Truth. I agree with your statements.
If your (or a hypothetical persons) stance is that of Will's...
*cut*
...you are just against redefineing a word.
Also truth. As of this point, we are in agreement.
Purely as an exercise of thought (and only that), but at the considerable risk of stretching this dicussion beyond the bounds of tedium. A stance taken by almost everybody (including myself) is that murderers should be denied rights that everybody else recieves (most noteably freedom), because they feel that murder is somehow wrong. That makes almost everybody a bigot (in the same sense of bigotry as stance number 2 above) towards murderers. Clearly this is bigotry in an acceptable form. A small few take the opposite stance that such bigotry of murder is not justified for various reasons (they deserved it, they're dead so they don't actually suffer anything as a result their own murder, it's a natural part of evolution, etc.)
Slightly fewer people take a similar bigoted stance on personal drug use. Some do not take this stance and argue that drug users should not be denied any rights usually either because their actions have no harmful effect on anybody other than themselves, or that the drugs actually have no significant harmful effects.
Fewer (probably, but this is a guess) people still, take the bigoted stance on homosexuality that you mentioned above. Many do not take this stance and claim that homosexuals should not be denied rights because again, their actions have no significant harmful effects.
Even fewer (another guess) people take the bigoted stance that black people should be denied equal rights with white people. Many do not take this stance for many, many reasons.
Surely any sane person would agree that they could draw a line between two of those examples and seperate them into acceptable and unacceptable forms of bigotry. You (Andrew) would clearly draw the line between drug use and homosexuality (or perhaps murder and drug use). Adolf hitler would probably have grouped them all as acceptable and the hypothetical person we were discussing would draw it between homosexuality and being black. My question is who should decide where to draw that line and how do/should they decide it?
-Kev
P.S. Sorry this is so long.
