Posts by Craig Ranapia
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Emma Hart,
Nowhere, nowhere have I said this. Or anything even remotely like it. Can you not find something I actually have said to disagree with?
No - because it's so much easier to keep scaremongering against marriage equality with the same old faith-based straw derail troll?
-
Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Angus Robertson,
You seem to believe that civil law grants us the right to be total hateful fuckwits to religions we do not like and force them to violate their beliefs for our own petty amusement.
Yet somehow, Angus, I’m pretty relaxed with civil law totally hating on people who use ‘God told me to do it’ as a defense for torturing the mentally ill, genitally mutilating little girls, stalking and harassing apostates, or (to drag this vaguely in the direction of the OP) the Marriage Act’s tiresome insistence that you can legally only marry one person at a time. If thinking slicing off a child's labia is faith-based barbarity on a par with witch-dunking constitutes "petty amusement,” I guess I have to plead guilty on all charges.
-
Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Steve Parks,
Perhaps - and it's an interesting ambiguity someone might want to test in court one day. But I'm still not seeing how the claims that marriage equality is some kind of "attack on religious freedom" is anything other than pure bullshitanium.
-
Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Tess Rooney,
Another way would be to separate weddings and the legal paperwork entirely. Everyone has to get the official marriage registration at the Registrars Office and then have a wedding as they see fit.
Which, with a lot of contortions, is pretty much what New Zealand's next head of state did with his second marriage: A civil ceremony at Windsor Town Hall followed by a "solemn blessing" at St. George's Chapel. (Which still raised the hackles of a number of divorced Anglicans who were told in no uncertain terms they would not be allowed to re-marry in any way, shape or form in an Anglican church.)
-
Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Danielle,
Call me wimpy, but “isn’t it great that older people who disagree with me will die?” isn’t exactly the tack I want to take on this issue.
It’s not mine either, not least because it’s horribly lazy to equate age with homophobia. Sonja Davies was sixty three when she voted for homosexual law reform and Fran Wilde acknowledged her as a staunch ally and mentor. US conservative luminary Theodore Olson was just shy of seventy when he went magnificently off-message to represent the plaintiffs in Perry v. Schwarzenegger.
Perhaps it's just me, but I suspect the likes of Richard Prosser and Winston Peters would be bigoted arseholes at any age.
-
Religious authority can doctrinally disapprove of all sorts of things from inter-racial dating over a shellfish dinner to usury. Whether than means civil law should follow suit is quite a different matter entirely - except when it comes to civil marriage, apparently.
-
Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Damn, point taken, isn’t there something we can do about this freedom of speech thing!
All the wrong people are talking….Yup - but if defending unpopular or downright distasteful speech was easy, everybody would be doing it. Sorry if this sounds a tad pompous, but we have to be better than our foes, because we are. I want to beat the fuckers by being smarter, working harder, going out and changing people's minds with solid arguments. Not by engaging in, let's be blunt, cyber-harassment and intimidation.
-
Now, I don’t for a second believe that his idea of robust debate involves fairness or rationality, but whatever, he’s entitled to express his views, no matter how obnoxious, and this DOS attack is no different from shouting him down. Doesn’t really help.
Yup - a useful variant on "don't feed the trolls" is "please don't make the poor petal's martyr complex any bigger".
If/when the bill gets passed and same-sex marriage is legal in Aotearoa, will churches be forced to enact the ceremonies?
What Emma said, and I'll add this. Any cleric who tries to frame marriage equality as an "attack on religious freedom" is just lying - and when I went to parochial school, I'm pretty sure fibbing was high on the list of things that made God cranky.
-
Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Russell Brown,
With the usual "the devil's in the details" caveats, well done. Now cue the anguished wails of "oh, you're playing right into Romney's hands with this irrelevant distraction" from the usual suspects. :)
-
Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Russell Brown,
It's as is it's easier to draw plans with Big Things in them than to envisage how people might actually live in the new city.
Perhaps - but I'm always more than a little skeptical about how much of that you can plan for anyway. Canary Wharf is planned up the wazoo, and it's the only part of London I spent any time in that I wouldn't regret seeing sink beneath the Thames.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 165 166 167 168 169 … 1235 Older→ First