Tired of Republicans.

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Seanchaidh

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I'd say you're one of at least two or three people.
The Republican Party is a coalition of people who are, generally speaking, convinced that the second amendment is important so long as it isn't a revolutionary working class or various marginalized groups within the working class that are inclined to fight back against their terrorization that has the balance of force. The Republican party elite indulges social reactionary attitudes and (usually covert or indirect) white supremacy because it would like to maintain a divided working class with various pockets that are yet more vulnerable to exploitation than the portion of the working class that is white and male. The rank and file of the Republican party is typically somewhat more affluent and oftentimes overly interested in taking the horrible side of issues which largely don't concern themselves in any direct material way, such as being anti-trans. Obviously they put a more positive spin on this weird (and often media-driven) predilection.

But whereas the Republican Party can be quite breathtakingly reactionary in its domestic politics, suddenly it becomes the shining beacon of social progressivism in its foreign policy, just so long as whatever crusade to be waged also serves the interests of the American natsec blob or finance capital (but I might be repeating myself).

The Republican Party has attitudes about the decline of various things-- the American family, for example-- because of course they need a way to explain various social problems that doesn't implicate the people holding the purse strings, or even ask them to loosen those purse strings a bit.

The Republican Party is not as concerned about climate change as it seems like it probably should be because some of them think the world is going to end soon for very different reasons, and others of them know that they have the financial means to buy a comfortable existence even if the worst predictions come true.

The Republican Party largely buys the mythology and ideology that is promoted to justify capitalism, as well as pretend that certain historical events demonstrate the impossibility of "socialism", which they have no clear understanding of except that it is foreign and murderous. Amusingly, they will not apply anywhere near the same standards to the European colonization of the United States.

The Democratic Party largely agrees with the Republican Party, but wants the votes of the people who don't agree with it, so it speaks with two mouths.
 

lil devils x

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"Democrats have deep divides over policy. In contrast, Republicans, at both the state and federal levels, are largely unified around an agenda of cutting spending for programs such as Medicaid that are targeted at low-income people, defending Americansā€™ ability to own and purchase guns, limiting abortion, and reducing regulations and taxes on businesses. "

Though as of late, the most unifying factor for republicans is just supporting whatever Trump says" nonsense. This current Pandemic though is going to test their ability to comply with Trump's anti science, anti truth stance as I am sure they will get quite a bit of blowback from the people and businesses for doing so. Trying to convince people that it isn't a problem and that the death toll is exaggerated does not go very far when their constituents are telling them their loved ones died from this due to the choices their representatives made.Yes, if your elected officials did not provide basic PPE and your loved ones died because they could not access basic protection equipment , those officials are responsible for those deaths. Yes, if your elected officials took away your unemployment and you were forced to go back to work unprotected and you get sick and become disabled due to getting sick, and they refuse to pay your disability, the elected officials are responsible for this. Yes, if you get sick or get your loved ones sick because of the polices your officials make, your officials are responsible for this, and they should be held accountable. The officials are going to be hearing about this, so it will be much harder for them to ignore when the people losing their loved ones are not just going to forget it is happening and believe their rhetoric this time.

The republican's standard playbook is " keep people bickering about Abortion and Guns so they do not notice us taking their healthcare, unemployment, food and housing away" as much." They scapegoat " immigrants taking their jobs" rather than businesses not paying a living wage because much of the country is still basing their business model on the slave economy.

The reason why Lindsey graham wants to take away people's unemployment is he wants to be able to force people to suffer enough to work for less than a living wage and that the people make more on unemployment than the companies he support's is willing to pay them for doing work that is not only physically taxing on their bodies, they are being paid not even enough to live on to do work that puts their lives at risk. Being able to profit off the backs of others keeping them too poor, sick and hurt to fight back is the business plan that Lindsey Graham is proposing here and sadly, he is only representing the wealthy whose money is made off the backs of the poor in this manner. Much of the republican party is directly kept in power by these same businesses that profit by refusing to pay a living wage to those doing the actual work .

