I guess you’d better not examine some of the outer fringes of S&M porn, then. 
% They’re branding you with a number
and taking away your name
secret…asian man %
There have always been a lot more blacks than gays. The more people there are, the less its possible to discriminate. Not exactly, but you get my point. Are where are the Pink Panthers?
Not so. 12.8% of the US population is black. Somewhere between 5 and 15% of the population is homosexual.
As someone who is both black and non-heterosexual (and a few other minorities on top of that) I can only say this:
There are no winners at the Oppression Olympics.
Trying to compare who had it worse or has it worse, who’s suffering and who has suffered, where we are and where we’ve been, all based on this trait or that trait is not only a losing game, it takes the focus off of what’s important, which is finding solutions.
OP, it’s great that you’re on board with gay rights and all. I mean, good for you. But with that in mind, maybe you might rethink categorizing all gay men like that. It’s kind of gross. Some of them are Steve Linebackers.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the history of the civil rights movement.
Collectively, gays may not be worst off then a slave in the South in 1830, but like I said, I believe that’s partly because you can’t identify gays as easily, and gays rights have come into the forefront in an age where public lynchings are unacceptable.
Why is that relevent?
Or you can look at it from another perspective. Would any store cover up a picture of a black couple from one complaint?
First, why shouldn’t I get mad over a magazine cover? In what way is it ok to cover up the existence of gays by deeming it not family friendly?
And second, I know of the suffering that gays have had to endure and incident such as Matthew Shepard’s murder or Stonewall certainly is part of undisputed history. But collectively, you cannot ID gays like you can ID a person from a specific race; it is dishonest to claim that the much smaller number of evils suffered by gays amounts to equal to what people born of a difference color had to go through. Of course this is speculation, but if all gays had some kind of physical identifying mark, I have no problems saying that it would be irrefutable history that they would have been rounded up and murdered throughout human civilization
I’m not downplaying the whole Civil Rights movement. I’m not even upgrading the gay rights movement. I am asserting that bigotry against gays is more severe and intense than bigotry towards different races. It is only because gay rights has manifested itself as a movement in the more civilized latter half of the 20th century, and in more civilized countries, that gays have not been killed en masse
I compared because I see, with much dismay, so many minorities still very hostile to gay rights. These same people also refuse to concede that gay right has anything to do with what they had to go through. It’s no secret by now that blacks as a group voted proportionately more for Prop 8 than whites. They failed to see the similarities. Some even took offense that there were similarities. That pisses me off
I want to slap some sense into those black people who voted for Prop 8, thus denying gays the right to marry.
You know, now that I think about it, I shouldn’t have used that. Caught up in emotion I guess. My mistake, I will try to never use that as an insult again. However, I reserve the right to speculate about homophobes being closeted gays themselves
I didn’t mean to equate all of those instances as rape. I noted that it was rape only because the black women were slaves and could not consent. I was actually debating whether to put rape or not. In the end, I felt that someone would probably derail the topic if I didn’t put rape because they would say that even if a black female slave had sex with her white master willingly, it should be counted as rape.
Of course this is speculation, but had being gay been easily identifiable back in the slavery days, I am sure they would have been bought and sold or killed
There is, however, worst losers. The fact that people who were oppressed severely within living memory seems to be doing it to others now that they have a higher status in society is befuddling and annoying to me
Duly noted. In my defense, I just wanted to write a funny name
That bothers me, too. Your OP was still stupid.
I’m probably going to take a lot of shit for saying this, but I don’t think gay people or black people should be oppressed.
You disgust me! Who else am I going to oppress!?
Vinyl Turnip, you are worse than Hitler playing texting on his iPhone while driving drunk.
The denial of rights to gays is a civil rights issue. The denial of rights to Blacks was/is a civil rights issue. That’s about where the comparison ends.
[hijack]This one bugs me too. One Doper in “Thread About the Holistic Evils of the South Number 29” or so actually opined that the reason slaves continued to reproduce even though slavery was (according to the same thread) far worse than the Holocaust was because of masters raping their slaves. I think the attempts to sharpen the thorns of slavery (by which I mean the reverse of gilding the lily- making a bad thing even worse than it was) is a large part of what keeps “The Lost Cause” notions alive.
There are many records of slaves raped by their masters (Booker T. Washington was born of one), there are many records of longtime monogamous consentual interracial relationships (including some based on mutual love and respect) in the antebellum era and afterwards (Rosa Parks was one of many famous people descended from one), and many records of relationships of mutual convenience (which most researchers seem to believe the Hemings-Jefferson relationship was). It irks me that rape is the automatic default for interracial relationships.[/hijack]
Christians. They never go out of fashion and they appreciate the martyrdom.
Pretty much this. This is nothing more than comparing scars, and it’s not going to do anything except turn people off. Let’s say for a moment that the OP is right, and gays are worse off than blacks have been. It’s nothing more than an appeal to emotion and it’s not going to convince people who hate gays to treat them any differently. And if the OP is wrong, he’s just spat on the struggles of countless people by downplaying it. It’s a lose-lose comparison.
Bottom line, denying civil rights to blacks is wrong. Denying civil rights to gays is wrong. Both should be fixed. The reason it isn’t happening as fast for gays isn’t because it’s somehow seen as less wrong, it’s because opponents of gay civil rights don’t think it’s wrong to do so. Making this comparison is essentially telling people against gay rights that they’re worse than racists which, while you may think it’s true, sure as hell isn’t going to change their minds. Moreso, you’ll end up distracting people who disagree with this comparison, arguing with you over it rather than discussing the important facts about gay rights.
Seems to me that, during slavery at least, it was a lot more likely that a white man would be raping a black woman. I’d say more but I want to see how quick it takes someone to bump my pit threads.
As for the main issue, I am a 40something straight black man, and I have no difficulty seeing the parallels between gay civil rights and black civil rights. It bothers me when my peers in the black community deny any such similarity; it bothers me even more when black persons significantly younger than me do so. People who claim that gays suffer any less by being denied the right to marry than interracial couples did are, at best, fooling themselves. More typically they’re ignorant, and frequently they’re out and out lying.
My favorite comment about being black v. being gay was E. Lynn Harris’s who was asked several times whether he felt being black or being gay was the greater prejudice. He said they had parallels but were ultimately incomparable- that when he got harassed by cops for jogging in a nice neighborhood he didn’t think it had much to do with the fact he was gay, but he never once had to say to his mother “Mama, I’m black”.
Bayard Rustin was a friend and associate of MLK who was a triple whammy in the 50s: openly gay, black, and card carrying Communist. It’d be interesting to hear his take on the matter. From a 1986 speech he gave:
I think the greatest contrast in gay v. black is that blacks had their families and their churches as a power base and for gays that’s often the source of their greatest discrimination and rejection. Teh gay is ultimately a far more individual rather than social battle where allies are found in external and often unlikely places. OTOH Stonewall Tavern doesn’t compare to Rosewood or the riots in Tulsa and Atlanta and other cities and “God Hates Fags” signs don’t compare to waterhoses and dogs and gays aren’t nearly as likely to be police-profiled for any number of reasons. We can all combine at least in thinking Little Richard is both wonderfully talented, almost as iconic and influential as he claims he is, and yet kind of embarrassing and annoying and nutty representation of us as a group.
Goddamn it, Skald talking about rape again. :rolleyes:
You have put me in the difficult position of un-demobbing the monkeys.
Jews? Or maybe the maybe the Mexicans.