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.
Ah ha!
Excellent points.
Everyone is bigoted towards something. Just like EVERYONE is prejudiced. People often get lost in the connotation of these words and forget the denotation.
This is a question at the ROOT of philosophy and morality. How do you define "right" and "wrong". This could run into another 25 page thread if we let it.
There are actually a TON of great works on this ranging from Plato, to Augustine to Kant.
The american public is STILL reaching for an answer to this question. And right now we have laws that are clearly based in 3 or 4 DIFFERENT views of morality. However, seemingly, we are moving towards a stance of "if it doesn't hurt me, you can do it."
More of a UTILITY theory of morality. Which is very much so a part of the libertarian stance of politics. Which is, in MANY ways, the exact stance I agree with. You should be allowed to do anything you want to yourself or with/to another consenting adult AS LONG as it does not hurt anyone outside of the consenting group.
The argument, in my mind, is DOES GAY MARRIAGE hurt anyone else. (BTW, I think you have to draw the line for "anyone else" somewhere too. You have to draw it at "normal rational human beings". In other words, if a weirdo gets offended by the color green, I can't be expected to stop wearing it).
Clearly, murder hurts other people. But does doing drugs? That's up for debate. Does being gay? I see no evidence for this, but it is possible. If it were shown that a majority of the US population is very distinctly offended and hurt by homosexual couples then clearly it should be illegal. But I don't think that is the case because there is not "utility theory" reason for it to hurt people.
