Why force someone ELSE to pay for it who has always been against it?
Oh man, I pay for all kinds of shit I am ethically, morally, and adamantly against.
Welfare, Social Security, Funding of "alternative healthcare" bullshit like chiropractors and homeopathy. I'm forced to pay for recycling in my county even though I am 100% against recycling. These are just a few things.
There are things that are done because the majority of people think it is good or us or because the majority of people want it. Like it or not, you have to pay for those things if you want to be part of society. If you don't want to be part of society, you can be amish.
That said, I am a very in favor of personal responsibility and freedom. This causes a cognitive dissidence issue. For us to have personal liberty and freedom of choice, we have to sometimes force things on society that might take away someone's personal choice.
For example, until all of society can say when life begins, we need to protect society's right to by birth control including the morning after pill. This may mean forcing it's sale to prevent a majority from imposing their will on women. This is the dilemma I face when deciding my stance on this. I think forcing someone to do something against their will is bad. I think taking away choice from someone because your beliefs don't match with theirs (in a sense that can't be scientifically proven their position is harmful to society) is also fundamentally wrong.
To renforce this statement, I'd use the example of our county wide smoking ban. I do not smoke, I hate smokers, and I hate being around smoke. However, I am against the smoking ban in my county because I think it should be the property owners choice. I do not think there is a 'right to smoke' like my father does, but I do think that there is a right to decide what legal activities can happen in your business.
So in the case of healthcare and birth control, because the minority of business were not allowing it (and it was not a growing trend), I am against forcing them to pay for birth control. Especially because these women could get another job, and social pressure to find good workers would eventually lead them to ether fail or re-examine their policy. I call this personal responsibility. That said, if the companies in question were paying for male birth control, then we have a gender inequality issue that should be addressed (either stop paying for male birth control (snip snip) or start paying for women birth control (pills and abortions). I would gladly allow the government to step in on behalf of women who simply want to be treated as first class citizens. Also, how is this an atheist agenda? Last I checked, the president goes to church. This is another problem with governing via religion, everyone thinks everyone else is worshiping a false god (He's not a real christian, thats not a real church, etc).
On to gay marriage. This is an issue where forcing christians has no grounds and holds no water. Legalizing gay marriage would in no way force churches to marry gays anymore than it forced churches to marry my wife and I (no church would do it, we had to find a judge). Legalization of gay marriage would simple allow two people who love each other the ability to get the same legal protections men and women get when they love each other. In fact, my personal stance on this is that legal and religious marriage should be in no way related. In fact, I would support the dissolving of legal marriage and it's replacement with some other document giving the same rights, but not using the word marriage. Perhaps married people should get no legal protections and instead should be forced to also get a civil union if they want the current protections married people get. I see no gay agenda beyond gay people wanting to be treated as first class citizens and have the same rights straight people have. I can't in good conscious entertain any moral argument that says two people who are not harming anyone else should be forced by law not have the same protections I enjoy. In fact, I find the christian argument much worse than the gay argument.
If we are enforcing the sanctity of marriage why is divorce legal? Why is premarital sex legal? Why do we let non-christians marry at all? Why can a man and woman legally live in the same house? Why does common law marriage exist? Why do we allow single mothers? Why isn't adultery a capital crime? The whole argument is flawed in that the very fact that my wife and myself are married proves marriage is not sanctified. We are two godless heathens screwing our brains out with birth control married only for the legal protections it provides and christians support that. They also support the fact that I can walk away from that marriage at any time and do the same thing with some other lady. They would support two satanists a marriage as long as they are opposite sex. This is proven in the fact that this argument does not include banning of non-faith based marriages, non-Christian marriages, or marriages of convenience. However, with two religious men who love each other it is an abomination that they would want those protections. All these "protectors of marriage" are using their religion as the sole source of their defense. This only renforces my statement that if they really were serious, they would move to ban non-christian marriage.
Then there is the silly argument made by many on tv that gay marriage would lead to men marrying sheep and turtles. If religious and legal marriage were separated, this is a non issue. Legally, you can't enter into a contract with a sheep, and legally no one should care how many people I give the legal rights marriage provides me to. Religiously, if there is a religion that will marry sheep, it would be against our very constitution to not allow that marriage. In fact, gay people have purely religious and symbolic marriages all the time in state states that do not allow gay marriage.
That last fact solidifies the reason's we should allow gay marriage. We are not talking about religious marriage, we are talking about legal protections. Religious gay marriage is already legal in all 50 states. It is constitutionally legal and no law short of a constitutional amendment can change that. Legal protections from said marriage is what is debated. There is no world where allowing gays to get those protections would ever harm the religious significance (or I would argue todays insignificance) because nothing about who could get married by a church would change.
When we talk about evolution in the classroom, again the christian argument is flawed. They want to teach religion in a science class. This is as silly as teaching science in a bible as literature class. Furthermore, evolution does not disprove or even attempt to replace god, it is a simple, logical, and actually observed phenomenon that we can document that deserves a place in science like gravity, physics, electricity, and biology do. The argument about evolution is just silly. The position of the creationists is that all things in the bible are literal and 100% correct, except in the places where they can't be literal and 100% correct because they contradict themselves are are just plain wrong to anyone with eyes. They look at a very tiny story of creation and think that somehow god was able to squeeze every detail of how he created man into it. They will on one hand say "a day to god is a thousand years", but then say "no the timeline is quite strict and he made the world in 6 days". The fact is that evolution does not say when life began or how it began. Evolution simple describes something that happens to life that allows us to thrive on this planet. This is just like the big bang theory, which doesn't describe how the universe started, but simply the means in which the observable universe can be observed and it's logal conclusions. The cause of the big bang, the origin of the first life forms, etc are not explained by these theories. Instead they explain the changes that have happend in life/universe over the period of time we can observe it and the evidence of the past we have.
Therefor, the obvious solution to this problem is somehow totally lost on everyone. Teach science in a science class, teach theology in theology class. A person's information will then be well rounded and they can make up their own minds (which seems to terrify people for some reason). The most important thing we can teach a person is critical thinking skills. Most creationists are dead set against this because critical thinking means evaluating evidence, and by their arguments all evidence must be discarded if it does not agree with their book. The explanation is simply that god allows the devil to fool us. With this taken as fact, then we can trust nothing in this world. We should not study any science, no medicine, no math, no physics. Who knows which of these things we observe is a trick by satan. A ruse planted to lead us from the path to god. This is a flawed and impossible argument. If left unchecked, it will lead to another dark age.
So to me, when it doubt of a path, we should always side with personal freedom. I support personal freedom above all other morals. I define the limits of personal freedom only when it infringes on another's or when it hurts mankind/the planet as a whole. This is my cognitive dissidence I want unlimited personal freedom, but I also know that without the EPA my water wouldn't be safe to drink, without laws and police my city wouldn't be a safe place to live, etc. So I suck it up and I pay for things that are for the greater freedom at the expensive of a little of my own.