It’s not a bizarre reach when it’s the only thing he actually mentions.
Paddick never mentions that he got his views of Farron from the media smears.
You’ve been making a lot of assumptions during this whole discussion.
Sure. Mainly I’ve just quoted people’s actual words, but occasionally I’ve gone out on a limb and assumed that someone who is gay would be offended by someone else saying that being gay is a sin. Your response above - that the person taking offense is simply being ignorant of theological dogma, and in fact being bigoted themselves - is so completely outside my weltanschauung that I don’t think we have any common ground for discussion.
He only mentions what came to light during the election campaign, and the only thing that came to light during the election was media smears. If he has personal knowledge of anything he’s kept it to himself.
[quote=“d_r, post:462, topic:86909”]
Sure. Mainly I’ve just quoted people’s actual words, but occasionally I’ve gone out on a limb and assumed that someone who is gay would be offended by someone else saying that being gay is a sin.[/quote]
people take offense to all kinds of things, that doesn’t mean the offense was justified. also, Farron never said being gay is a sin, in fact he said the opposite.
Maybe you should try and expand your weltanschauung then? I am not a Christian, but I am capable of evaluating good-faith arguments and the points-of-view of other people, even if I disagree with their conclusions it’s possible for disagreement without disrespect and prejudice.
You’re right, If I call a bigot “a bigot”, and he chooses to be offended, that’s his choice, and I have to decide whether I’m OK with his hurt feelings (I am in this case) or not. As for the rest, I’ve made my positions clear upthread, and don’t see any point in continuing to hash them around with you here.
Farron is gone, many people who support gay rights (and legal abortion) will be happy with that, and with Tory lapdog Clegg gone as well perhaps the Lib Dems can start to regain some of their former claim to be a party favoring social liberalism and democratic progress.
You didn’t call a bigot a bigot, you called someone who campaigned for the rights of marginalised people a bigot. You are a bigot if the only reason you have to call someone a bigot is their religious affiliation, and that’s all you have.
That’s Khan leading the Pride festival in London, by the way. Khan has been an open supporter of gay rights and the Pride movement for a long time. He is firmly, resolutely, on the right side of this one.
People’s reactions would be quite different to these allegations if they were directed at Khan, because he’s not afraid to give unequivocal support. Unlike Farron, who absolutely should have quit if his (bigoted) personal views put him at odds with the majority of his party. He figured he could gloss over it and still do a decent job but he crumpled when asked to try to explain himself.
Don’t even get me started on why evangelists feel like they can pick that one passage from the Old Testament and ignore the rest of it. Jesus wasn’t exactly judgmental about people’s sexual behaviour now, was he?
I’m glad the fucker’s gone. Evangelist homophobia has no place in a modern society. If your sky god tells you gay marriage is a sin, fine; don’t get gay married. While you’re at it, you should probably not be leading the traditional party of individual liberty and personal freedom.
Congratulations on completely missing the point. I know Sadiq Khan doesn’t deserve any criticism, but neither does Farron, the only difference with certain people seems to be that one is a Muslim and the other is a Christian (and it’s only acceptable to have bigoted views about the latter among some people, vice versa for others of course, me I prefer to be bigoted against neither of them).
Seeing as ‘the fucker’ in question agrees with you that homophobia has no place in a modern society, and that gay marriage is a human right, I’m not sure why you’re glad he’s gone, or think that he’s a fucker. It’s a shame that these smears have proven so pervasive.
Is it bigotry having problems with the faith who took over my liberal leaning broad church CofE parish, then made me feel unwelcome there? I wasn’t out at the time, but the fear that they would discover that I was trans and bisexual did not improve my mental health. Listening to their comments on whichever LGBT person was in the headlines at that moment was extremely damaging. I eventually had a mental breakdown and left the church in my mid to late teens. i still have feelings of self hatred with it’s roots in that period.
I don’t believe anymore (nothing to do with the evangelical cuckoos), but I am more than happy to support LGBTQ affirming faiths.
Just like not all Christians are homophobes, not all Evangelicals are homophobes either, Farron seems to be one of the good ones. There seems to be a split in virtually all Christian denominations these days, in some sects it’s 50/50, in others it’s more skewed to one or the other viewpoint, the same is true in other faiths as well (just the other day there was a scandal involving the Jewish Orthodox in London, one of their leaders said some fairly mildly supportive things about gay people, but enough to cause a scandal within their ranks). It seems to me that when someone in a faith that has been traditionally, and in many respects currently, opposed to civil rights issues stands up for those rights we should be giving them more support, not less, even if they’re not always perfect, if they’re helping make things better surely that’s more important? The same thing happens all the time with reformist/modernising voices in the Muslim community as well, they get a huge amount of flack from left in particular, it’s pretty disheartening.
Congratulations on the false equivalency. Khan doesn’t deserve criticism because he is vocally pro-LGBTQ rights. Farron does deserve criticism because despite his voting record, his personal comments and his inability to give a straight answer on the subject lends itself to the idea that even though he is prepared to vote against his conscience for the sake of political expediency, on a personal level his faith means that he finds gay marriage objectionable. If Khan felt the same way, I’d be objecting to him too but he doesn’t. It has nothing to do with the fact that one is a Christian and one is a Muslim but thanks for parroting the Paranoid Christian viewpoint on that.
Even if I accept the idea that his voting record means his personal views are not bigoted (and I really, really don’t) the fact that he fudged the answer to the question repeatedly and in doing so caused a great deal of harm to his party is enough to mean he should stand down. He failed to double the number of seats held by the Lib Dems as he claimed he would, which is also enough for him to step down. He massively misjudged the mood of the country and ran on a platform that didn’t appeal to voters. Guess what? That means he should step down, too. The fact that he blamed all of these failures on anti-Christian intolerance rather than his own ineptitude suggests, to me, that we are well rid of the fucker.
It’s not a false equivalency, there’s no reason to believe either of them are homophobes, and plenty of evidence to the contrary for both. Your only reason for not accepting that fact seems to be assumptions and suspicion based on his religious affiliation, not on anything he has ever said or done. None of his answers were fudges either, he was pretty clear on what he was saying, he’s not a theologian, it’s not his responsibility to talk about doctrinal interpretations of his faith (just like it’s not Khan’s - they’re politicians not clerics, who’d have a far harder time explaining away Islam’s doctrinal positions on homosexuality if anyone ever asked him about that).
As to the election results, well that’s obviously a totally separate issue. I wasn’t a big fan of his prior to winning the leadership, though there weren’t many better candidates to be honest, nor are there now unfortunately. He did ok in the election, clawed back some seats, but ultimately it was a fairly disappointing result.
Here’s a piece of news that puts recent events into an awful lot of context.
Grenfell tower could have been prevented, because here’s an example of where it was prevented, over 10 years ago. Of course, it wasn’t listened to by multiple UK governments.
Here’s the most chillingly relevant quote:
But the report added: “Notwithstanding… we do not believe that it should take a serious fire in which many people are killed before all reasonable steps are taken towards minimising the risks.”
