same, though less general. Here's a definition: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigot http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigot
fennecfoxen 13y ago
The answer is that when you see the word "bigot" here, it actually means: * this person has a different model of the structure of the world than we do * we do not wish to recognize (or are not capable of recognizing, or have not been informed) that it is possible or intellectually valid to use a different model of the structure of the world than we do * assuming that you use the same model as we do, it is impossible to support Prop 8 unless you also think that gay people don't deserve to be treated as people * therefore he must not think they should be treated as people, and is bad. we should call him names and try to impugn his ability to empathize and/or be intellectually consistent. Any relation of this to the dictionary definition is coincidental. For your personal edification: the real question about gay marriage is a what marriage is (and what the government should recognize), not about whether gay people are people. If you believe that marriage is primarily about an emotional commitment between two arbitrary people, then the only logical conclusion is to support gay marriage. If you're old-school and think in the general case that it has something more to do with children and families and sexual reproduction (notwithstanding current practices to the contrary), then you may support measures like Prop 8 or Amendment 1. It is this difference in attitudes which drives the issue and drives enough voter turnout to pass measures like Prop 8 -- not bigotry and hatred, but defending something that these people care about, Marriage and Family. This is also why it's called the "Defense of Marriage Act"; it's a defense. These supporters of gay marriage long ago internalized the notion of marriage as an emotional commitment between.... well, let's say N arbitrary people, not always 2.
- glesica 13y ago
  > * assuming that you use the same model as we do, it is impossible to support Prop 8 unless you also think that gay people don't deserve to be treated as people This is basically accurate. It is not possible to support Prop 8 without treating gay people as though they are not people. If the only advantage marriage conferred was being allowed to make babies, then I would agree with you. The problem is that marriage confers a bunch of additional benefits (including hospital visitation and inheritance with less drama). Additionally, there is no need to be married to have children, and there is no need to have children to be married, so the whole "marriage is about kids" thing is, frankly, really, really hard to take seriously. So by supporting Prop 8, people were saying "gay people do not deserve the privileges mentioned above even through straight people who don't intend to have kids can have those privileges". If this is really about children and families, where is the movement to prevent infertile straight people from getting married, or just people who have no intention of having children. They are ruining the tradition just as much as gay people supposedly would.
  - fennecfoxen 13y ago
    It sounds like your ability to reason about the way other people think is limited. Be aware that this is a defect, not a virtue. It is also one definition I've seen of bigotry: the inability to conceive of an alternative point of view. In the meantime, as an exercise, let's do some reasoning about what people might hypothetically think, with the example of "infertile straight people". First, infertile straight people commonly are unaware of their infertility until such time as they are actually interested in having children, which occurs late in the traditional order of [marriage, sex, children]. Perhaps someone could think that enforcing this question up front is impractically difficult, and this is a defect of the current regime. Perhaps someone could think that it's important that you're willing to have children before you enter marriage, but that subsequent discovery of infertility doesn't dissolve the marriage. Perhaps the issue didn't really occur to the person in question -- the media coverage of the issue is nil, so awareness has got to be pretty limited. Perhaps there are actually such movements, and you're just unaware of them. (For instance, were you aware of Sixtus V's decree of 27 June 1587?) Perhaps the people with these opinions are silly and wrong to think what they think: from time to time, people can and are intellectually inconsistent. Perhaps this is the result of a something that invokes an inconsistent pattern of reasoning about the matter, such as a politician of an unfavored political party promoting the matter, or perhaps they were exposed to some cultural artifact depicting gay marriage in combination with a celebration of human sexuality in a way that the person in question found disgusting. Or perhaps they have a prejudice against gay people that falls short of being an un-person but which affects reasoning about relevant topics in an unfair and negative way (as is commonly suggested in a variety of racial-sensitivity contexts).

