Yes, and that’s why racism by whites (being dark-skinned is abnormal in the US, in a statistical sense), anti-Semitism (ditto), and homophobia are all OK and shouldn’t be made to seem wrong, right?
Misogyny, on the other hand, is wrong because women are the norm. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day…
jayjay
JayJay, you’re lumping racism, anit-semitism and homophobia into one big ball?
I think there’s a difference between having one’s belief’s and acting against beliefs that differ than your own in the way of discrimation!
Look, let’s face it, people will ALWAYS find fault with another simply because one takes the stance of “they’re not like me”.
It’s as simple as that. It’ll ALWAYS be that way. Let’s stop dilluting ourselves into thinking it’ll ever be different.
That’s not to say that one has to walk around with this chip on one’s shoulder and be bitter toward people who are different then they.
It IS possible to walk around and greet people with a smile and a kind “Hi, how are ya?” and be thinking, “What a DOPE!!”
It’s ok to dislike another group’s beliefs and lifestyle - just don’t act on the dislike.
I don’t care to eat asperagus. What, I’m going to be made to feel that I have to just LOVE asperagus and I’m foolish to not. I’m not going out and trampling the fields of asperagus but, it’ll never be on MY table, I’ll tell ya that!!!
They’re more connected than you think. Add sexism in there, too, btw. I separated it out for a particular effect, but it’s interrelated as well.
And nobody is going to force you to set asparagus on the table. But you can’t force others to stop shopping for and servicing…er, serving asparagus. After all, if we asparagus-lovers have to watch you do those disgusting things to your brussels sprouts…
jayjay
So no one should bother then, right? “Fuck it, people are just animals anyway. There’s no sense in trying to change anything for the better.”
I’m sorry, I disagree with that attitude thoroughly.
Possible? Of course, people do it all the time. That doesn’t mean I find it pleasing, and it doesn’t mean I’m content to accept it for myself or those I love.
Homosexuality is an act, not an orientation.
And as for not being “normal,” that depends on how you define normal. It’s normal for me. It’s not normal for the society at large. But then, being educated is not normal in that regard. Hell, being male is abnormal by that measure.
People who are homophobic stand in the way of full civil rights equality for gays and lesbians, and that is wrong, no matter how you cut it. Unless, of course, you’re a bigot, and don’t think people should be equal.
Damn, that should say “Homosexuality is an oreintation, not an act.” Sorry, I’m working on like 3 hours of sleep right now…
Is homosexuality a “belief” or a “lifestyle”? Is it “abnormal”? Biology is a tricky, tricky animal. Please allow me to indulge myself here by reposting something I posted to a Pit thread but that was [sadly, sniff] completely unacknowledged. Let’s give it another shot here:
Friday night, my husband and I watched a program on Discovery Health about the intersexed. Please bear with me as I attempt to make my point. “Intersexed” is the term used to describe the condition of those formerly known as “hermaphrodites”; ie, their sex organs are neither fully female or male but often a combination of both. This program showed graphic pictures of babies with a penis and no testicles, while internally they had an ovary and a teste, and various other combinations of genitalia.
Of course, parents and doctors alike have been freaked out by this phenomena and insist the child has to be a boy or a girl, because that’s what is “normal.” So the child undergoes sex assignement surgery while still an infant. Then, when the child grows up, it (occasionally? often?) turns out the parent chose poorly, and at puberty the child ends up developing as the opposite of whichever gender they were assigned. So there is a movement afoot to hold off on gender assignment surgery. Let the child grow up first and see which gender asserts itself. Then, if the person chooses, they can have surgery accordingly.
What this program demonstrates to me is that the idea that there is a god up there somewhere handing out specific genders with mandatory gender roles and accompanying dos and don’ts is at best naïve and at worst hopelessly narrow-minded and ignorant.
If the body can be born such a combination of genders, then why can’t the mind? People who argue for gender roles in society crow with glee that there are definite biological differences between the female and male brains. So why can’t a brain be “intersexed”? And if that is the way the brain is made, then it can’t be helped anymore than the color of a person’s skin or their features can. Therefore, hating a person for their sexual orientation has to be as wrong as hating a person for their race.
POWER_station, could you please, for the third time, tell me about my lifestyle? I seem to be missing out on some big secret and I’d love to know what it is, and since you know enough about it to find it distasteful, you seem to be the guy to ask.
If you can’t answer this simple question, you never should have started the OP in the first place.
Esprix
Originally posted by Ominscient
I disagree. If I have SS&C sex with a woman tomorrow that doesn’t make me homosexual. It makes me no longer a virgin ;), but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m bisexual.
Sexuality is more than behaviour. Sexuality is, in fact, more than sex.
Deal with it.
