That’s actually held in Wisconsin as it’s near the border…I was making reference to rural areas, really. I meant to type “South Dakota”, not Duluth, but Duluth it is. Sure, anyone can drive to their nearest big city or major population area, but Uber Gay Pride™ is more of a fringe thing.
The Duluth Pride Parade is pretty tame. Worship services, family time…sound like leather daddies, ass chaps & boobie tassels to you? Are they bad for the movement if they’re boring? Do leather daddies exist only in big cities? How about scantily clad sexualized parade participants? Hmmm? Thoughts?
Calm down, Marley. In this conversation, I have not been the one making up shit.
If I live in Palo, Iowa and everyone things gay males are freaks it doesn’t help me if Cedar Rapids or Iowa City have (clothed and low key) pride parades.
There’s a “march of gay people down the street” and there’s a PRIDE PARADE. See how they vary from state to state. (More liberal areas are the ones with nudity, and that’s what people buzz about.) And it’s people in the smaller towns that are hurting.
Huh? Then how come anti-gay measurements are being passed? Cite? What?
Also – how can you say pride parades with overt sexual content helped that? Because it’s my belief that while overall opinions are changing, it is not at the same rate in most of America. And it’s not going to change much if the perception of gays is what we’ve talked about. It’s like what I said before - rural America may have a 13 per cent favorable opinion of same sex marriage versus 11 percent ten years ago, but that’s awfully tiny.
And as history has shown, courts don’t always reflect the public’s opinion. Look at blacks and education. In my state, we practice institutionalized segregation.
If gays want others to accept them, why not project what is the gay norm - or at least within a few deviations of it? Why give off the feeling of sex-crazed teenagers who can’t help but to splash their sex lives in public?
There are so many straight people who go to Pride Parades to* see the show* more than anything, because it can be awfully entertaining. Shock value usually is.
But chicks in tassels and guys in bikini underwear can’t casually stroll down Main Street, hook a left, and wave at schoolchildren in the middle of the week. The gay movement should stand on its own merits instead of capitalizing on people’s want to have a good time with half naked hot dudes (or chicks) and alcohol. “Gay Pride Parades” needs to be under “Stuff White People Like”.
If you put off that vibe that this parade is my pride - think of me as a sex object and look at this bulging penis, it’s your fault if someone doesn’t take you seriously.
I don’t object to the idea of having a pride parade. Not at all. I’ve participated in marches, parades, rallies. I have my “LET FREEDOM MARRY” pin on my political bag & “SAFE ZONE” stickers and such in my classroom and HRC tags on my car and bla bla bla. I don’t need someone to be cookie cutter for me to think they deserve equal rights!
I object to the sexualization and exploitation that has become the staple of some of the major cities - Toronto, NYC, SF, Chicago. To think that those things don’t hurt the movement is actually kind of silly. It’s like you’re too desensitized.
I’m willing to bet that after gay marriage is no longer an issue, we’ll see a spike in anti-gay sentiment within the Department of Human Services/Child Protection of several areas.
No one ever gained political traction in America by being outrageous. And unfortunately, this is not a true blue America.
Aw, hell. Obama is so determined to leave some positive legacy that I’m sure he’ll finally decide on ‘how he feels’ on the issue.
I think it’s remarkable that you keep forgetting what you’ve posted. Throughout this thread, you’ve said over and over again that gay pride parades are overly sexualized and it presents a problem for the gay rights movement. And here you just said this parade doesn’t have that. (You said the same thing about Denver earlier. For some reason you can’t acknowledge you overgeneralized.) So in fact, not all gay pride parades have a big sexual component, right? Is that not what you just admitted? That maybe they do more flamboyant parades in places that will tolerate that kind of thing and tone it down in other places?
Here’s the schedule for the 2009 Sioux Falls gay pride event. Note that it includes two different drag shows.
There’s plenty of family events at San Francisco Pride. Among more adult-oriented fare, of course. I don’t see any worship services as part of the official events, but the list of supporters includes several religious organizations, including Christian churches, whom I assume will be offering services to people attending the festival.
Also, I note that there’s a Trans Parade. I wonder what that’s doing in there? You should probably tell them that transsexuals aren’t gay. They seem to have missed your earlier newsflash.
Here’s an article about the pride parade in Minneapolis. Not too different from what you’d find in SF or NYC.
Because not all gays are within a few deviations of norm, and the purpose of gay pride is inclusion, not exclusion. Again, even if we accept (without, as Marley keeps pointing out to you, not one single shred of evidence) that pride parades are hurting gay rights in mainstream society, that’s a small price to pay for the effects they have within the gay community itself.
