Molotov

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/br ... -for-kids/

So a subset of the bigoted religious folk who oppose same-sex marriage and who happen to be doctors are now opposing it as doctors.

Whereas the representative of people who are doctors regardless of their religious affiliation say that's stupid and the other guys should shut up.

On the plus side, there now exists a list of doctors I would never see.

It's nice to see that professionals can keep personal beliefs and work separate.

Mews wrote:It's nice to see that professionals can keep personal beliefs and work separate.

...And the keyword is "beliefs", since they're presenting their argument as a statement of fact - "children do better from families with a mother and father" - when that's a dishonest representation of the results of various studies.

The only real statement we can draw from the studies done into "how well children fare" (which is pretty vague to begin with) is that children who come from broken families typically don't do as well as children where both parents are still together. Which isn't terribly surprising, since they usually had to go through the trauma of their parents' divorce and missed out on having 2 parents to manage them.

Ain't got nothing to do with the correct number of mothers and fathers.

Further to the point they're trying to make - given the number of heterosexual divorces will always greatly eclipse the number of same-sex marriages, what do they propose to do for the children of divorce? Ban it? Mandate that single parents have to get married again? Provide a government issued parent?

Meanwhile, Victoria's Deputy Chief Psychiatrist, Professor Kuravilla George, who was appointed to the board of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission by the State Government, is one of the doctors who signed the petition.

How does stuff like this happen? They all in cahoots, passing bribes under the table? I don't understand how such a humanitarian position can be appointed to a literal bigot.

Aside from that, what annoys me is how Religious folk still cling to the vestigial claims of sanctity of marriage. Marriage in moderns times is mostly a legal term and label to instill rights and laws upon people who enter a long term union/partnership, it's not shitting on your religion, it's literally about legal ramifications and consequences to people that are none of your concern.

My interpretation is that marriage, while vaguely part of the picture, is mostly just a proxy battle. Allowing gay folk to get married implies that homosexuality has the imprimatur of the government, which implies it's ok, which means that being gay is ok. And there's a large subset of people that don't seem able to cope with that for whatever reason. Personally, I put it down to spending way too much time imagining what other people do with their junk.

It's actually not a bad article, as far as these things go, but the constant push for objectivity in journalism really fails at times like this. Having the AMA facing off certainly shows which is the more credible part of the 'he said, she said' debate, but there has to come a time when journalists get to sit down and say: "John Doe said this thing. It is unfounded, dishonest and in all probability, objectively wrong"

At least we haven't yet quite hit the US level of allowing chemists to refuse to fill prescriptions based on their religious values. That intersection of belief and medicine is markedly more terrifying.

dukkha wrote:My interpretation is that marriage, while vaguely part of the picture, is mostly just a proxy battle. Allowing gay folk to get married implies that homosexuality has the imprimatur of the government, which implies it's ok, which means that being gay is ok. And there's a large subset of people that don't seem able to cope with that for whatever reason. Personally, I put it down to spending way too much time imagining what other people do with their junk.

I wouldn't care so much if they were honest about their bigotry.

It's actually not a bad article, as far as these things go, but the constant push for objectivity in journalism really fails at times like this. Having the AMA facing off certainly shows which is the more credible part of the 'he said, she said' debate, but there has to come a time when journalists get to sit down and say: "John Doe said this thing. It is unfounded, dishonest and in all probability, objectively wrong"

At least we haven't yet quite hit the US level of allowing chemists to refuse to fill prescriptions based on their religious values. That intersection of belief and medicine is markedly more terrifying.

The article was okay... the headline was a bit too forgiving for my liking though.

dukkha wrote:My interpretation is that marriage, while vaguely part of the picture, is mostly just a proxy battle. Allowing gay folk to get married implies that homosexuality has the imprimatur of the government, which implies it's ok, which means that being gay is ok. And there's a large subset of people that don't seem able to cope with that for whatever reason. Personally, I put it down to spending way too much time imagining what other people do with their junk.

Emphasis mine.

It's not just in regards to sexual orientation. It also applies to other things, like "no camera's" at the pool, or taking photo's of your kids in the bath. Someone with too much power thinking dirty thoughts and spreading paranoia to suit their own interests/beliefs that the average person wouldn't think twice about.