Justsignedup 13y ago

Bigotry is usually referred to someone who puts down a group of people, based on their race, sexual orientation, sex, etc. Things that people cannot control: "I hate all left-handed people." In his case he was (at least partially) trying to deny a group of people (homosexuals and other derivatives) the right to Marry a same-sex partner and have equal protection under the law. Note this issue is similar to people protesting that a black man should not be allowed to legally marry a white woman just a few decades ago.

glesica 13y ago

One very common meaning for the term "bigot" is basically someone who dislikes a group of people for no good reason. The term is often used as an umbrella term for "racist", "sexist", "xenophobe" and other terms. In this case, I used it as a synonym for "homophobe". If it makes you more comfortable, you could replace the word "bigot" in my comment with the word "homophobe" and the meaning would be the same, though less general. Here's a definition: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigot http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigot

fennecfoxen 13y ago

The answer is that when you see the word "bigot" here, it actually means: * this person has a different model of the structure of the world than we do * we do not wish to recognize (or are not capable of recognizing, or have not been informed) that it is possible or intellectually valid to use a different model of the structure of the world than we do * assuming that you use the same model as we do, it is impossible to support Prop 8 unless you also think that gay people don't deserve to be treated as people * therefore he must not think they should be treated as people, and is bad. we should call him names and try to impugn his ability to empathize and/or be intellectually consistent. Any relation of this to the dictionary definition is coincidental. For your personal edification: the real question about gay marriage is a what marriage is (and what the government should recognize), not about whether gay people are people. If you believe that marriage is primarily about an emotional commitment between two arbitrary people, then the only logical conclusion is to support gay marriage. If you're old-school and think in the general case that it has something more to do with children and families and sexual reproduction (notwithstanding current practices to the contrary), then you may support measures like Prop 8 or Amendment 1. It is this difference in attitudes which drives the issue and drives enough voter turnout to pass measures like Prop 8 -- not bigotry and hatred, but defending something that these people care about, Marriage and Family. This is also why it's called the "Defense of Marriage Act"; it's a defense. These supporters of gay marriage long ago internalized the notion of marriage as an emotional commitment between.... well, let's say N arbitrary people, not always 2.

glesica 13y ago
> * assuming that you use the same model as we do, it is impossible to support Prop 8 unless you also think that gay people don't deserve to be treated as people This is basically accurate. It is not possible to support Prop 8 without treating gay people as though they are not people. If the only advantage marriage conferred was being allowed to make babies, then I would agree with you. The problem is that marriage confers a bunch of additional benefits (including hospital visitation and inheritance with less drama). Additionally, there is no need to be married to have children, and there is no need to have children to be married, so the whole "marriage is about kids" thing is, frankly, really, really hard to take seriously. So by supporting Prop 8, people were saying "gay people do not deserve the privileges mentioned above even through straight people who don't intend to have kids can have those privileges". If this is really about children and families, where is the movement to prevent infertile straight people from getting married, or just people who have no intention of having children. They are ruining the tradition just as much as gay people supposedly would.
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  It sounds like your ability to reason about the way other people think is limited. Be aware that this is a defect, not a virtue. It is also one definition I've seen of bigotry: the inability to conceive of an alternative point of view. In the meantime, as an exercise, let's do some reasoning about what people might hypothetically think, with the example of "infertile straight people". First, infertile straight people commonly are unaware of their infertility until such time as they are actually interested in having children, which occurs late in the traditional order of [marriage, sex, children]. Perhaps someone could think that enforcing this question up front is impractically difficult, and this is a defect of the current regime. Perhaps someone could think that it's important that you're willing to have children before you enter marriage, but that subsequent discovery of infertility doesn't dissolve the marriage. Perhaps the issue didn't really occur to the person in question -- the media coverage of the issue is nil, so awareness has got to be pretty limited. Perhaps there are actually such movements, and you're just unaware of them. (For instance, were you aware of Sixtus V's decree of 27 June 1587?) Perhaps the people with these opinions are silly and wrong to think what they think: from time to time, people can and are intellectually inconsistent. Perhaps this is the result of a something that invokes an inconsistent pattern of reasoning about the matter, such as a politician of an unfavored political party promoting the matter, or perhaps they were exposed to some cultural artifact depicting gay marriage in combination with a celebration of human sexuality in a way that the person in question found disgusting. Or perhaps they have a prejudice against gay people that falls short of being an un-person but which affects reasoning about relevant topics in an unfair and negative way (as is commonly suggested in a variety of racial-sensitivity contexts).