Having spent way too much time of my life engaging in debate over the civil rights of the homosexual community, I have come to the conclusion that it has all been a pointless exercise. One can put forth cogent, fact-based arguments in support of the gay rights position, yet find these points don't make one iota of a difference in the minds of the Christian Right. I am sure that I am not alone.
Unfortunately, as many who have attempted to engage members of the Christian Right have discovered, a reasonable discourse is an impossibility. Why?
Simply put, they don't have opinions; instead, they have "truth." They KNOW. They can say, with utter conviction, that homosexuality is a sin, as determined by God himself. Debate is futile.
Of course, lost in the minds of the "knowing" Christian is the fact that fundamentalists of other religions "know" that their faith is the "true" faith, with just as much certainty. Of course, these fundamentalists from numerous faiths with conflicting doctrine cannot all be right, as they claim. By definition, only one can actually be the truth. Yet they all believe fully and completely and without question that Theirs is the True Way and all the others are false. But someone has to be wrong. In fact most have to be wrong. And it only follows that if some of these folks who "know" are wrong, then perhaps they are ALL wrong. Logic dictates this. Rational analysis makes this possibility clear. But, alas, there-in lies the rub. When rational thought is rejected as a REQUIREMENT of faith, then these logical conundrums are easily tossed aside, like so much rubbish. And as we have seen on many other threads, once rational thought is deemed meaningless, it becomes very easy to apply this embrace of the irrational in support of any number of positions; be it supporting Bush's war crimes without question, or denying science whenever possible, or my personal favorite, tossing the U.S. Constitution in the gutter to deny equal rights to a minority.
Meanwhile, everyone must fall over themselves in tolerance to the intolerance of the Christian right. Yet, that obvious hypocrisy could never be acknowledged, as it requires rational thought.
