Sounds to me like you wanted a fight - and you got one. Glad you enjoyed it - I’m too old for that shit anymore.
Go to bar, get drunk, talk shit, “step outside,” fight.
Follow those five steps and you you are an asshole. Period. It doesn’t really matter whether you were fighting for gay rights, the Redskins, or who makes the best tuna salad.
Do a little self-intervention, stop the rationalizations, and consider your judgement.
I was a bartender in N.O. during College and I saw two big kids pick a fight with a smaller nerdy scared guy. The scared guy swung a beer bottle which broke on the side of a guy’s head and effectively sliced his face in half. I saw the bottom half of his face basically just slide down. He’s screwed for the rest of his life.
Do you think you’re going to change minds, by fighting?
Shame on you for even pretending this is about civil rights. If you are going to be stupid enough to pick drunken fights in bars at least have the class not to muddy up some social issue. You did no good. They’ll probably jump some unsuspecting gay guy for revenge.
Idiots “step outside.” If you are going to fight you should do your level best to kill the other guy as quickly as possible, and by surprise if possible.
IF IT DOES NOT RISE TO THAT LEVEL THEN DON’T FIGHT Because it can rise to that level all on it’s own, and once the fight starts it may no longer be your choice.
Moron.
Hard to tell exactly, but it looks like you started the fight. I hope you learned something, but if you’re still getting into bar fights at your age, I doubt it.
Anyway, hope you’re feeling better today.
Well, the OP’s story, right there, is a prime example of why I hardly ever go to bars any more. I find I have far fewer encounters with drunken fuckwits that way.
Alcohol. Testosterone. Trouble. Who knew?
The only thing missing is guns.
That’s why I don’t talk about politics and religion in bars anymore. I just sit, drink, and listen to music. Even then, I still get the occasional “What are you looking at me in a funny way for?”
In all fairness, I got that at a donut shop at 7:30 in the morning once.
The more I think about gay marriage and the right to marriage argument, the more I realize that we discriminate against single straight people too. When gay rights advocates make this their issue, I feel as though they’re tacitly accepting the premise that people who are married should be entitled to more rights than people who aren’t. Why should any married couple be afforded these special rights and privileges?
I recently attended a conference on the ‘‘State of LGBTQ Rights in America’’ and a number of people present raised the same point. The face of gayness as presented by vocal rights groups like, say, the HRC, is this sort of harmless, middle-class, ‘‘we’re just like everyone else’’ sensibility. But the reality is that gays as a group experience much more serious oppression than not being allowed to marry. Often the voices of those who are more seriously oppressed – the sexual minorities who are disproportionately homeless, victims of violence and assault or living in poverty – are drowned out. As one impoverished black lesbian woman put it, ‘‘I’m struggling just to survive and you want to talk to me about marriage?’’
Essentially what I predict will happen if and when we do win this ‘‘marriage’’ fight is that, much like the Civil Rights Act is used to ignore systemic racism today, people will have a piece of legislature to point to as evidence that we live in an equal society. So gays will get their marriage, but they will continue to be victims of violence, homelessness and poverty at a disproportional rate, and nobody will bother to do anything about it.
That’s the worst case scenario, of course, but it works so well for oppressing blacks in this country today that I have no doubt it could happen.
If that third guy hadn’t sucker punched him, he might have been able to.
Yes and no. I agree with you that it’s silly to afford people special rights because they got married, but clearly a lot of folks (gay and straight) have been told since day one that marriage is this magical, holy thing, and people should get special bonuses and prizes for doing it. So yes, there are some gays who are tacitly acknowledging that marriage itself should afford people special rights.
I’m not in favor of marriage for anyone, but the gays who share my view in this regard are really in a no-win situation here. On one hand, the obvious and overriding issue here is equality. Here’s this right (good or bad) that opposite sex couples get, that gay couples cannot because they are of the same sex, and that is unfair. On the other, there’s also this right that people who do not get married cannot have because they don’t (and in some cases cannot) get married. If gays as a whole were to oppose marriage altogether, then they actually would be trying to destroy the institution of marriage. Is that the position they want to be in? “See! I told you all that gayness was an attempt to destroy marriage!”
xtisme well done for standing up for your opinion and your friends. If it went down the way you say it went down (and I’ve no reason to believe you’re making anything up) then these shitheads deserved to get their asses kicked. I hope you feel better soon.
