TAG | homosexuality
The Spanish Catholic Church is also concerned about homosexuality. During his Boxing Day sermon, the Bishop of Córdoba, Demetrio Fernández, said there was a conspiracy by the United Nations. “The Minister for Family of the Papal Government, Cardinal Antonelli, told me a few days ago in Zaragoza that UNESCO has a program for the next 20 years to make half the world population homosexual. To do this they have distinct programs, and will continue to implant the ideology that is already present in our schools.”
Via the London Times, an instructive tale from Uganda:
When he arrived at Kampala’s Hotel Triangle for a three-day conference, the Rev Kapya Kaoma knew that he would not like what he heard.
The clue was in the event’s title — “Exposing the truth behind homosexuality and the homosexual agenda” — and in the line-up of guest speakers arranged by Stephen Langa, head of the Ugandan-based Family Life Network (FLN), and an outspoken advocate for the criminalisation of homosexuality in Uganda.
Given top billing at the event hosted by the FLN was Scott Lively, president of Abiding Truth Ministries, an American conservative Christian group from California, and a Holocaust revisionist whose controversial book The Pink Swastika names homosexuals as “the true inventors of Nazism and the guiding force behind many Nazi atrocities.”
Weeks after the Kampala conference in March last year — which followed a meeting between the speakers and members of the Ugandan Parliament — a clause appeared in the country’s draft Anti-Homosexuality Bill recommending life imprisonment for certain homosexual “crimes” or, for “serial offenders”, the death sentence.
” I’m sure many people here have read opinion polls that show Atheists to be public enemy #1 ranking less favorably than Gays, Blacks, and Gay Blacks. Many still can’t understand that someone can believe in morality but not God.”
Just speaking as someone who is gay [lesbian] and was atheist/agnostic for most of my life, I always object when ppl make such statements. Sure, people say they don’t like atheists, but hatred against atheists manifests itself in completely different ways than hatred of other groups….
Over the past generation there has come to be in the United States a series of “oppression” bidding wars. Who has it worse, white women, or black men? Atheists or homosexuals? Muslims or Mormons? And so forth. A problem though with these comparisons is that they presume that dislike and persecution lay on a linear spectrum, rather than exploring a multidimensional space. The concreteness of this is manifest in comparing relations between the sexes and the races. The relationship between men and women, all things equal, is qualitatively different from the relationship between different races.
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By now you’ve probably seen the Ryan Sorba video from CPAC:
Right now opposition to gay marriage is a winning issue for conservatives. But how much longer? I wonder if we’re going to see a shift where conservatives are going to have to put anti-gay sentiments aside because of changes in the wider societal Zeitgeist. Similar to the way that the Left seems to have soft-pedaled or deemphasized the gun control agenda over the past 10 years.
CPAC · Gays · homosexuality
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Gay marriage attitudes by political orientation
6 Comments · Posted by David Hume in politics
The Audacious Epigone points out that though attitudes toward gay marriage shifted a great deal over the past few years for liberals and moderates, not so much for conservatives. This makes sense. I’ve looked at attitudes toward homosexuals where liberals, and to a lesser extent moderates, exhibit a great deal of age dependent difference. In contrast young conservatives tend to agree with older conservatives to a far greater extent. Younger conservatives who point out that opposition to gay marriage is less burning of an issue for more recent age cohorts on the Right are correct, but the difference is dwarfed by the radical changes you see in the Center and Left.
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Regional differences in attitudes toward gay marriage
33 Comments · Posted by David Hume in politics
It looks like both Maine & New Hampshire will be taking steps toward recognizing gay marriage. If that happens only Rhode Island in New England will not recognize gay marriage. It also looks like there will be movement in New York. Clearly there’s a regional bias here; but I thought it would be nice to quantify it. The GSS has the “MARHOMO” variable for 1988, 2004, 2006 and 2008. I limited it to 2006 and 2008 as attitudes didn’t differ between these years, and split it by the Census regions. Results below.
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Gay marriage attitudes by the numbers
10 Comments · Posted by David Hume in politics, Uncategorized
I know there are plenty of polls in regards to gay marriage, but I don’t ever see them broken out by religious attitudes. So I looked at the GSS at the MARHOMO, “Homosexuals should have right to marry,” variable for 2008. I then cross-referenced with the “GOD” variable, which asks people about their confidence in the existence of God. The trendlines are as you would expect, but there is more diversity of belief than I suspect many would have assumed. (more…)
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Biblical literalism correlates with thinking extramarital sex is wrong
2 Comments · Posted by David Hume in culture, politics
The Audacious Epigone has a post up where the title says it all, Extramarital sex wrong? Gays and supporters of same sex marriage less likely to think so. But I was curious how MARHOMO, attitudes toward gay marriage, stacked up against other independent variables in relation to XMARSEX, attitudes toward extramarital sex. Here is what XMARSEX is representing:
What is your opinion about a married person having sexual relations with someone other than the marriage partner?
1 – ALWAYS WRONG
2 – ALMOST ALWAYS WRONG
3 – SOMETIMES WRONG
4 – NOT WRONG AT ALL
Here’s the logit regression from the GSS:
Affair · demographics · Extramarital Sex · Gay Marriage · homosexuality
In a follow up to my previous post, I decided to use the GSS’s logit regression feature to probe the relationship between a set of variables and attitudes toward homosexuality. The columns are the dependent variables, while the rows are the independent ones. I’ve omitted all variables where the beta coefficient is not statistically significant at p-value = 0.05. I’ve also bolded the largest beta in each column.
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demographics · GSS · homosexuality · politics
There is a debate on the internet about homosexuality and morality, with Rod Dreher, Andrew Sullivan and Damon Linker at the center of the storm. Nothing too surprising or unexpected. All I would add is that this is a sort of thing where reasoned arguments, that is, inferences from axioms, are probably overrated. The traditionalist and socially liberal voices in any sort of argument have to, by the nature of the beast, engage in structured debates which take as given axioms (e.g., the Bible, individual liberty) which result in a host of propositions. But this is ultimately just shadow-boxing, as an empirical matter social norms evolve over time through changes in the Zeitgeist which humans have a minimal comprehension of (probably because they are the Zeitgeist). Two generations ago traditionalists and social liberals would probably agree on their attitudes toward homosexuality, but not on the acceptability of women in the work place. Their premises, ostensibily derived from scripture and the Enlightenment, would be the same. But the terminal points which define the set of public policy and social positions which define the two camps would be very different. Also see Jim Manzi.