As long as the republicans can keep the people distracted bickering about things that are not as important and blaming someone else for all their problems , they can continue to exploit the people for profit without drawing attention to themselves, further siphoning the wealth into fewer and fewer hands:



The biggest lie they sell the people is " we cannot afford this" because they keep the vast majority of the population not being able to afford much of anything so they convince them that they will take away what little scraps they do have to be able to make the needed changes, when in reality, they just need to take from that big pile on the right of that graph, there is enough in that pile to make every single man, woman, and child, citizen or not " wealthy" in the US. so taking just a small amount of it and using it to keep people from struggling with basic necessities isn't really taking much from them at all. It certainly is not taking as much as the wealthy took from ll of those families by not paying them adequately for their work all these years. All they are doing is giving the back wages that should have been paid already that the wealthy should not have had in the first place because if they had paid a living wage in the first place, that wealth would have already been more evenly distributed throughout the general population to begin with. We can afford it, and the people will be better for it, we just have to end the very false idea that " the poor don't do their share" when they are the ones who ARE doing more than their share, just they are having their share taken from them and not being given back. We just need to give them back their share and we could solve so many of the problems this is causing all at once.

EDIT: In comparison, the Democrats are in no way united around cutting programs to the poor, they instead primarily want to increase them, it is just a matter of how much, which ones and how to go about it which often causes endless bickering over the best way to do things:

These strong divides among democrats are also the reason that if democrats fail to find agreement over a policy, it often gives the republicans the little gap they need to seize control entirely due to the democrats endlessly bickering about the best way to solve issues. They do not get to solve anything once the republicans seize control, but the republicans being unified is what makes it so much easier for them to gain power, yet we still have so many democrats willing to say " my way or the highway" instead of compromising along the way so they can get more done in the long run and actually be able to achieve their goals eventually.
 
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Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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If you don't think the opposite exists, you're not paying attention. Like, government determining who counts as married doesn't exist to attack you. It exists to attack me. It's a tool that was introduced to try and pull people away from the Catholic Church. It was "your religious traditions don't matter, it's the government that gets to decide what counts".
As far as I am aware, it has always been the government's prerogative to determine what marriage is. Substantial quantities of law, going all the way back to the ancient era, are devoted to the idea of marriage even despite a welter of different religions and their notions of marriage.

For instance, the Catholic church does not recognise divorce. And yet you can get divorced. You can go get a papal annulment, and it means precisely nothing in terms of your legally-recognised marriage under US jurisdiction. The US government doesn't care about your religious traditions in this, it gets to decide what counts, and yet I don't see any Catholics claiming that this age-old legal right to divorce is an "attack" on their religion. Likewise, the fact we have long been able to have a registered official get us to repeat some vows and sign a contract, outside of a church with nary a mention of the Christian God anywhere in the process, should tell us marriage has long existed in forms outside religious tradition as long as it satisfies the rules of the state.

Consequently, I cannot for the life of me see a good rational argument why the religious should demand that gay people cannot be allowed to legally marry on the basis of their traditions, because their traditions have never been the final word on what marriage is.

* * *

Secondly, I am sorry that you feel under attack by LGBT activists, and actually I'd agree some of them harbour a grudge and do axe-grinding. On the other hand, given the historical and to some extent current treatment of homosexualty by many religions, I think the religious should accept that homosexuals have a very good reason to be upset with them, and be a little more graceful about it.

Finally, my sympathies with various religious organisations runs pretty thin that they busily pour huge resources into impeding other peoples freedoms (e.g. gay marriage, abortion), but squeal like crazy the minute someone tells them they should bake a gay cake. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
 
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Saelune

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* * *

Secondly, I am sorry that you feel under attack by LGBT activists, and actually I'd agree some of them harbour a grudge and do axe-grinding. On the other hand, given the historical and to some extent current treatment of homosexualty by many religions, I think the religious should accept that homosexuals have a very good reason to be upset with them, and be a little more graceful about it.

