As my brother commented, “Gays are way more fun than people who hate gays.”
Wow, there’s a shock.
And I’m sure the GLBT community is grateful for the guidance from some random person that disagrees with them.
Do you know why people use metaphors like “high ground”? Because it’s a battlefield. And on the battlefield, you shoot the enemy. You don’t hold the high ground by letting them shoot at you without returning fire.
Exactly. I always roll my eyes at people who demand that the oppressed be nicer to the oppressors, otherwise the oppressed lose the moral high ground. Like people who don’t have equal rights owe anything to those denying them of those rights.
When it’s just a barely veiled attack at someone else? Always. You can argue that maybe that assholishness is justified, but it is always being an asshole. It’s part of the definition: enjoying someone else’s pain.
And I agree with CitizenPained–this sort of stuff just gives the opposition more ammunition to convince people that gay people are shitty people and deserve to treated the way they are. This is the type of stuff that bigots quote.
I know some of you guys are so far removed from the issue that you can’t believe anything matters. But I not only am a former homophobe, but am still surrounded by homophobes. I listen every day to the rhetoric they use, and it always boils down to homosexuals being shitty people in general. They don’t flat out say that, but that’s the underlying argument.
But go ahead and attack the one person who is actually aware of what’s going on because you are upset the world isn’t the way you want it to be. And then attack the agoraphobe because he dares give his experience, and prove you aren’t actually anti-bigotry, just pro-gay even when it hurts your cause.
Homophobes aren’t going to need this as “more ammunition,” since the GLBT community could basically roll over and play dead and the homophobes would still hate them. There’s nothing that the GLBT community could do, or not do, that would make the homophobes NOT think that they’re shitty people.
Demanding that oppressed groups act like angels all the fucking time, in the face of ongoing hatred and bigotry, just makes you look sanctimonious. Isn’t there someone on this board who always argues that blacks should have been nicer during their demands for equal rights? That argument is stupid, and it’s equally stupid to say that the GLBT community should never, ever snark back at someone who’s spent a career attempting to deny them basic human rights.
With all due respect, this is bullshit. Homophobes and bigots are going to find “ammunition” even if every gay person on the planet becomes celibate overnight and joins a Baptist church.
You want it? You’ve got it.
First off, there is no way in the whole wide world that GLBT persons would be able to be nice enough to get the Kochs of the world to decide that the deserve equal treatment. Telling them that they gain more than they’ll lose by silence is a fucking condescending error. And that’s at the most generous.
Personally, I think, for all you’re calling yourself a former homophobe that you’re lying to them and to yourself. Not necessarily intentionally, but still not telling the whole truth. You still seem to have a lot of internalized homophobia if you can honestly believe that keeping quiet, and behaving, is going to do any good.
Secondly using your mental illness to make yourself unassailable, because you’re an agoraphobe is beyond childish. Stand up on your own two feet. Don’t use your illness for a fucking excuse to do anything you like. You’re making the rest of us who work the labors of Sisyphus to convince the sane world that we are not completely useless drains on the fucking globe look bad. Your agoraphobia not only has abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with the topic at hand, but it’s actually going to work counter to your point - since agoraphobes don’t exactly often have the interpersonal experience to draw accurate conclusions about group behavior.
Grow up and take responsibility for as much of your actions as you may. Don’t use your mental illness to demand that you can’t be treated like an adult.
Who gives a fuck? I don’t give a rat’s ass what Johnny Q. Homophobe thinks about jackshit. And the sort of person I’d have to be in order to have him approve of me is a denial of who I am. I give no one that authority over me and frankly, I think your attitude is disgusting.
This seems impossible. How would the agoraphobe have any relevant or valuable experience to add to the discussion, let alone be the “one person who is actually aware of what’s going on”? From your widespread social interactions both with homosexual people and homophobes? Uh…yeah.
I don’t believe that the people who make this argument even believe it. I think it’s just a socially acceptable way to tell people in oppressed groups to shut up. It’s obviously, manifestly false; gay people tried the “be nice and don’t fuss” for thousands of years, fercrissakes. We started slowly winning rights like the right to legally have sex with each other, and after that even the right to get married, when we started making noise. Being meek just makes it easier to ignore us, and that’s true for any minority group.
[QUOTE=BigT]
And I agree with CitizenPained–this sort of stuff just gives the opposition more ammunition to convince people that gay people are shitty people and deserve to treated the way they are. This is the type of stuff that bigots quote.
[/QUOTE]
I do not believe that there are people who would support us and vote to give us the same rights straight people enjoy but who don’t because we’re not nice enough. I believe there are homophobes who rationalize their homophobia by complaining about gay people making too much fuss, but I doubt we’ve ever lost a single person who actually would otherwise have been committed to our cause by making fun of the hypocrites who wish to continue oppressing us.
Are you now.
It doesn’t hurt our cause. To be blunt, the wavering and conditional support we might possibly get from a few people like you has no benefit to us anyway. Your conditional, vague support doesn’t do anything for us; if anything, trying to kowtow to fair-weather friends like you hurts us by tying our hands.
And I don’t believe you have the kind of background in doing advocacy or political work where you could even have any idea what strategies work and what ones don’t. At any rate, the bottom line is that there is no homophobe on earth who is a homophobe because we’re not nice enough.
When someone is in political office and claims to be holier-than-thou, and supposedly represents the holier-than-thou contingent, it is absolutely fair game to call them out on their hypocritical actions. If they are actively infringing on my rights - you can damn well be assured I am watching them to see if they play by their self-imposed rules. You can’t have it both ways - fuck around with underage kids while you are married and then stand on a pedestal and claim to be a beacon of moral light.
Speaking as an agoraphobic queer, I endorse this post whole-heartedly.
If you’re looking for someone who has a problem with gay marriage, you’re not looking for me.
But I’m going to predict, just based on a hunch, that John Medeiros is an asshole.
How the hell did you get out of the closet?
Mr. Medeiros may be an asshole, he probably is based on my observation that all humans are assholes to some degree, but Ms. Adulteress is a bigger asshole by several orders of magnitude. So he wins.
Well put.
AFAIAC, when someone chooses to hold herself up in the political realm as the avatar of morality to the extent of contrasting other people’s private lives unfavourably with her own, that means that she has chosen to place her private life in the political realm, just as she has done to others (without giving them the choice).
Wow. I missed this development.
As I said before, I thought the gay community made those comments (whatever constitutes the gay community in that region), not one person. If an organization had said that, that would’ve been in poor taste. Comedian? Fair game. But an organization or person representing a general community? Have some class, please.
I, like I assume many people reading that article/thread, didn’t realize at first that the newspaper did some shitty reporting with the sensationalist headline. I still stand by my statement: If your position is that your marriage/sex life/etc isn’t the public’s business, don’t get into other people’s shit. I mean, really?
Again, you’re demanding a level of “class” from an oppressed group that you’re not demanding from the oppressors. And that’s unreasonable, unrealistic and unfair.
And I see by your last paragraph that you actually agree with the sentiment of the letter - if Amy Koch believes that her sex life isn’t the public’s business, then she shouldn’t get into the sex/love/romantic lives of others, like the LGBT community, that she’s spent a lot of her career demonizing.