Truly Bizarre Divorce protest against Gay Marriage … are people really that daft?

CHRISTIANS-DIVORCING-PROTEST-GAY-MARRIAGE-e1436036414939-620x264So over at United Media Publishing, we have the following claim …

Thousands of Christian couples, some who have been married for decades, have vowed to file for divorce in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling which has legalized gay marriage nationwide.

Adam Cyrus is the founder of Christ in Family Services which provides bible-based counseling to married Christian couples throughout Topeka Kansas. Cyrus says he supports the wave of high-principled duos seeking divorce as an act of protest. “We are symbolically divorcing a government which no longer honors our culture and values. We have no desire to benefit from a system which characterizes us as the enemy and enables and rewards sin under the guise of holy matrimony. If they wish to reward and empower those who desire to make a mockery of our faith, and misrepresent our religion, then we intend to remove ourselves altogether from this bureaucracy so that we may practice our faith in accordance to our beliefs.”

(This is the point at which non-believers proceed to rant something along the lines of how incredibly stupid some fundamentalist believers can be).

Oh but wait … (yes, here comes the skeptical bit).

Apart from this article on “United Media Publishing” (who?), there are exactly zero other sources for this claim, and they cite nothing. Ah so have they perhaps got a scoop and nobody else his picked up the news yet? Nope, the story is fake, the site simply creates fake stories as clickbait to draw you in.

These are the same folks who had a fake article about Charles Manson being dead going viral last May, so this is simply more of the same.

Why do such bits of clickbait work?

There are some rather popular myths that prevail within various communities, for example amongst those that believe there is a myth that those that do not believe have no purpose, meaning or morality. Flip that coin over and amongst the community of non-believers you will find a myth that those that do believe are stupid and totally irrational. You can of course find specific examples that will be latched on to and highlighted to confirm such thoughts, but to then generalise is where the myth comes into play.

When I first saw the story pop up on Facebook, I initially accepted it as true and filed it away later to take a closer look. Yes, I was conned, and fell for it hook line and sinker at first. There are indeed religious people who are truly daft enough to do something that crazy (yes really, there actually are), and so it works as click bait because it panders to an emotional bias.

We are perhaps all prone to falling for such stories at one time or another, and so it does perhaps underline the importance of questioning everything, even the stuff that panders to what we think is true.

When out there surfing the net then Caveat lector (let the reader beware)

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