Brilliant imagery! I feel like “heterosexual white wonderbread” should be the name of a band. Or a doper. But it’s a little too long. “Hetero wonderbread” maybe?
[/hijack]
Well, someone could go the ego route and name themselves the “Hetero White Wonder”…
I was verbally (and almost physically) harassed twice during the month following 9/11 because of my “ethnic” looks. Both the harassers were black. Initially, I found it shocking that blacks would harass someone based on how they looked but I realized that there are bigots and assholes in every race.
He might have meant to say “hide” instead of “change”, but even that would have missed the mark of being a rational position.
Oh yeah, because everyone in the whole world is perfect. It’s nice to know that I’m living in a perfect world, since everyone in it is perfect, right? I mean, that’s news to me! I had no idea everyone was perfect, but now I know. Hey everybody, stop your bellyaching! This is a perfect world! Everybody is perfect, so that means the world is perfect. That’s what litost says!
And if you couldn’t tell, I was being sarcastic.
really. that whole thing was a joke
Dude, if you are going to ride the Sarcasm Pony, you’ve gotta ride it all the way. Don’t tell people that you are being sarcastic, it defeats the purpose of that finest of literary devices.
Are you mocking my initial reaction of shock? I genuinely believed then that blacks in this country would be more tolerant as a group given what they have gone through.
(I still believe that to a certain extent)
FIrst of all, let me say that I wholeheartedly support same-sex marriage and strongly oppose any kind of bias against homosexuality (or any other sexual activity between consenting adults, for that matter). My two brothers and a step-brother are gay, and my former husband is now named Rebecca, with equipment to match.
That being said, I think there are two things that may have prompted Morton’s speech.
One is that there are what you might call recreational bisexuals - thrill seekers and such. The nature/nurture line isn’t quite as solid as a lot of you folks are saying. Look at the Greece of Plato’s era. At least among the ruling class, having a homosexual relationship with a young man was as common and expected as having a wife and family. Societal norms and expectations have a great deal to do with our sexuality. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t a genetic disposition toward homosexuality - I honestly don’t know if there is or not, although it seems likely. But the idea that every person who enjoys homosexual sex has no choice in the matter is over the top, folks.
More importantly, though, is that I suspect many black leaders have been highly offended by the gay community comparing its struggles to those of their own. As I said, I’m whole-heartedly in favor of legal same-sex marriage. But if I were black and heard gay leaders comparing being restricted to civil unions rather than marriage with Jim Crow laws, I’d be seriously pissed. And I have seen that comparison being made on this board, so I assume it is being made elsewhere as well.
No, my previous post was a joke. That’s right, all that stuff I wrote was one, big joke. All of it. The whole thing. Nope, nothing serious at all about what I wrote. I was joking the whole time by making a big deal out of nothing.
Even after your explanation post, I was looking for the joke, and I didn’t really see what the barb was or what it was aiming at…
Must have been the +5 Barbed Mace of Irony…
So we can’t cite historical civil rights struggles, such as women’s sufferage or the ongoing fight of all ethnicities to level the playing field? Fuck that.
You can’t necessarily pick the gay people out of a crowd and force them to go to a different school…or use a different bathroom…or refuse them a job…or keep them out of the voting booth…but they are absolutely “visible” and distinguishable and discriminated against when they are trying to get married, or trying to visit a critically ill partner in the hospital, or trying to adopt the children of a deceased partner.
It pisses me off that there are people who have suffered, and continue to suffer discrimination based on race or gender or disability, and I work to preserve their civil rights, and mine, every day of my life. It pisses me off that there are people who have suffered, and continue to suffer discrimination based on their sexual orientation, and I work te preserve their civil rights, and mine, every day of my life.
Let’s take a look at the term “civil rights” with dictionary.com:
civil:
- Of, relating to, or befitting a citizen or citizens: civil duties.
- Of or relating to citizens and their interrelations with one another or with the state: civil society; the civil branches of government.
- Of ordinary citizens or ordinary community life as distinguished from the military or the ecclesiastical: civil authorities.
- Of or in accordance with organized society; civilized.
- Sufficiently observing or befitting accepted social usages; not rude: a civil reply. See Synonyms at polite.
- Being in accordance with or denoting legally recognized divisions of time: a civil year.
- Law. Relating to the rights of private individuals and legal proceedings concerning these rights as distinguished from criminal, military, or international regulations or proceedings.
right:
- Something that is due to a person or governmental body by law, tradition, or nature.
- Something, especially humane treatment, claimed to be due to animals by moral principle.
- A just or legal claim or title.
I’m not willing to just stand by and watch anyone’s civil rights to be violated, and you can be damn sure that such a applicable and relevant phrase will be flying out of my mouth whenever and wherever I encounter such violation.
