Thread:Comments:French Senate vote in support of same-sex marriage/Redefining "marriage" silences ideas that the queer community finds inconvenient./reply

Today I learned: the only way for members of the LGBT community to not have their heads smashed in by bigots is to accept the condition of permanent second-class citizenship, apparently.

The United States "redefined" marriage many years ago to allow for inter-racial couples to get married. Has that made the people who oppose inter-racial marriage unable to express their viewpoint (as opponents of same-sex marriage keep saying, for some reason)? Surely, the words "I think marriage only ought to be between people of the same race" expresses that sentiment today just the same as it did fifty or a hundred years ago.

Many Western governments have changed the legal definition of rape so that marital rape is not legally acceptable as it used to be. Presumably, that was "silencing" the people who think that marital rape is okay. Under the sentiments you've expressed, the only way to not "silence" dissent is to not change anything. No same-sex marriage because that silences the anti-same-sex marriage people (of course, by doing that you are silencing the pro-same-sex marriage people, but that's okay because they are just a bunch of queers). Why just limit it same-sex marriage though?

Here's what will actually happen. Over the next few years, more and more Western countries will legalise same-sex marriage. Except a tiny minority of religious fundamentalists, straight people won't give a shit. And a proportion of gay people will get married. And they'll mostly be happier for it. The small number of people who will continue to have a bee in their bonnet about it will claim to be persecuted and silenced by the state because their view lost in the democratic process: they'll still be able to utter phrases like "I think marriage is between a man and a woman". People might look at them in the same way we now look at people who think that inter-racial marriage is wrong, but that's not a civil liberties issue.