Basically, to make a long story short, brickbacon (among others), is upset that the struggle for the rights of gays is being compared to that of blacks during the Civil Rights movement. Some of his statements are downright insulting:
And:
So basically, if anyone other than a black and/or Jewish individual talks about civil rights, it’s somehow a copyright violation, that marriage isn’t really a right, so it’s not a huge deal? And so even though gays are terribly discriminated against, seen as perverts, told they’re going to hell, prevented from being with those they love, kicked out of their homes, forbidden from having children, how DARE they compare their struggles against that of others who had their rights denied to them?
Guin, why don’t you respond to the actual substance of what brickbacon is saying instead of just satirizing one little aspect of what he said?
MHO is that you are not intellectually able to form a coherent argument against his positions (assuming you are able to understand them in the first place), and the OP of this thread proves this beyond a reasonable doubt.
In what way? He’s shown his reasoning. What’s yours?
That’s now what he said. He didn’t say it was a copyright violation. He did note that it’s an appeal to emotion as you’re doing here that’s not terribly effective, unless one is prone to appeals to emotion.
They can compare their struggles to anyone they want. Heck, you can compare your struggles to the plight of African Americans in history if you choose. I’m just not sure it’s terribly persuasive.
I just read that thread and I’m glad that I did because it was interesting. Calling brickbacon a bigot is totally ridiculous and unjustified.
We get it, Guin, you’re liberal and entirely open minded and get all outraged over the right things. Thanks for that. You might be more effective for the “cause” if you could try to form a coherent argument in a debate instead of getting all huffy when you’re bested.
Guinastasia, your positions in that debate were poorly presented and inartfully argued. Your opponent presented a clear, concise, and compelling argument, and this thread demonstrates your apparent inability to understand it.
I have to admit I just skimmed the thread, and I don’t really care about whether the LGBT movement can be accurately compared to the civil rights movement. But I did notice this:
I don’t know about bigotry, but that comment is at least extremely ignorant.
I have personally worked with, or know people working at many of the leading race-focused civil rights organizations in the country (NAACP, SPLC, ACLU RJP, etc.) and there are dozens of gay men and women working for these organizations. Ditto regional organizations in Newark and NYC.
Even outside the civil rights leadership, in my experience, the gay community is more likely to be active in race-related civil rights work than the population as a whole. This is not surprising, given the LGBT community’s more acute awareness of social injustice.
Perhaps nothing more should be read into this than brickbacon’s ignorance on the subject. But it’s easy to read the comment as brickbacon calling the gay community selfish, or insular. That kind of sentiment would be pretty close to bigotry, given the actual facts.
The fact Guinastasia can’t argue to save her life doesn’t make brickbacon any less of a bigot. His comment about gays only working for ‘gay rights’ as opposed to ‘civil rights’ is particularly telling: He either doesn’t realize that fighting one campaign aids the whole war, or (more likely) refuses to see the gay rights campaign as part of the war to defend civil rights. That is a position that makes you a bigot.
Could we get some cites on this? It’s not that I don’t believe you or think that your experience doesn’t count. But it would help to combat ignorance to have more factual evidence than anecdotes, especially if you’re going to charge bigotry based on that ignorance. Your experience could be countered by someone who has had the opposite experience.
You want me to cite that there are lots of gay people working on race issues? Seriously? You want, like, Facebook profiles or what?
I mean, I understand your skepticism of anecdotal information. It is the internet after all. But, really, how could I possible prove that other than by offering my experience. I tell you what. If someone with similar experience comes in and offers conflicting testimony, I’ll retract my claim of ignorance. Cool?
You can’t think of any statistics that would show this fact? But yet you’re claiming that someone else is ignorant for not knowing what your experiences are on the subject?
That’s easy. . . brickbacon. He obviously doesn’t share your conclusions from his experiences. So now you have his experiences versus yours.
I don’t know what you mean by similar experiences though.
I can, however, give you some evidence that refutes your reasoning (below) that brought you to your conclusion here:
We’ll have to jump through a few IFs before we do. But I’m sure you’ll have no problem with them.
IF you consider gay marriage to be a civil right and IF prop. 8 was about gay marriage and IF you believe exit polls and IF California is representative of the US population on this issue, then it’s not true that people who have suffered social injustice work in solidarity based on that common experience.
African Americans voted yes on 8 in a ratio of 2 to 1. If this was an issue of social injustice, African Americans either didn’t see it that way or didn’t vote in solidarity to it.
You think someone is out there gathering statistics on gay employment at civil rights organizations? That really seems plausible to you?
And, keep in mind, this was his assertion. I’m claiming he is ignorant because his assertion is wrong. When you refer to “my experience” we’re not talking about a religious experience I had that is purely subjective. I’m making factual claims. They are either true or false.
If someone told me China was overrun by polar bears, and I called him ignorant based on my travels through China, it would be a slim defense to say that I’m merely “claiming that someone else is ignorant for not knowing what my experiences are on the subject.”
What is brickbacon’s experience in the contemporary civil rights movement?
There’s a lot to unpack there, but let’s leave it at this: the fact that black people voted for Prop 8 says absolutely nothing about whether gay people are involved in civil rights.
I was not claiming that a common sense of injustice leads all oppressed people to join hands and sing kumbaya. I was claiming that the gay community is disproportionately represented in social activism, including race issues.
Speaking as a cocksucker, I don’t find anything brickbacon said in that thread to be insulting. I don’t agree with his position in the slightest, but there’s absolutely nothing in it to support a claim of bigotry
perhaps if you want to take the original interpretation of the word that the has his ideas and will steadfastly stick to them irrespective of what evidence is presented to him, then yes, he could be called a bigot.
Maybe not insulting, but some of it was vaguely ridiculous. For instance, claiming that gays were ungrateful towards black people, yet self-interestedly co-opted their methods used during the Civil Rights movement without using the proper footnotes, and that’s part of the reason why “gay is the new black” isn’t OK. Clearly the converse is true, that blacks aren’t helping gays out with their civil rights movement, and weren’t there to help them out during Stonewall etc., but that apparently is gay people’s fault because of their lesser level of oppression and their lack of thanks towards blacks.
I just realized that in this particular case, the argument that there is no right to be stripped is not only morally wrong but legally wrong as well. Prop 8 did strip away a right. Unless of course you think that that right doesn’t exist for heteros, either.