How about comparing Jim Crow to the law recently passed in Virginia, explicitly forbidding gays from not only marriage, but civil unions or any sort of legal arrangement that grants gay couples any rights available to straights through marriage? Is that similar enough to Jim Crow that you wouldn’t be “insulted” by the comparison? How about the fact that, in most states in the Union, it’s perfectly legal to fire someone just for being gay? Or to deny them housing? Or, in some jurisdictions, to take away their children? Sure, Jim Crow was far more widespread, because there are more blacks in this country than gays, and you can’t usually tell if someone is gay just by lookin’ at them. And in many ways, Jim Crow was more vicious, because the legal protections they were in the process of winning are now protecting gays from many of the extremes of bigotry that blacks were subjected to in the last century. I mean, gaybashing doesn’t have quite the public support lynch mobs used to enjoy, but I’m sure that’s pretty cold comfort for the folks posting in this thread.
So, what I’m wondering here is three things. First, how is the stuggle for gay’s civil rights not like the struggle for black’s civil rights? Second, even if you can show that there is a material difference between the two, why is the comparison insulting? With respect, it sounds to me like the insult comes from being compared to a bunch of fags. Which I don’t think is what you’re trying to say, but I’m not sure how else the comparison could be considered an “insult.” Lastly, and most importantly, if you can show that the comparison between the black civil rights movement and the gay civil rights movement is invalid, and you can show why a reasonable person would consider the comparison to be insulting, it still doesn’t explain why bigotry towards gays is any more or less acceptable than bigotry towards blacks. Which, I believe, is the original gist of this thread.
Oh, and just to be clear, I get that you’re offering your perception of someone else’s motives and beliefs, not your own. Any heat in the preceding is directed at the hypothesis you were offering, not at you for offering it.
And you could also compare telling gays they can just “hide their orientation” to lighter skinned blacks who “passed” for being white. I’m sure that these clergy men wouldn’t advise something like that.
I don’t think you can say that gays have faced exactly the same thing that blacks have. Not every situation is exact.
But c’mon, wasn’t the slaying of Matthew Shepard every bit as heinous as the lynchings of the early part of the 20th century?
It’s sad when those who have been persecuted in the past not only do nothing to prevent it from happening to others, but actively participate in harming these others.
I don’t really want to defend these people, but I think I see a point. Most gays in the gay rights brigade are white, and when you step back and look at it, a bunch of white guys complaining about oppression looks ridiculous. Gay or not, being a white guy is still going to open way more doors for you than being black would. In fact, looking at it that way, I’d have to agree that it’s insulting and patronizing for these white guys who want to add yet another pearl to the oyster of their world to try to identify with people who have hardly ever been able to call their own nation “home” (and that’s aside from the fact that mainstream gay culture is notoriously racist).
pizzabrat, with that logic, I could claim that black MEN have no need to rant about oppression, since they had more rights than women did for a long time (women have only been able to vote for LESS than 100 years.)
The “more oppressed than thou” game sickens me.
IMHO, no. It was every bit as heinous as an individual lynching, yes. (Probably worse…they really made that poor kid suffer.) But that’s where I believe the insult lies. The number of heinous crimes committed against blacks dwarfs those committed against gays by several orders of magnitude.
I would imagine it would be like comparing…hmmm, I’d love to avoid Godwin’s Law here…okay, it would be like comparing the US torturing of Iraqi prisoners to the rape of Nanking. Yes, both are bad. But to compare the two would be an insulting belittlement to the suffering in Nanking.
Somebody upthread suggested that there were many more blacks than gays. I thought both groups represented about 10% of the US population. Am I mistaken?
I agree with the first part of your statement, but I think the latter is over the top.
Pizzabrat…Not to mention that us carpet-munching lesbos don’t fit into the white male priviledge equation, and neither do any gay men of color, or the transfolk. Drawing lines in the sand does nothing but get grit under your fingernail. When the tides comes, don’t we ALL get wet?
Yeah, but you can usually tell your place in the social pyramid by taking a look at who’s standing on your head to get above it.
I have a problem with taking analogies to a grotesque level, so I tried to reign myself in, probably for the worst.
I deleted a prolific paragraph about the rich, the white and the powerful being the sun-baked bone-dry sand, but only for now. All it takes is a social earthquake and they’ll get flooded with a psunami of backlash, churned around, then find themselves fighting for breath down here in the tidepools. Meanwhile the black transexual wellfare Mom’s will have taken up their vacated beachfront residence.
The lesson that our species can’t seem to learn is not to make the same bigoted, oppressive mistakes over and over again, just with a different cast(e).
I keep clinging to the hope that the black transexual wellfare Mom’s (or whoever’s turn it is next) will be able to break the cycle and graciously refuse to stand on any heads.
See what I mean? The little fuckers (analogies) just run away with me…