Gay Bashing -- What Age, and What Extent?

Great Debates
61

I do believe that parents do most of the thinking for their kids when they are young, especially if you are religious. Many ppl would say, “no they didn’t,” when really you just can’t remember your child hood that well.

I find myself an open minded person. My family is not religious at all. I find that all my friends who are part of a religion because of their parents refuse to believe anything that contradicts what they have been taught by their parents and ministers, priests, etc.

Just because something is said in the bible doesn’t make it true. The bible is just a book. Do any of us really know who wrote it? For all we know, it couldv’e been written by some crazy guy (i know im going to get flamed for that one).

One thing about my family though is an absolute repulsion to anything that restricts any kind of freedom. So if the girls parents were a bit restrictive, then that could explain part of it. I dont know how human psychology works, but it seems as if we always find a way to hate another human being in any way, shape, or form. Gays are just the next outlet for all those racist/close-minded ppl.

62

I do have to admit though that what might be considered a racial slur has slipped into my vocabulary. I don’t say “nigger” or anything like that, but i do use gay as to mean something bad. Im not saying that gays are bad, it’s just a word that now has a different meaning. Of course, my regional dialect is very different from anywhere else, so what I say here will probably mean something different anywhere else.

For example, i say “Damn, temptation island is a really gay show.” It’s clear that the show is not about gays, but it is a crappy show.

So nowadays, racial slurs aren’t as concrete as they used to be. Nigger is generally a part of a black man’s vocabulary now, especially if he is a rapper. Now that’s what i call ironic.

63

Physician, heal thyself.

It’s also called reclamation.

Is it possible to learn this stuff from internet message boards, too?

Esprix

64

Alright, we’ve got some people saying (very reasonably) that when preachers and other religious types shout that homosexuality is a sin, it creates a genuinely hostile atmosphere for the queer community. We’ve got others saying (also reasonably) that perfectly nice and peaceful people can think that homosexuality is a sin due to the simple fact that their religious beliefs dictate that view (if you believe the bible is the Word Of God, and the bible says don’t screw your fellow man, there really isn’t any way around that).

Recomendation:
Calling Christians intolerant won’t help, as it won’t change their mind. Calling gays sinful won’t help, as it won’t change their sexual orientation (and it will, directly or indirectly, lead to anti-gay bigotry or even violence).

Therefore, if you are a kind-hearted Christian who happens to think that it is a sin to lie with one’s fellow man as with woman, just keep it to yourself. Why would you go out of your way to separate and classify an entire group of people merely for the purpose of pointing out that they are sinful? How can that lead to anything other than enmity? Show your tolerance by not calling gays sinful, which they really seem to hate . . . and with good reason.

If you don’t say things that insult the gay community, then you don’t have to worry about being called intolerant. This would also make it alot easier to differentiate between “well-intentioned” Christians and those that are truly intolerant (i.e. those that see it as a part of their mission to convert the gay community en masse, by derision and exclusion if necessary). Of course, another way of looking at this is that this particular viewpoint is already employed by truly tolerant Christians . . . meaning that the intolerant ones are the ones who go out of their way to quote Leviticus . . . today, on the boards now.

But I’m not prepared to take that position.

65

How amazingly insightful - I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Sadly, it won’t happen. Remember, a “good Christian” loves his fellow sinners so much that he wants to save them from the fate of Hell, a fare surely they don’t see, for look how they continue to sin so! Truly it’s his/her job to save them from their own ignorance!

:rolleyes:

But in a perfect world we could all disagree without being so disagreeable.

Esprix

66

Um, that’s “we faggots.” Well, not “we,” but you know . . . :smiley:

67

A quote from Hastur’s site:

Estimates of the percent of gays in the population vary widely. Best estimate I can find is 3 - 4% of males in the Western world are primarily gay (July 3, 1992 issue of Science magazine). I believe most people will agree that the number of female molesters of male children is too small to be statistically significant.

So if the above figures are correct, gay males are overrepresented among child molesters by about two and a half times what you would expect if child molesters were randomly distributed among the population.

In addition, gay men seem to be over-represented among serial murderers. I am thinking of people like Wayne Williams (the Atlanta child murderer), Jeffrey Dahmer in Milwaukee, John Wayne Gacy, Juan Corona, etc.

