Posts made by royalcrown89

@Higgs:

I'm also dubious about the idea that men are not entitled to an opinion on abortion because they can't bear children.

Maybe I should clarify because you've obviously derailed into something else. Men can have all the opinion we want. I'm saying no man should be able to FORCE a woman to have a child through legislation or subject her to criminal charges because he's conservative and doesn't believe in science and therefore doesn't believe in spontaneous abortions aka miscarriages. This is actually pretty direct. What evidence do you have that conservatives believe in science enough to the point that they won't subject women to prison sentences or even death for having spontaneous abortions aka miscarriages? It is a known fact that American conservatives are dismissive to science, especially medical and climate science. Me and millions of others are not willing to sacrifice women's lives to find out. It's not even worth taking the risk.

@dist:

It's a free service. You don't like it? Get out. People seem to forget they are grown and should take responsibility for their own decisions. If you make your life public online and want to be a part of that community, you need to deal with the good and the bad. I deleted mine years ago. Not because of whatever agenda people think they may have. I just was fed up with idiotic selfies and generic food pics.

I agree with this. There have been people making direct threats to me before under the guise of "free speech" and I've reported them plenty of times before and even got them rightfully terminated. You cannot make a threat saying you'll "find my house" and "burn it down" because I posted a pic of a bumper sticker on my car calling our current president a bigot. A maniac posted that multiple times on my pics and I reported him and he got permanently terminated. Threats of physical harm are not freedom of speech.

On the other side, no one should be blocked for stating their opinions on something. I've seen people getting terminated for saying "BLM sucks" or "I hate Mexicans." How are those threats? I'm friends with a white man from my job who posted a short video about how BLM is ruining the black community and while I disagreed with him, I don't think it was right for so many people to flood his page with hate messages and then they got him terminated. He is not a racist and has eaten dinner at my house and I've eaten dinner at his. I tried telling the maniacs that and they threatened to get me removed, too, even though they couldn't. Facebook didn't even let him appeal it or anything. They just removed years of photos and other things he'd put up. It's not right and yes someone needs to file a suit against them. There is a huge difference between threatening people and stating opinions.

@Higgs:

I am not comfortable with either of the polarised options offered, though I will say that I am definitely uneasy with the idea of abortion. But it seems to me that there are a lot of tangential issues being raised here that are not really relevant to the main question. Yes, no doubt many conservatives are hypocritical. Yes, no doubt there is a certain irony in a 'pro-life' stance that nevertheless embraces the death penalty or war. Yes, opposing abortion raises imperatives about caring for young mothers and unwanted children. All of these are valid points, but they seem to me to be deflections from the raw force of the main argument.

The core questions - it seems to me - are these: Is an unborn child a person? Does it have rights? Does it have interests that should be protected? Can it be right to sacrifice its interests in favour of those of another person?

If an unborn child does have such rights, at what point in the pregnancy do they apply? At what point between conception and birth does it have a moral claim upon us? At what point is that moral claim so great that the interests of the mother should be regarded as secondary? And should any behaviour on the part of the mother that potentially endangers the foetus be seen as culpable?

If an unborn child does not have such rights, then does anybody? At what point in a person's life do they stop being a mere organism and become a person?  If we can morally kill a foetus, then why not a newborn? Why not a severely brain-damaged child or disabled adult?  Why not anyone at all if convenience dictates?

I think these are all profoundly challenging questions, and I don't pretend to have simple answers to any of them. But I think they are real questions, and they deserve to be discussed seriously. I am afraid that abortion has been largely removed from the domain of ethics and placed in the domain of political rhetoric. Which does us all a huge disservice, whichever side of the argument we may find ourselves on.

In my opinion, it's a slippery slope the moment you label the unborn as a person with full rights. What happens when the woman has a miscarriage and no one believes her and charges her with murder? It is known fact at this point that American conservatives have zero respect for science; therefore, it can become very dangerous when science is the explanation for a spontaneous abortion, the medical term for a common miscarriage. If we change laws now, a woman can suffer a miscarriage and she's charged with murder because she can't prove without science that it was an actual miscarriage and not something she did to herself to cause the fetus to die. Are you willing to go down that route when history shows us what happens when we leave the very livelihood of each and every woman at the hands of men? History gives me no hope that if we do outlaw abortions and make them punishable with prison time or even death that men won't use actual accounts of miscarriages to mercilessly punish women. I would say let's just give it a go and try it out for a few years, but I have more respect for women than that and thousands if not millions of women would suffer. No woman should be told what to do with her body and until we get to a point where natural born men can give birth to children, this is not an issue where men should have much of a say. Women have the right to bring a child into this world if they want. They also have a right not to bring one into this world. It's sad that even today we still do not want women to hold any iota of power, not even when it comes to their own bodies.

