Again, your lack of reading comprehension is showing. BELIEVING is different than ACTING. I don't give a shit if Billy Bob believes gay people are the scum of the earth and that they should die, as long as he doesn't ACT on those thoughts or use them to openly degrade others or restrict their rights (so basically as long as he treats gay people like every other human being and doesn't come to me and tell me "I hate gay people so much, you should too because this book says so"), I don't care what he BELIEVES.
Also, yes, you do have a right to make your opinion about gay marriage known, I never said you didn't. My comment is aimed at people who just bash religion or people who bash those who aren't religious based on the fact they don't agree with them. Beliefs should not be a point of conflict as long as they are not harming anyone (I'm not saying they can't be debated, but they should not be used to spark angry, insult filled rants). Since you can't seem to understand what I'm saying, I'll give you an example:
1. A woman, lets call her Sarah, is religious and thinks gay marriage is bad. However, Sarah realizes that they are people too and should have the same rights as the rest of us so she votes for gay marriage (or chooses to abstain from voting). Sarah also does not talk down to gay people and treats them as equals. <---- I'm ok with this because although she believes gay marriage is bad, she is not trying to force her beliefs on anyone, is not trying to restrict their rights as humans, and does not use her beliefs to hurt or degrade them.
2. A woman, let's call her Kim Davis ;), is religious and refuses to give gay people their marriage license because she thinks gay marriage is wrong. <----- this I am not ok with because she is using her beliefs to restrict the rights of others and treats them as inferior humans.
I hope you understand that I am saying I don't give a shit about a person's BELIEFS, I care about their ACTIONS. I do not like people who force their beliefs upon others or who use their beliefs to justify hurting others. I don't care if you believe in a giant spaghetti monster in the sky, as long as you don't try and force me to believe in the spaghetti monster or use your spaghetti monster book to hurt others. Keep your spaghetti monster (or lack thereof) to yourself.
I can't believe I just basically repeated myself 3 times, each comment getting larger, just because you can't understand I'm differentiating between beliefs and actions. This is honestly ridiculous lol
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I also don't care if people believe things and don't act on them, but that really isn't at all realistic. If it's just example 1 then that's fine, but that's really not how it plays out. I haven't even disagreed with you, all I've done is explain why I feel the need to speak out. You're acting like I've laid into you, and i haven't. You've been defensive from the get go and all I've done is explain myself, calmly and coherently. Sure, there might be some people that can understand their views only apply to them, they are the decent people. But they aren't the ones these conversations are necessarily aimed at, and saying leave them alone is basically asking us to leave the bad ones alone too, since we can't tell who's who via the Internet. You can always ask people to be civil, that's more sensible at least.