Finally, my sympathies with various religious organisations runs pretty thin that they busily pour huge resources into impeding other peoples freedoms (e.g. gay marriage, abortion), but squeal like crazy the minute someone tells them they should bake a gay cake. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
I suspect the reason they are 'under attack by LGBT activists' is because they have a history of opposing LGBT rights. Do not apologize for bullies being punished for it.
 

tstorm823

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Bullshit.

Christianity is not under attack in the US and never has been. Christianity has a beyond unfair position of power and control of the US law and policy, and Christians have NEVER been persecuted in the US ever, except by oh, other Christians. (The KKK started as anti-Catholic as well as anti-black until they realized alot of White Catholics hated blacks too).

You are literally making lies up and playing the victim for people fighting back.

YOUR RIGHTS ARE NOT IMPEDED BECAUSE YOU ARE BEING TOLD TO STOP IMPEDING MINE!
SOME Christians have had the position of power in the US. Catholics didn't. Why do you think Irish and Italians were undesirables? Cause they're predominantly Catholic. JFK was controversial because he was Catholic.

The concept I'm talking about does go older than the US itself. I'm talking like John Calvin or the creation of the Church of England stuff. Once upon a time, anyone who called themselves married was. For Catholics, this was considered sacramental. Martin Luther disagreed, and more revolutionary minded figures after him decided it should be made an explicitly legal binding to take away influence from the Vatican.

I have no problem with other people doing Catholic sacraments differently. Protestant communion celebrations are 1000x more heretical to my beliefs than gay marriage. The problem isn't what other people are doing with their own lives. The problem is the government deciding what counts. The government should not be in the business of deciding who is married in the first place, but so long as it is, shifting the definition and mandating people respect the government's ruling is a threat to my religion. There will absolutely at some point be a court case demanding the Catholic Church capitulate to someone we refused to marry in our Church, regardless of their sexual orientation, and that's not ok.

I have never felt the government should be deciding who is and isn't married. But I guarantee you're reading this and getting ready to tell me that I'm just trying to take my ball and go home, and that's not correct.

The problem is that the state offers a bunch of benefits, like tax breaks, juridical protection and special rules for inheritance in case of your partner's demise if you're married. It has nothing to do with religion and a lot to do with the fact that two people living together who aren't married have less protections and benefits under the law then two married people do. Allowing same-sex marriage is definitely about equal rights because it allows two life partners of the same sex the same benefits under the law as two heteronormative life partners get.
Right. Give everyone all those rights. Hell, give unmarried people some of it too. Try and suggest legal partnerships shouldn't be tied to marriage, I guarantee someone calls you a bigot.
 

Hades

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I have no problem with other people doing Catholic sacraments differently. Protestant communion celebrations are 1000x more heretical to my beliefs than gay marriage. The problem isn't what other people are doing with their own lives. The problem is the government deciding what counts. The government should not be in the business of deciding who is married in the first place, but so long as it is, shifting the definition and mandating people respect the government's ruling is a threat to my religion. There will absolutely at some point be a court case demanding the Catholic Church capitulate to someone we refused to marry in our Church, regardless of their sexual orientation, and that's not ok.

I have never felt the government should be deciding who is and isn't married. But I guarantee you're reading this and getting ready to tell me that I'm just trying to take my ball and go home, and that's not correct.
Doesn't that go both ways? After all you have many, many political parties who very much want to use their power in the government to decide that people they find icky cannot marry each other. If governments shouldn't decide who can marry or not then they have no business opposing LGBTQ rights.
 

