I think you exaggerate some of your points, but you are mostly correct. Your last line is ironic as I am both a Tolkien Geek and probably the best known Yankee Fan on the board.
I find overall the toleration for sports threads to be fair. When one of the sports haters threadshit in a sports thread, I ripped into him extremely well and got only support from posters and mods. We are a minority, but a well tolerated minority even on the dope.
TPTB are even considering giving us our own forum, (well Sports and Games actually, but close enough). It might not happen, but it is nice they are at least considering it. Any board with a poster like **RickJay ** has to at least baseball friendly. **Hal ** and **Ellis Dee ** are two standouts for football.
It’s not really a statement saying people do this difinitively. It’s more a reminder that some people can do it if they wanted to. Just because you are honest here and in real life doesn’t mean others are all the time. It sort of goes along the lines of IANAD or IANAL type rationale.
The Dope cannot be either tolerant or intolerant. It’s a random collection of people with very different personalities. Some people are kind and forgiving, others are mean spirited jerks, most are in between.
There is a subset of posters who choose to post a lot of details about their personal lives and problems. Another subset of posters finds this hilarious and can’t resist opportunities to needle the first group. neither group stands for the dope as a whole.
I don’t know, in the recent thread I started about sharing a bed platonically with a gay man, there were several posts to the effect that gay men are absolute whores who will screw anything, even women, given the chance. I was pretty shocked at that attitude, but no one else reacted to it, and it blew over in the thread. Which was probably for the best, for the thread to continue on-topic, but it does fly in the face of your claims that homophobic comments are immediately castigated and are not tolerated.
I had to restrain myself to keep from commenting on that very thing. I just didn’t feel like getting into it about that topic. To say I was shocked at that attitude is a complete understatement. It did make me realize that even though Dopers tend to be pretty tolerant, people still don’t understand a lot of things.
I would include myself in that last bit. As long as people aren’t hurting others I can pretty much accept whatever choice they make. But I readily admit that I don’t understand a lot of things or that I just don’t agree with them.
That was bizarre, I agree. Most gay men that I know are emphatically not into having sex with women. Yes, sexual orientation can be on a continuum, but to extrapolate from that that a gay man and straight woman sharing a bed might get overcome and knock boots…it confused the hell out of me.
That was one of the threads that I was thinking of (I mentioned it in the stripper thread in the pit, but not in this OP). So you aren’t alone in seeing it!
That stuck in mind, too, since it’s still new. Not just this idea held by some straight men that gay men are just waiting for the right opportunity to do chicks, or that married women are waiting for convenient sleepovers with friends to cheat, but that getting married means doing every single thing together and never again having an intimate (not necessarily sexual) moment with another human being of whatever gender or sexual orientation. Yikes.
I’d say a good indication of the board’s tolerance is the thread above this: Is there a better way to maxmize the enjoyment of the smell of ones own gas?
I don’t think I’d find that at any other board.
That is a good example of a thread title that many posters (including me) just are not going to bother reading at all. I saw that, rolled my eyes and moved on quickly. I didn’t even bother with a mouse over. It appears on the surface to be either a silly joke or ‘stinking’ of TMI.
There could be a complete show of intolerance in that thread and I would never know unless someone mentioned it in another thread I happened to be reading.
What part of claims that gay guys are pathologically promiscuous is actually a questioning of “any political or societal decision that might be remotely construed as hostile to supporting absolute rights for homosexual[s]”? I’d put the comments you saw into the area I later noted that “We’ve got lots of posters with a(n un)healthy streak of judgmentalism running through their world views.”
It goes back to what the OP asked, which is, how many people will just stand there and listen/read/watch while people spout bigoted nonsense? Nobody said anything in the thread I’m mentioning, though I guess other people found it shocking/offensive. I’m glad the thread wasn’t derailed by it, and I’m relieved that others found it inappropriate, but until this thread I thought I was alone here in my feelings about it.
tomndebb, you’re correct that the homophobia I’m citing does not touch on gay rights per se. However, if there are people walking around with such incredibly negative views of the morality and integrity of gay people based on the fact that they are gay, then it’s not much of a leap to infer other issues.
However, if the gay-bashers stick to threads where the proponents of gay rights do not get involved, each group can hang out, here, with very little interaction or conflict. There are many denizens of GD who would not “demean” themselves by poking their heads into MPSIMS or opening “fluffy” threads in IMHO and a lot of posters just stay out of GD. A title such as Men, would you be OK with your SO doing this? hardly strikes me as the sort that would attract a fervently eager debater of politics, law, or human rights.
I do not understand your point here. Gay bashers did get involved in a thread with proponents of gay rights, just not on the specific topic of gay rights. It was an uncomfortable moment, but because the thread was not specifically about gay rights, the homophobia was not addressed in a very thorough manner. It was still an instance of a bigoted viewpoint being espoused on the Dope, which is what the OP was asking about, right?