@brianboru72:

It's a pathetic last ditch defense- they can't defend the actions of Trump at this point so they try to deflect the issue by saying how bad Obama and Clinton were/would have been.  ::)

This of course doesn't change the fact that you have a President who is clueless, has the temperament of a child, and who is only interested in enriching himself and his family> in fact he's so arrogant he isn't doing anything to hide it anymore. It has always been about making himself great at the expense of everything else, including America.   :crazy2:

Exactly! They're acting as if they can wish Hillary/Obama into the White House or as if Hillary/Obama are our shadow presidents. It's so irrational and borderline insane. How can you argue that he's legitimately our president on one hand and then act as if we have a shadow presidency on the other hand? I'm honestly starting to believe they're living in an alternative universe while we're suffering in the real one with this highly unpopular incompetent president who still has strange hair  :crazy2:

Okay, why did some people vote to say the Republicans created the KKK? That's just historically inaccurate. Democrats worked hand in hand with the KKK, especially the Southern Democrats/States' Rights Democrats who became the Dixiecrats. That's well-known and well documented history. This thread has gone completely  :crazy2: LOL. You got mhorndisk who believes Lincoln was on the side of the Confederacy and as usual raphjd trying to deflect what the thread is about. This is a hot mess  :crazy2:

What does all of this have to do with the fact that we're still stuck with a highly unpopular president? This was my point. No one is making the case for our highly unpopular president, only using the "idea" of Hillary and the 2016 election. You cannot make #45 popular with the, "but Hillary…" excuse. Is it currently working for him or is he stuck with a 35-39% approval rating in the final days of his first 100 days? That hasn't happened to any president in recent history and it doesn't matter how many times you yell "but Hillary..." it will not save him. It's a shame that we are stuck with someone who the majority of this country did not want, whether they voted or not. That's all I'm pointing out. So you can attempt to derail this topic all you want but it doesn't change the sad reality. I only hope the office of the presidency isn't degraded any further. If it keeps going this way, we are heading towards something dangerously unprecedented. We cannot have a president this unpopular making serious decisions for people who do not want him. He won my state and there has been nonstop resistance to much of what he says and does by nearly everyone here, including those who voted for him. Longtime Congressmen have been getting booed by the very people who voted them in. Do you know how many constituent meetings I've been to from 2007 to now in this state? I've never seen Republicans booing Republicans the way I've been seeing lately.

So the only time we as gay men should care about women's bodies is when we're attempting to control their bodies? The day men can biologically carry a baby for nine months and give birth, we'll have a say in this. Until then, leave women's bodies the hell alone. If not, then let's give women the power to vote whether or not men can be kicked in the nuts against our will without any legal ramifications  :crazy2:

BLM is about police accountability so bringing them up in this was just…irrational. What happened to Robery Godwin, Sr. was awful but I fail to see what any of it has to do with BLM and their reasons for demanding police accountability. Steve Stephens didn't mention BLM when he murdered Mr. Godwin, so what's the connection? While I disagree with BLM on many, many things and am glad to see their role in discourse has been reduced heavily lately, there simply is no connection to that movement and this horrible killing. The 2nd Amendment and the little regulation on that Amendment has more to do with this case than BLM.

@mhorndisk:

Wow this is really a bunch of "convincing talk," (explaining) which in determining when someone isn't being honest, goes on forever trying to "convince you that they're a good person," rather than just answering the simple matter at hand with simple deniability. I don't care about the fact that you think one politician did this and another did that, and therefore the whole mass of Republicans are racist. Hillary is still a racist, she came from Arkansas and praised Margaret Sanger, who said black people are weeds who need to be exterminated, and Trump is from NYC, where you don't get far by being a bigot. You can't say the whole Republican Establishment is racist because one Senator switched. That's a bunch of hullabaloo. The Democrats are still racist to this day, promising "free stuff," just like FDR did in the 30s to win the black vote. You say it had to do with something else, as in "philosophical reasons," but give ZERO examples, and therefore, I conclude what you are saying to be total nonsense. Thanks for trying!