09philj

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I have no problem with other people doing Catholic sacraments differently. Protestant communion celebrations are 1000x more heretical to my beliefs than gay marriage. The problem isn't what other people are doing with their own lives. The problem is the government deciding what counts. The government should not be in the business of deciding who is married in the first place, but so long as it is, shifting the definition and mandating people respect the government's ruling is a threat to my religion.
Thinking your religion is threatened by the government recognising forms of marriage other than yours as legal betrays your lack of faith. It is not your place to dictate who does and doesn't get to call themselves married. The government, as representative of the people and enforcer of the laws, does. Personally, I think common law marriage should be made available to everyone across the nation, so people don't have to have any kind of ceremony to get married, and finally take back the power that the church took from the people. How threatened will you feel then?
 

tstorm823

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Doesn't that go both ways? After all you have many, many political parties who very much want to use their power in the government to decide that people they find icky cannot marry each other. If governments shouldn't decide who can marry or not then they have no business opposing LGBTQ rights.
I fundamentally agree, but it gets a little messy around what is or is not a right. Case and point, do you have a right to buy a cake from any cakemaker?

The Equality Act is a thing being pushed at the moment, it would expand civil rights protections to sex and sexuality. Sounds great, except it's specifically the protections from the civil rights act of 1964, which is the one that remains controversial because it took the jump from "the government cannot infringe on anyone's rights regardless of race" to the concept of "the government has to punish anyone who discriminates based on race". There's an argument that step wasn't necessary, but regardless, the downside there isn't particularly huge. It's punishing racists, whether or not the government should be in that business, I'm not shedding tears for them.

With sex and sexuality, it's not clear that way. When the law is preventing black only or white only facilities, that situation is, for lack of a better phrase, pretty black and white. Those things are pretty all bad no good. Applying a principal like that to sex and sexuality, what do you do with men's groups or women's groups? Is a women's shelter legal? We certainly wouldn't support white only shelters, why women's shelters? We wouldn't have black only bathrooms, but we certainly have men's rooms. If something can't exclude a gay person, are things specifically for gay people allowed? And what would the law do to an organization that has all male priests and only straight weddings?

Discriminating is acting based on the differences between things. Some discrimination is good, some is bad. Not hiring someone in a wheelchair to lift 70 lb boxes 10 ft in the air is good for both the business and the person in the wheelchair. Not hiring a perfectly qualified candidate because of the color of their skin is bad. But not experiencing discrimination isn't a right. That's not something the government can or should pursue. It only sort of works for racial discrimination because that's almost universally bad. But like, colleges have "safe spaces" at the exclusion of white people, by letter of the law, that 100% violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By spirit of the law, nobody is going to stop that discrimination, because that's not what that act was meant to do. It was meant for a specific and egregious form of discrimination, and applying it broadly and indiscriminately would be a huge mistake.

Personally, I think common law marriage should be made available to everyone across the nation, so people don't have to have any kind of ceremony to get married, and finally take back the power that the church took from the people. How threatened will you feel then?
None, that's almost literally what I said I want. I don't want governments or churches deciding what does and doesn't count for other people. Certain sects of Christianity encouraged the government to define things their way for the explicit purpose of making my Church matter less. I don't want to steal their tactic for my benefit, I want the whole mistake undone.

Like, matrimony is the only Catholic sacrament that doesn't have the priest perform it. A marriage, in Catholic tradition, is performed by the people getting married, and the Church is only a witness. Prior to the Reformation, you didn't need to have ceremonies, you didn't need the priest there to witness the vows, you just had to say "hey, we're married now" to be married in the Catholic Church. It was that way for over a millenium. Certainly some people had big ceremonies, but that's not the important part. It still isn't. Is wasn't until the reformation when protestants were trying to convince people marriage was a secular thing and shouldn't be considered religious that the Catholic Church started encouraging people to have ceremonies in churches, just to reinforce the holy nature of the process.

What you're suggesting is pretty much exactly what marriage was in the Holy Roman Empire. As a Catholic, I'm down.
 
