TriPolar, out of curiosity, what is your background in history? Have you studied it at any level above high school? Written about it, taught it?
Personally I think that this is favouritism of the worst kind.
Us Rubber Fetishists are equally persecuted by the Man, but do we get any breaks eh ?
No we bloody well don’t !
Our struggle has never been recognised , the prejudice against us has been, and still is brutal.
We are a TRUE minority, unlike the Gays who you couldn’t get lost in the Sahara desert without bumping into a few dozen or so.
OUR history is much more important then the Gays, let alone ww2, the Napoleonic wars, the discovery of the laws of physics etc.
And have the Gays done one single thing to help us in our struggle ?
Huh !
I’ll leave you to work that out for yourselves, you bunch of self righteous bigots !
He’d be difficult to fit into a U.S. History class though - since he is British. And we don’t tend to talk about scientists themselves in Science class beyond maybe Gregor Mendal and Einstein (or 'George Washington Carver did great things with peanuts!) Not impossible, just really stretching the tokenism (“We need to find a gay scientist - Alan Turing! Right next to George Washington Carver!”)
Through the years I taught several young people who hinted to me about having problems with their sexual identities. One young woman wanted to bring another girl to the prom but the principal wouldn’t let her. The child already had self-inflicted cigarette burns down her arm. There was so much self-loathing there. What if she had been taught that her feelings weren’t bad nor were they even unusual? What if she had known that some of the writers that we had studied were lesbian, gay, or bisexual? Would she have seen more potential in herself?
Sometimes I used to mention in class a writer or two that was generally considered gay or bisexual. I didn’t make a big issue of it, but I wanted my students to know that some of the names that they have heard belong to people who were or are “gay.” I couldn’t do that anymore if I were teaching. I live in Tennessee and our Republican dominated State legislature just passed a law that forbids teachers from discussing homosexuality in any way in the classroom. It is the opposite of California’s law.
Please don’t think that it reflects the will of the people of Tennessee. The vote took place right here in a liberal city. We are not all meadow muffins.
“Sex” (meaning gender) is not a protected class in the way that race, creed and religion are. The Equal Rights Amendment has not yet passed.
Since we’re talking about California in this thread, my post was in regards to that state and its laws. The California Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) has that sex is a protected class.
Age (40 and over)
Ancestry
Color
Religious Creed
Denial of Family and Medical Care Leave
Disability (mental and physical) including HIV and AIDS
Marital Status
Medical Condition (cancer and genetic characteristics)
National Origin
Race
Religion
Sex
Sexual Orientation
Lighten up mate, it was a joke.