Where do your rights end and mine begin?
"The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."
Zechariah Chafee
I think that's pretty sound in principle. If someone's behavior isn't harming me, it's none of my business. Two homosexuals want to go at it, none of my business unless they're noisy, same applies to heterosexuals. That's reasonable. If they're having sex on the front lawn, that's indecent behavior, same goes for a heterosexual couple or anyone parading around in the buff.
The kicker seems to be imaginary wrongs. I can prove a harm if a neighbor is dumping motor oil in the backyard or burning tires or running a meth lab. There's a code violation if he fills has backyard with livestock or turns his house into a daycare. But imaginary wrongs, that comes down to faith. Blacks in the neighborhood lowering property values, the mere presence of gays threatening to increase incidents of homosexuality among the children, there's no more factual basis to those beliefs than religious dietary laws. Show me the scientific test that indicates this steak came from a kosher-slaughtered cow and that steak came from a halal-slaughtered cow. Ok, with property values there might be a drop due to hysteria, the same as if people stop shopping at a business rumored to be owned by a witch but that's just ignorance.
If your identity, cultural or religious, is predominantly about who you hate, you are fucked. You have nothing to offer the world. The only positive contribution you can make is dying childless and letting your ignorance follow you to the grave.
What I think is being missed here with people in these debates is the question of public and private behavior. Nobody is legislating that you have to like people. If you don't like gay sex, don't fuck someone your same gender you don't believe in divorce, don't have one. If you don't like black people, you don't have to be friends. That's private. But in public you have to suck it up.
The one difference, I think, is between customer and proprietor. You don't have to shop at a given store but if you do, they're obligated to serve.
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At this point in the game I couldn't deal with living in an uptight religious type area.
