"Jesus would rather kill, not marry, gay people" - Franklin Graham

[polymath257]

OK, exactly what do you think it wrong with being gay? If you take any of your statements and apply them to the issue of miscegenation (sexual relations between races), would you have the same conclusions, or would you see them as bigoted?

So, for example, if someone claims, based on the BIble (re: Ham and his descendants), that marriage between races is immoral, would you see that as bigoted or not?

BTW, I am on the side of it being bigoted.

I think that you are going to have a difficult time trying to justify miscegenation using the bible or Christian tradition.  However, lets say that there is another religion for arguments sake, which has a long and standing tradition that it is wrong to mix races.  I view bigotry

Merriam Webster gives the following definition of Bigot:

a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance

So what we see here, is hatred and intolerance towards a group of people.   So the question would be, does this person show these things?  Are there reasons apart from their disagreement on interracial marriage to think that it stems from hating black people (or white or whatever the case may be)?   Even on intolerance, I'm going to view this as more than saying that they think something is wrong.   Otherwise, we can't even be intolerant to intolerance.  Tolerance doesn't mean that we must agree, and even implies that we do not.  

When you talk about the reasons that something is wrong, I think this is part of a larger conversation.   Why is anything wrong?   Is there anything that is objectively wrong (moral realism).  Or is it all just subjective (opinion or something else).  This could be a case, where those who say it is subjective don't act like it is subjective.  How would you reason that murder is wrong, apart from a pragmatic point of view, which is really just arguing for convenience (not that it is really wrong).  You need to start with some objective basis, with which to reason that something is wrong, and not just that you dislike it (or pragmatism or whatever).  I think that we all have a sense of right and wrong, which is founded in God.  Not that you need to believe in God to necessarily know right and wrong, or that you need to believe and follow the Bible.  It's more basic and ingrained than that.  So in some sense, I think that it is the wrong question for reasons why it is wrong, because for a particular situation we may reason for why something is wrong or not, but we are reasoning from properly basic moral principles.  And of course if morality is subjective, then it's the wrong question to ask, because morals are relative and based on the subject, and you are acting like they are objective.

Even other primates have a sense of fairness and 'right and wrong'. It comes from being a social species.

What is the basis of morality? Avoidance of unnecessary harm. There. No deities are required. It is *all* about how we relate to other people. We can debate about what constitutes 'harm', of course, and that is how we improve morally. But the basic fact: unnecessary harm is immoral is still preserved.

In the case of gay marriage, to deny societal acceptance of an otherwise loving healthy relationship is to perpetrate unnecessary harm. Hence, it is immoral.