I suspect that Omnipresent was trying to state a generic, objective view and inadvertently(?) used a few of the hot-button terms. In short, “Normal” was not intended by him, if I read him correctly, as a value judgment, but as a statistical comment – it is a fact that the desire for sex with someone of one’s own sex is not the norm – the desired activity of the mode in any randomized population (West Hollywood, the Castro, Key West, and a few other places being statistically aberrant). And in this he’s right.
To generalize from this that for any given individual such behavior is “abnormal” in some value-judgment sense, however, has become such a weapon of the anti-gay activists that the phrase “normal” triggers a hostile response.
Whatever biological or sociological phenomena made Kirk a gay person, for him desiring sex with another man is “normal” – it’s the mode of his own behavior – in fact, the unanimous choice of that universe of one. What society as a whole has as a majority attitude is irrelevant to that definition. Sister Coyote makes a good case for orientation rather than behavior to be the defining question, anyway.
Ahhhh, but treating homosexuality as if it were “normal” and equalizing and homogenizing it with same sex marriages and homosexual surrogate births etc. IS putting asparagus on MY table. It will affect my meal even though I won’t partake in it. I don’t want it on my table but I’m made to feel bigoted for not wanting it on my table.
So, you feel it is acceptable to make your problem everyone else’s problem?
No, it isn’t. It’s allowing people to put it on their own tables and still experience the same rights that you do. Not liking something does not entitle you to excise it from the society that you live in.
Tough. If you can’t live with other people who are homosexual in the same society as you, then you are bigoted against homosexuals. Period. You are more than welcome not to engage in sex or romantic relationships with people of the same gender, but demanding that those who do are not allowed to marry or have children – rights that you no doubt would demand if they were not allowed for you – is bigoted by definition.
Of course it does, if it’s deemed unacceptable behaviour.
I buy that. But you said that like it’s a bad thing. Bigoted (in other words, intolerant in matters of race, religioun, politics and sex) ok. But it’s not a dirty word.
You’re going to force ME to be tolerant toward YOUR lifestyle? It ain’t gonna happen. Get used to it. Get used to feeling like the fifth wheel because it’s never going to change.
We lock up pedophiles because we’ve decided that they are different than normal. We’ve already established that Homosexuals are different than normal! Next.
Wrong.
We don’t lock up pedophiles, we lock up child molesters. In other words, you get locked up for acting on your pedophilia, not just because you’re sexually attracted to children.
And it’s not because it’s “different than normal”, it’s because it harms children. It’s assault.
Maybe you like the idea of a society where people are locked up for being different, but I’m glad I don’t live in one.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by andros *
**
So no one should bother then, right? “Fuck it, people are just animals anyway. There’s no sense in trying to change anything for the better.”
You’re assuming that it would be a change for the better.
We’re not talking about one’s beliefs really. We’re talking about staying within the law while maintaining your beliefs.
If I’m Jewish in America, there is absolutely nothing wrong with me if I hate, despise, disagree with, walk the other way from Muslims. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Now, if I see a Muslim walking down the street and beat the crap out of him because he’s Muslim, NOW we have a problem.
The same can be applied to Homosexuality.
Just as a public apology, I’d like to withdraw my attempt, based on my wearing rose-colored spectacles and trying to see good in others, to defend Omnipresent’s use of “normal.”
No. Nobody is going to force you to do anything. I’m fairly confident that every gay person already has “got used to it.”
However, there is a really big line between what you think and do and feel privately and how you conduct yourself in public. And if you think that your personal feelings towards their “lifestyle” – most people would say what they mean: “sex life” – gives you any license to deny them the equal rights to which they are entitled (and often deprived by prejudicial laws), you’ve got another think coming.
Finally, we don’t “lock up pedophiles because we’ve decided that they are different than normal.” We lock up people who molest children because they commit sexual assaults on small people whom we are charged to defend. If somebody wants to spend the next fifty years looking at pictures of naked children and masturbating, and never touch a single child, for all of me he’s welcome to do so. (What I think of his mind is another story, just like what you think of gays is another story.)
And who died and left you the Grand High Pontificator of What Is Normal? If you found yourself stranded in Key West without transportation or money, would you decide that you were required to “turn gay” because that is “normal” there?
There’s everything wrong with that, AFAIC. I don’t want you to hate anyone, whether you act on that hatred or not. Is that alien to you?
I’m human. So are you. We hate. It’s natural. We love, we dislike, we hate. To not admit that is to not be human. You’re going to stand there and tell me that throughout your life so far you havn’t hated someone? Whatever reason it is? I’ll bet both of you have and I’ll bet I can come up with some reason why you shouldn’t have hated.
But it’s YOUR business to hate someone for YOUR reasons without having someone else agree with you. Don’t ya think?