(Only read the bold words if you don't feel like reading or can't understand the other parts)

I didn't deny it because I agree 100% with you that the Democratic Party was the party of the KKK historically. Some could and have argued that the Democratic Party indeed did create the KKK. I myself believe the Democratic Party created the KKK; hence, why I agree with you on that point. It is well documented that the Democrats worked with the KKK to disenfranchise black people and even killed black people and white people who tried to help black people. Where in my previous statement did I deny that fact? I literally began my post with "It is a well known fact that the Democratic Party created and supported the KKK for a time. No one has ever disputed that."

My statements weren't meant to be "convincing," I was simply stating the complex history behind the party realignments as they have been studied for decades by political and non-political scholars from many different angles. You cannot simplify something this complex effectively, but here are well-known facts that I'm sure you could easily check since there's so much info on Google about them (if you didn't learn them in school):

(1) Democrats did give the KKK a platform and are arguably the creators of the KKK.
(2) The KKK participated in voter suppression for a very long time with the help of the Democratic Party.
(3) Many, if not all, Southern segregationists were Democrats up until the Democratic Party began changing. After 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed, followed by the Voting Rights Act in 1965, most of those Southern segregationists abandoned the party. (I used Strom Thurmond as an example because he led the fillibuster against the Civil Rights Act that failed.)
(4) Following Nixon's infamous "Southern Strategy," all of those segregationists and racists who hadn't joined the Republican Party the way Strom Thurmond and others had done prior to the 1970s, joined the Republican Party. Robert Byrd remained in the Democratic Party due to West Virginia continuing to vote Democrat (they've always had a low population of people of color); therefore, he couldn't switch parties without risking the loss of his senate seat. He later claimed he'd "changed" his perception on people of color but who knows, we can't read minds  ;D
(5) The Republican Party has constantly passed bills that courts have determined were crafted to disenfranchise black and brown people, and many of those bills were struck down after they were turned into laws. Republicans challenged the historic Voting Rights Act and were successful in dismantling one of its most effective provisions. The Democrats didn't do that, did they? Who is currently participating in voter suppression?
(6) David Duke was (maybe still is) a KKK member and he ran for office multiple times, including in the 2016 election, as a Republican, not a Democrat. I'm sure you can find current KKK members who are Democrats but you have to first find out (a) where that person lives because studies have shown local demographics play a huge role in whether white people prefer Democratic policies more than Republican policies and (b) whether that person realizes the Democratic Party of today is not the same Democratic Party that helped the KKK all those years ago.

Main Point
To say the Democratic and Republican Parties are the same now as they were prior to realignments is wholly ignorant to the very detailed history. Are you saying that President Lincoln, a Republican who represented the Union during the Civil War, was for the Confederacy? Because the Republican Party of today is the party that fights for the Confederate battle flag to be displayed on public statehouse grounds and want to preserve all of the Confederate monuments throughout the South. It was Jefferson Davis and the Democrats who represented the Confederacy, right? So if the parties never changed, why on earth is it the Republican Party fighting to preserve the battle flag of the Confederacy and not the Democrats who represented the Confederacy during the Civil War? Are you arguing that Abraham Lincoln was instead a Democrat since the Democrats are currently trying to remove the battle flag from statehouse grounds and other public property? You cannot pretend that the party realignments did not happen because they actually did happen. What you are arguing counters the documented history of our country.

@mhorndisk:

Why would he do something impeachable? Let's not reach for straws, he knows the law and he knows you're watching, so it ain't going to happen. And the point is IT HASN'T. He is going to be good, so now it's time to look at Hillary's crimes, when she clearly was guilty of everything Comey said, but then said she was "ok." Let's go after the people who have actually broken the law. It wasn't a mistake that Hillary actually had a private server in her bathroom and sent classified information. It was in her BATHROOM for God sakes! She knew what she was doing!

:crazy2:

@aadam101:

Trump hasn't destroyed the GOP.  He has humiliated them but the GOP will turn on Trump in a heartbeat and happily throw him out of office.  They would much rather have Pence anyway.  They are just waiting for him to commit an impeachable offense.  I'm sure  he has already.  We just don't know about it yet.

This is true, they simply are waiting for him to do something so terrible that they'll be forced to turn on him. There's already a few who have jumped ship lately and we all remember how they were ready to abandon him when the "grab 'em by the meow" tape came out lol. They were all running around like  :crazy2: until he won the election, which is proof their support of him is fickle.