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Saelune

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SOME Christians have had the position of power in the US. Catholics didn't. Why do you think Irish and Italians were undesirables? Cause they're predominantly Catholic. JFK was controversial because he was Catholic.

The concept I'm talking about does go older than the US itself. I'm talking like John Calvin or the creation of the Church of England stuff. Once upon a time, anyone who called themselves married was. For Catholics, this was considered sacramental. Martin Luther disagreed, and more revolutionary minded figures after him decided it should be made an explicitly legal binding to take away influence from the Vatican.

I have no problem with other people doing Catholic sacraments differently. Protestant communion celebrations are 1000x more heretical to my beliefs than gay marriage. The problem isn't what other people are doing with their own lives. The problem is the government deciding what counts. The government should not be in the business of deciding who is married in the first place, but so long as it is, shifting the definition and mandating people respect the government's ruling is a threat to my religion. There will absolutely at some point be a court case demanding the Catholic Church capitulate to someone we refused to marry in our Church, regardless of their sexual orientation, and that's not ok.

I have never felt the government should be deciding who is and isn't married. But I guarantee you're reading this and getting ready to tell me that I'm just trying to take my ball and go home, and that's not correct.



Right. Give everyone all those rights. Hell, give unmarried people some of it too. Try and suggest legal partnerships shouldn't be tied to marriage, I guarantee someone calls you a bigot.
So you admit that Christian persecution comes from other Christians? Cause a second ago you were blaming LGBT people.

And yes, if you say bigoted things, people will call you a bigot. If you do not like being accused of bigotry, then stop saying bigoted things.
 

tstorm823

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So you admit that Christian persecution comes from other Christians? Cause a second ago you were blaming LGBT people.

And yes, if you say bigoted things, people will call you a bigot. If you do not like being accused of bigotry, then stop saying bigoted things.
Some Christian persecution comes from other Christians. Certainly more than comes from LGBT atheists. I admit that freely. Just the history of England makes that undeniable.

That doesn't mean that LGBT activists are allowed to persecute people more. Allowable persecution isn't a thing.

Imma take a stab in the dark, someone at some point has called you a bigot. Do you feel you deserve that?
 

Saelune

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Some Christian persecution comes from other Christians. Certainly more than comes from LGBT atheists. I admit that freely. Just the history of England makes that undeniable.

That doesn't mean that LGBT activists are allowed to persecute people more. Allowable persecution isn't a thing.

Imma take a stab in the dark, someone at some point has called you a bigot. Do you feel you deserve that?
LGBT people are not persecuting Christians. We are defending ourselves from the abuse Christians put us through and you are upset because you hate your victims fighting back.

The people who call me a bigot tend to be people who think LGBT people don't deserve rights. I can't think of a time when a non-bigot called me a bigot.
 

tstorm823

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LGBT people are not persecuting Christians. We are defending ourselves from the abuse Christians put us through and you are upset because you hate your victims fighting back.

The people who call me a bigot tend to be people who think LGBT people don't deserve rights. I can't think of a time when a non-bigot called me a bigot.
The people calling up that cake shop asking for dildo cakes are defending themselves? The pedophile suing to have a brazilian in Canada was defending themself?

To clarify, it's not "LGBT people persecuting Christians". It's some LGBT people persecuting Christians. No sexuality or gender identity is immune to bad actors.

"If you do not like being accused of bigotry, then stop saying bigoted things. " Or, just ignore the accusations because they are wrong. That's what we both do.
 

Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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Some Christian persecution comes from other Christians. Certainly more than comes from LGBT atheists. I admit that freely. Just the history of England makes that undeniable.
And England was pretty light for Christian on Christian persecution all in all: not a patch on what went on in places like France or Germany.
 

Nick Calandra

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Locking this thread. The original post included no actual news to discuss. Do not forget. Current Events is for discussing news with citable sources that can be discussed, not just for blasting out personal opinions.
 
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