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Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Muddled Watery Language

I was reading this article, http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/analysis.aspx?id=23113 about the recent Supreme Court decision in Christian Legal Society V. Martinez. I already figured how it would turn out as a College has the right to set its own policies and any student organization needs to follow those if they wish to get funds from that university, but the following quote I found to be quite troubling.

"... this language demonstrated that “the Supreme Court definitively held that sexual orientation is not merely behavioral, but rather, that gay and lesbian individuals are an identifiable class.” As a class, gays would more easily qualify for protection under anti-discrimination laws."

Since when are people who share in a common activity a class? We don't do this with anything else, so why sex? Why can people be defined by sexual behavior and not fishing for example? If a group of people enjoy fishing and are a community of fishermen, are they a fishing class? Are gaming licenses discriminatory against the fishing class? Maybe those need to be abolished. If we can start calling people who participate in an activity and group together around said activity and lifestyle a class, then who isn't a class? And then there is the matter of the word "discrimination" which has been throne around far too much and is soaked in a negative connotation. All groups are discriminatory by definition. If you have a group that means there are people who are not in the group; that there are certain qualifications to be in the group. Example: National Honors Society. Example: Football Teams. I mean those groups meet the criteria for discrimination too don't they? It is discriminatory to ask someone who wants to join an organization to not participate in homosexual activity even if it a prohibition equally levied against all those who wish to join because it excludes those don't wish to do that. The mistake people make is thinking that is wrong. It is not singling any one person out. It's not saying change the color of your skin or your ethnic background and homosexual activity does not fit into those categories anyway. Even if it turns out to be a genetic thing it IS something the individual has the choice to activly participate in, or not. With that particular group, if someone wished to continue to participate in that action it would be obvious that they were not willing to meet the criteria for participating in that group. Isn't college itself an example of this? You have to meet certain criteria to get in. It is discriminatory against those who cannot pay, those whose grades were low, and those whose test scores were low. It's about compliance to the groups standards and every group has them. As for associating with that school, that is an entirely different issue, as the school can make it's own policies to which student organizations must conform if they want funding ect. That's a seperate issue. However; I think they will run into the problem of how to distinguish groups at all if they really take what they say seriously. I'm thorougly disturbed by this language though, and I think it has some bad implications for the future.

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