The Republicans aren't destroyed, but he has made them significantly unpopular. We just don't know what it means since the Democrats also are significantly unpopular. We're back to the usual situation: low turnout in the midterms will help the Republicans and high turnout will result in Democrats winning a lot. What we all can agree on is there can be no more North Carolina bathroom bill situations because social issues haven't been Republicans' strong suit since the 1950s. Stick to talking about tax cuts and removing regulations on businesses to create more jobs because messing with the LGBT community in 2017 will put you in the North Carolina situation. Is Pat McCrory still governor or did he lose??  :cheers:

@mhorndisk:

What's crazy is the demoncrats banned the rebel flag because it has a history as "racist" when they founded the KKK. Why don't they ban themselves? Good grief!

I'm glad you began a new thread because what you've posted here in this thread is 100% irrelevant to what this topic is about. This level of deflection is simply  :crazy2:

It is a well known fact that the Democratic Party created and supported the KKK for a time. No one has ever disputed that. However, minimal research will show you that both political parties went through complex realignments and took very different positions before becoming what they are today. For example, known lifelong racist from my state Strom Thurmond was a Democrat before 1964 because of what the Democratic Party stood for at that time. He even ran for president as a Dixiecrat in 1948 and received 39 electoral college votes from the South because of the racist ideologies he ran on. After 1964, Thurmond joined the Republican Party where he remained until he died because he felt the Republican Party better reflected the way he felt on many issues, including race. I am from the state Senator Thurmond is from, I have lived here my whole life, and everyone here knows his record and what he fought for so there's no way this can be twisted to fit any other narrative. The man was a lifelong racist and he switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party because of the complex realignments, not because he changed. There's only one senator who remained in the Democratic Party through the realignments and that's West Virginia's senator Robert Byrd, and he only remained in the Democratic Party because until very recently (the Obama years) did West Virginia begin voting reliably Republican.

Lastly, black people did not join forces with the KKK. Black people joined forces with a faction of the Democratic Party that was mostly based in the northeast while JFK and later LBJ were president because that faction of the Democratic Party was trying to help them gain the right to vote in the South. You also had Republicans fighting for Civil Rights for black people in those days, such as Mitt Romney's father. Prior to that you did have a significant portion of black people support FDR; however, FDR wasn't giving support to the KKK because he wasn't a part of the southern Democrats who were giving support to the KKK. The party was nowhere near as national as it is today, so you had many different factions using the party name but supporting universally different causes for a time. This is why you don't attempt to simplify complex history, it ends up making you look incompetent.

Edit: Condoleezza Rice has often stated one of the reasons she is a Republican is because her father was denied the right to vote in the South by the Democratic Party and the Republican Party let him register and vote in elections. This is akin to this thread in that it ignores the fact that the parties went through major changes and realignments over the past seventy or more years. Today, it is the Republican Party that has passed laws proven–-and struck down---by courts that are attempting to disenfranchise black and brown voters; something the Democratic Party did prior to the party realignments.

Not sure that gay marriage is bad for gay people, but I know being pro-discrimination or even hinting at being pro-discrimination is bad for business. Just ask those who lost out on so much in North Carolina. Don't you love living in a capitalist society where we can also vote with our dollars?  :cheers:

@mhorndisk:

Gay marriage is very bad for gay people.

LOL  :crazy2:

@raphjd:

@raphjd, 95-98% of what you say is wholly irrational…you know the rest.

So says the person that screams "racism" any time a white person disagrees with black people, regardless of the topic.

You are delusional if you think if the election went the other way that your side wouldn't be saying "yeah but what if Trump won?".   We heard that kind of stuff while Obama was in office about republicans who ran against him and even GWB, who couldn't be President again because of term limits.

You are a typical partisan hack.  It's ok when your side does it, but the other side is never allowed to do it.

Most of your reply is wholly irrelevant to anything I've said, so I'll just respond by saying what I've been saying: Hillary Clinton did not win the election. She is not making decisions to drop huge bombs everywhere without verifying that no great loss of innocent lives are in jeopardy because she is not our commander-in-chief. We only have one president and that president should be held accountable to what he says and does. You CANNOT use the idea of an alternate reality to defend very real actions caused in our very real reality.

@TheNewt:

I have not noticed Donald Trump's supporters doing what the OP claims.