I kinda think all the straight people who show up at gay pride parades are probably okay with what’s going on in the parades. Otherwise, I doubt they’d be attending. So, the fact that there’s a significant straight population in attendance at pride events rather works against your argument, don’t you think?
Gay pride is one of the merits of the overall gay rights movement. The fact that people can do this, in public, without censure or violence, is the best tribute imaginable to the strides made by the gay rights movement over the last fifty years.
There is not one single thing you’ve posted in this thread to support this statement.
Do I start with the 21 states that went out of their way to write it in their constitutions or…?
Marley, what is the point of this? You’re just going to contend every thing I say, pick apart stuff, twist my words, and for what?
If you want to have a PRODUCTIVE conversation, that’s fine. But the stereotypes of gays --no, fuck that, the GROSS MIS-CHARACTERIZATIONS depicted in major pride parades fuel people’s fears.
Will that extend to other areas? Religious charities? Religious hospitals? Their employees, their services, their contracts, their funding? That’s the kind of domino effect that conservatives are worried about.
Damage done by gay pride parades. Small town gays who are hurt by the backlash to the exuberance of gays in the big city. Something related to the thing I asked you to cite.
Which parades are major and which aren’t? Do you have a list?
You can’t give people shit for citing Wikipedia and then try to prove your point by quoting responses to blog posts. I’m sure there you are not the only person on the planet who feels the way you do about these parades. That does not mean anything you have said about them is correct.
The 21 states that amended their constitutions do not demonstrate a rising tide of anti-gay sentiment. In each one of those states, gay marriage was already illegal. The amendments were passed as a reaction to the steadily increasing acceptance of gays throughout the country. The people who wrote, and voted for, those laws weren’t pro-gay rights until they saw a pride parade. They were already anti-gay rights, and are freaking the fuck out because they can see that their numbers are steadily dwindling. They haven’t, yet, shrunk to the point where they’re politically powerless, but they can sure as hell feel the wolves nipping at their heels.
To try to get you to make a coherent argument, would be my guess.
How are those gross mischaracterizations? The people in these parades that you so vehemently despise are actual gay people. They’re not deep-cover members of Westboro Baptist, planting disinformation. They’re an accurate representation of one portion of the gay community. There are, certainly, a vast number of gays who are nothing like that - and they’re represented in the parades as well. Yes, enemies of the gay rights movement are going to pick out the most outrageous examples they can find, and try to paint them as representing all gay people. The solution to that isn’t to make the outrageous parts disappear, the solution is to keep fighting until people get it through their skulls that those people deserve the same rights as everyone else.
And this is related to gay pride parades how, exactly?
I should fucking well hope so. If a church wants to run a business, it has to run it by the same rules every other business does. It’s a pity that the Catholic Church has once again put their own medieval bigotry ahead of the welfare of children, but I don’t see any way a reasonable person can place the blame for that one the gay rights movement, and not on the Catholic organization that decided to end the program.
> Then how come anti-gay measurements are being passed?
Because, as I said already, the fact that the percentages in voting patterns are going upward doesn’t mean that they are all above 50% yet. When a particular vote in a particular region goes 55% to 45% against same-sex marriage, that doesn’t mean that suddenly it has been decided that never in the future will it pass. What you have to do is look at the history in that region. 10 years before, a similar vote might have gone 65% to 35% against same-sex marriage. 20 years before it would have been unlikely that it could have even got on the ballot, and if it did it would have been lucky to get 25% of the votes. As I already said, you have to look at the long-term patterns and not at any one particular ballot, legislative vote, or court decision.
Ah, now I see what you mean. I don’t dispute that such things come in waves - just ta few years ago, support for same sex marriage was ‘down’, but now it ‘isn’t’.
My point was to not get too terribly excited over the Gallup poll and to focus on what’s happening in the legal realm.
I really wanted this not to be true, but when I looked it up not only did I find out that it is(according to one poll at least), it turns out 67% of Canadians do too.
Since you made that post about angels 10 days ago, the Great Debates mods have told you several times that you need to stop posting this comment (and ones like it) over and over and over again. This is another warning for ignoring those instructions.
Here’s another indication of how things have changed:
In 1978, there was a proposition on the California ballot, the so-called Briggs Initiative. If passed, it “would have banned gays and lesbians, and possibly anyone who supported gay rights, from working in California’s public schools.”
It lost, but more than 40% of the electorate voted for it. In California!