The reason you're getting tired of seeing this interracial marriage argument is because it demonstrates that your weak unconvincing arguments in support of bigotry against gays are the same as other people's weak unconvincing arguments in support of bigotry against mixed race couples. The reason you are tired is that you are wrong and on the wrong side of history, and you're wasting your energy fighting an uphill losing battle.
So stop complaining that people arguing for marriage equality are making you tired by pointing out that you're no better than bigots who argue against mixed race marriage. People's right to marry the partner they love trumps your right not to be tired of making weak unconvincing arguments. You are not the victim here.
I made a very clear argument as to why an argument against banning interracial marriage says nothing regarding the question of same sex marriage. Instead of addressing my argument head on you respond with the usual emotional non-arguments.
Also note that I never made an argument for or against gay marriage, I simply argued that your argument itself is faulty. People seem to be incapable of distinguishing between the two. Perhaps I'm a rare breed, but I will argue against bad arguments for a conclusion I agree with.
You guys are losing people by attempting to hitch the gay rights wagon onto the civil rights wagon. One does not immediately follow from the other.
Intolerance of intolerance is a well known and thoroughly debated philosophical issue, and the consensus is that it's ethically justified, good for society, and not hypocritical.
The tolerance paradox arises from a problem that a tolerant person might be antagonistic toward intolerance, hence intolerant of it. The tolerant individual would then be by definition intolerant of intolerance.
Michael Walzer asks "Should we tolerate the intolerant?" He notes that most minority religious groups who are the beneficiaries of tolerance are themselves intolerant, at least in some respects. In a tolerant regime, such people may learn to tolerate, or at least to behave "as if they possessed this virtue". Philosopher Karl Popper asserted, in The Open Society and Its Enemies Vol. 1, that we are warranted in refusing to tolerate intolerance. Philosopher John Rawls concludes in A Theory of Justice that a just society must tolerate the intolerant, for otherwise, the society would then itself be intolerant, and thus unjust. However, Rawls also insists, like Popper, that society has a reasonable right of self-preservation that supersedes the principle of tolerance: "While an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger."
"Gays and straights are treated the same - both are free to marry people of the opposite sex. Gays may prefer not to do that, but they do have the legal right."
That is a totally sociopathic argument, and you know it, and it makes you an asshole for having the nerve to make it.
There remains an huge elephant in the room, Brendan, which causes your message of inclusivity to fall flat.
"I'm sorry." "I was wrong." These are the words abusers never say; you want our forgiveness without actually promising to stop harming people, or explaining what was going through your head when you DID harm people before.
You're not sorry. You refuse to mention you were wrong, and apologize for the tangible harm you caused. You skirt around the well known fact that you donated money to destroy the existing and potential marriages of gay families. Everyone knows that. It's on the record.
Your verbal gymnastics to avoid addressing that fact overshadowed your message. Why didn't you mention that YOU PERSONALLY are the cause of people mistrusting Mozilla's commitment to equality, and explain WHAT you did and WHY you did it, as you have always refused to do.
If you learned anything, and changed your bigoted beliefs, then you should ADMIT to making a mistake, EXPLAIN why you made it, and APOLOGIZE for the harm you caused.
But no, you're still an abuser, because:
You refuse to admit you were wrong.
You refuse to explain what the fuck you were thinking when you donated money to support Proposition 8.
You refuse to explain why you intended and succeeded in destroying the existing and potential marriages of gay families.
You refuse to explain what you learned from being wrong, so other bigots like yourself can learn from your mistakes, and hopefully change their ways.
Brendan: You are a bigot, and an abuser. Not just because of your beliefs, which you have kept to yourself because they are so unjustifiable that you are ashamed to discuss them, but because of your ACTIONS, which tangibly contributed to the success of Proposition 8, thus destroying the existing gay marriages in California and preventing others. That was your intent, and that was the result of your actions, so you deserve credit for destroying those marriages, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
The Supreme Court finally ruled that Proposition 8 was wrong. Can you finally admit that YOU were wrong?
But I am sure you won't, because as a religious bigot, you think you're better than everyone else, and that you have a right to tell other people how to live their lives.
You've so much as proven that with your latest cowardly statement, a non-apology apology, which dances around the fact that you did what you did, that brought shame to the company that you direct, and blatantly avoids saying you're sorry and that you're wrong.
Dude: think it through. Steve Job's unprecedented :) is overwhelming evidence of his intent.
When an animal trainer gives a dog a cookie for jumping through a hoop, it's beyond question that the trainer intended the dog to jump through the hoop. Even the dog understands that. That is exactly the situation here.
In your analogy, what dog got what cookie for jumping through what hoop? From context it would seem you're saying that Schmidt recieved the email with the smiley as a "reward". It wasn't sent to him though, but to some HR person at Apple (probably the one who escalated the issue to Jobs).
I have to disagree because there 16 bits isn't enough to encode ACK of the intent of the original email. To me, he's saying "Hey, look what I made Eric do!" which is undoubtably more satisfying than getting some line level employee fired.
Henry Minsky, Marvin's son, works at Nest on the "Thermogotchi", a digital pet that lives on your wall, that's a sensor-driven, Wi-Fi-enabled, self-learning, programmable thermostat which you train to adapt to your habits and lifestyle, and keep happy by feeding love and energy.
SimAntics is a visual artificial intelligence programming language for scripting the behavior of irrational simulated people and intelligent inanimate objects, developed for The Sims at Maxis. ;)
(That's lower case game industry artificial intelligence, not Upper Case Marvin Minsky Artificial Intelligence.)
So stop complaining that people arguing for marriage equality are making you tired by pointing out that you're no better than bigots who argue against mixed race marriage. People's right to marry the partner they love trumps your right not to be tired of making weak unconvincing arguments. You are not the victim here.