I have noticed a lot of people who are angry that Donald Trump won doing this:

@raphjd:

It's your side that keeps the "not our president" and "yeah, but if Hillary won" crap going.

There are still teachers/professors calling the election an act of terrorism/violence on the people of the US.

You guys are just as bad as the Tea Party wanting the country to fail to prove Obama was bad.

Are you serious? There are more than 15 topics posted on this forum alone about "Hillary Clinton taking Haiti funds," "Hillary Clinton starting a child prostitution pizza ring," "Hillary Clinton" this and "Hillary Clinton" that. There are threads solely about #45 and out of nowhere, his supporters on here bring up Hillary Clinton, the 2016 election and they go on about it as if it isn't the year 2017 or as if Hillary is the actual president. Hillary Clinton is as about as relevant as a potato chip when it comes to the presidency and what's going on in our country right now. Yes, there are people questioning the legitimacy of the election but I AM NOT NOR AM I PROPOSING THAT IN THIS THREAD. That has absolutely nothing to do with the point of this thread. "What ifs" are not a part of this thread.

@aadam101:

Obvoiusly they haven't all gotten the message or they wouldn't continue writing these bills in the first place.

Yeah, they haven't all gotten the message yet. But the ones in leadership have. It was the North Carolina Republican Speaker of the House that put a stop to the bill's progression and deemed it dead on arrival. After what that state went through, I have confidence it'll be like that from now on.

I do think one of the biggest problems is fellow gays wanting to see our community be discriminated against. Look at how some of the users on this forum respond to Republican discrimination against fellow gays, it's almost like they enjoy seeing fellow gays get bashed, treated poorly or even sometimes murdered during hate crimes. I've brought up the sad and brutal way Matthew Shepard's life ended on here multiple times, and you would think everyone on here would at least agree that the heinous hate crime is horrible but there are users on here who couldn't care less. It's very sad and when Republicans see how divided we are as members of the LGBT community, it helps them discriminate against us all. How can we continue to fight against very real acts of discrimination when a large portion of the community not only dismisses those acts' legitimacy but also wants to see Republican lawmakers create laws that harm us?

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/north-carolina-bill-banning-same-sex-marriage-again-won%E2%80%99t-be-heard-house-speaker-says/ar-BBzM0zj

This week, North Carolina Republican state legislators tried to introduce a bill that would make same-sex marriage illegal and the Republican House Speaker in the legislature has said the bill is now "dead on arrival." It seems that Republicans in North Carolina are slowly understanding the country has moved on. After the disastrous "bathroom bill" debacle, Republicans in the state obviously realize money matters way more than their backwards beliefs. We are a capitalist society and when North Carolina lost out on billions of dollars due to the "bathroom bill," it appears the Republican party in that state got the message. They lost out on being able to host the NBA All Star game because of the discriminating bill. Their Republican governor lost his reelection due to that same discriminating bill. You cannot pass discriminatory laws in the US anymore without very real ramifications for passing those laws.

Now, will the national Republican party get the message? That is the million dollar question at the moment. Will Republicans in other states attempt to discriminate against LGBT individuals knowing it will negatively effect their state's economy? I have a feeling legislation attempts will cease, but I also have a feeling that there will be attempts to get cases to the Supreme Court. Once again, the country has moved on from this and any attempts at this point will come with heavy consequences. If the Republicans do get a case to the Supreme Court and lets say the justices actually do say, "It's up to states whether they want to adhere to the previous ruling," then each state will still be hit hard economically if they decide not to adhere to the court's previous ruling. There is no way out of the box Republicans will put themselves in by going after this issue.

As a gay married man who is currently taking advantage of the many privileges given to married people, I sincerely hope the Republican party will back off of this issue. Back off of any issue that discriminates against LGBT individuals because it's just not good for business.

@skizzage:

Hurting the cuck's feelings. Poor lil cuck and his poor lil feelings. You throw words around like cuck and sjw using them as insults and then run to your cave when someone throws them back at you. Cliche. Stereotype. Boring.

Man, I really regret stumbling into the political forum in a gay porn torrent site.

I believe he's trying too hard to be right-wing. You can be gay and right-wing without completely losing your rationale. He has obviously lost his rationale and has gone off into a highly irrational tangent where you either hate yourself and agree 100% with him or you are a SJW. I actually empathized with him about one of his current situations because unlike him, I can show empathy towards someone even if I cannot relate to them politically, socially, economically, etc. I truly believe he does not know reality from fiction at this point.