So I think gay men are at least as guilty of committing violence against straights as vice versa. If violence against gays is caused by Christian disapproval of homosexual acts, what is gay violence against straight persons caused by? And how do we know the causes for both aren’t the same?

68

Actually, no, your quote says nothing about the sexual orientation of the molesters. Please don’t tell me you’re under the misimpression that otherwise heterosexual men don’t sometimes molest boys.

Errrr . . . . well, one thing at a time.

First of all, there is significant doubt among experts and law enforcement over whether Wayne Williams committed all of those murders, and in any case, there’s no certainty that he’s gay. He’s never said so, AFAIK.

Second of all, most of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims were gay, too, so that doesn’t count as “violence against straights.”

Third, Gacy was, if anything, bisexual (he was married once and had children, you know.)

Fourth, five examples? How about the two Hillside Stranglers, the Boston Strangler(s), Berkowitz, Paul Bernardo, Ted Bundy, Zodiac, Ed Gein, Richard Ramirez, Angel Resendez, Edmund Kemper, Richard Chase . . .? If gay men seem to be overrepresented, I think it’s because you might be ignoring pretty much everyone else.

Fifth, how do you know that all the kids the Atlanta murderer killed were straight? Or all of Gacy’s victims, for that matter?

But beyond all that, what makes serial killers has nothing to do with their sexual orientation. That may be a determinant in who they choose as victims, but it doesn’t make them killers. I am dumbfounded that you would choose serial killers, of all things, as examples of “gay violence against straights.” That’s so far beyond the pale, I just don’t know what to say.

{fixed bold. --Gaudere}

[Edited by Gaudere on 02-08-2001 at 02:01 PM]

69

Someone who has sex (by choice) with both males and females I would classify as ‘bisexual’. (Actually, I would classify them as ‘gay but trying to kid themselves’, but that is another discussion.) Besides, how do we know they aren’t otherwise homosexual men who sometimes molest girls?

My information on Wayne Williams’ sexual orientation came from two books written by the men who founded the FBI’s profiling division. I can dig up the titles if you’re interested.

I expect the fact that John Wayne Gacy raped and murdered exclusively males speaks more about his sexual preferences than what he claimed. He was actually married twice, but I don’t believe he had any birth children. I don’t think this guarantees anything, but it is indicative. His usual MO was to offer adolescents who came to him to find work drugs and/or money for sexual favors, then get them alone and kill them. Hard to say if his victims were genuinely gay, or just willing to prostitute themselves.

I cited five examples; you cited twelve. Do we know for a fact that all your examples were straight? (God only knows how to classify Ed Gein’s sexual preference. Does the fact that he only dug up female bodies make him straight? Maybe being gay isn’t as bad as some people say.)

At any rate, the key word here is ‘disproportionate’. If gay men make up 4% of the population, any percentage of serial murderers (or any other social pathology or unusual characteristic) over 4% signifies something unusual about gay men that may be worth noticing. So we cannot say for sure that

Correlation is not causality, but it is correlation.

And I think I would agree that being gay does not ‘cause’ a person to become a serial murderer. A more accurate way to express it might be that people who are screwed up sexually (as many serial murderers, to say the least, seem to be) tend to be those whose other sexual characteristics are statistically out of the norm. I can’t find the cite, but I read that serial murderers exhibit three characteristics as children [ul]

  • lighting fires
  • wetting the bed
  • cruelty to small animals[/ul]

Oops, I am wandering off the topic.

Carry on with the discussion.

Regards,
Shodan

70

Shodan: Pedophiles are neither homosexual nor heterosexual: they are pedophiles. They aren’t attracted to children because of any sexual characteristic. They’re children; they don’t have sexual characteristics. Gays are attracted to their own gender, straights to the opposite gender, pedophiles to children. Saying a pedophile is gay because he molested a boy is like saying someone with a yen for livestock is gay because he buggered a male sheep.

The sexual orientation of a serial killer is even more irrelevent. These are individuals who cannot recognize other people as human beings, let alone make meaningful distinctions based on gender.

71

Like they’re more likely to be psychologically screwed up? Well, you try growing up gay in this country and see if you don’t have some problems because of it. Comparing suicide figures is all the proof you need of that. If someone’s already pretty screwed up to begin with, being gay certainly wouldn’t help on top of that.