This is why Westboro Baptist Church is a joke

[kandrathe]

So, because religious people in the US are respectful, and Fred Phelps is not respectful (and is in the US), therefore he's not religious?

This is a weird argument. Wouldn't it make more sense to say he's religious in a way which is outdated, extreme, or foreign to the US? Rather than trying to construct an argument about how a fire-and-brimstone pastor is not religious?

(Of course, that wouldn't manage the "no true scotsman" implication...)

I mean other than that he doesn't follow the fundamentals of Christian theology... Maybe he religiously remembers to hate every day, but he isn't following any "religious" teaching that I know of.

More like 58% say homosexuality should be accepted, and 33% say it should be discouraged with 8% don't know, or undecided. However, in the 58% group, only 45% favor same-sex unions. I think the attitude of that 13% would be described as ambivalent to what people do in their relationships, but are more concerned for changing what marriage means.

So, we've gone from "the bulk" of the opposition to gay marriage being mostly concerned about "marriage" rather than "gay," to it being less than a third of the opposition?

I would say that means "the bulk" is from people who are just anti-gay, and only a middling minority are concerned about the niceties of exactly what "marriage" means. (As if we had some kind of consistent definition about *that* either.)

I don't think we can narrowly read the statistics that way. Just because someone thinks homosexuality is "wrong", wouldn't mean they automatically oppose homosexuality existing in the society. It's a convenient tactic to just lump together and discount everyone who disagrees as a bigot, but again, it is usually an obvious tactic of demagoguery.

It's a slim step away from "If you're not for us, you are against us."