Wander through these threads:
Gay marriage opponents, listen up: I’ve got a secret to tell you (Pit)
What is the rationale for opposition to same-sex marriage? (GD)
Do not post to them; they are old. I would not suggest starting new threads; they always start and end at the same point with no changes in views.
Unlike, for instance, threads about the Iraq War, Sarah Palin, Health Care, Global Warming, Gun Control, Evolution… 
You left out gods and religion.
It is a bit hard to tell but, as Scylla says, only idiots “step outside.” It doesn’t matter who makes the suggestion; anyone who agrees to it is just as responsible for any violence that follows.
I guess i sympathize with the OP a bit because i sympathize with his political position, and i also have some sympathy if the other party did indeed start in with homophobic epithets specifically directed at his group. I firmly believe that violence should never be a response to simple name-calling, but at the same time i still don’t have too much sympathy for someone who gets the crap beaten out of him for calling a black man “nigger.” Same in this case; i think that resorting to violence was wrong, but if the other party was throwing around words like “faggot” i’m not going to cry too many tears for them.
Unfortunately, there are some people in this world who believe that any political disagreement is an invitation to a fight. I love talking politics, and i love arguing politics. I’m happy to spend hours arguing with someone who disagrees with me. But i rarely do it in public, simply because of the sort of scenario described in the OP. And for that reason, i usually end up talking politics mainly with my friends, people who feel the same way i do. We have some interesting conversations, to be sure, but for the most part we only disagree about small things, and many of the conversations become little more than reaffirmations of our shared positions.
I was reminded of the perils of public political conversation a week ago in our gym. The guy doing dumbbell presses next to me, a guy who i occasionally make small-talk with, asked me, “Did you hear about that new law they passed?” I said to him, “Which one? The new health care bill?” and he said “Yes.” I told him, noncommittally, that i had indeed heard about it, and went back to pressing my weights. A few seconds later, he said, “Pretty fucking stupid law, isn’t it?”
My first inclination was to grunt an indecipherable response and just keep working out, but then i thought, “Fuck that. I shouldn’t have to pretend that i agree with this guy just to keep the peace in my gym.” So i said something like, “Actually, i didn’t support every single part of the law, but i think the law itself is long overdue and that it’s a big step forward for America.”
The guy was clearly somewhat taken aback at my position. He started pressing me about why i supported it, and spouting a bunch of rhetoric about America and do things for yourself and not taking handouts. In the end, i just held my hands up and said, “Dude, you asked for my opinion about the law, and i gave it to you. You’re entitled to your opinion, but i’m not really interested in justifying my position to you. I came here to work out, and that’s what i’m going to do.”
What annoys me most about people like that is not that they disagree with me. Hell, San Diego county is a pretty conservative place, and i’m well aware that plenty of people around here don’t share my politics. It’s that they ask questions like this, of people they barely know, and clearly expect nothing but nodding agreement. They get quite put out if you actually contradict them. I don’t go around to people i barely know saying, “Isn’t it great that the healthcare bill allows America to call itself a civilized nation?”
No, we resolved that last Tuesday. Pity you missed it.
What did we decide?
So, I can close all nine of the open threads on those topics on the first page of GD? (They only go back to Thursday, but it would be a start.)
I’ll just let all those posters know I have your permission. 
I definitely see your point. I think, in a sense, it is inevitable that any kind of social movement is going to marginalize some portion of the population – the problem I guess is that I think it’s the most oppressed that seem to be marginalized in most cases. If you look at the way trans women have been marginalized not only by society but by many feminist and LGBTQ movements, you can maybe see my point.
Take the Civil Rights Movement – and I want to be clear, I am not drawing an equivalency here, I do not believe one can be made, but I do think it’s a handy example of marginalization within a social movement. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the ideal of desegregation was the face of this movement, and many whites no doubt perceived that he represented the will of most black people. This was not necessarily the case. Many blacks of that era were against desegregation. King himself wasn’t even universally popular – he was new to the movement and there were many who had worked for decades before he came along that felt he was out of touch with reality on the ground. There was a lot of dissent about what the fight really should be about, but ultimately it was King’s view of desegregation as the ultimate expression of equality that won out. Now, we accept that as a given. Which is, I believe, part of the problem we have today in accepting that we are still a discriminatory society.
In short, I think gay marriage would be great. But I think equal access to health care, affordable housing, safe communities, jobs, etc would be even better. I worry we are trying to sacrifice one for the other.
Also bicyclists, SUVs, and declawing cats.