I’ve got it! Lissener is actually a Crab Person.
Ryle, not sure what you mean: you posted that I had called people homophobes simply for disagreeing with me, I asked you to prove it, and then you disappeared.
Can I take this to mean that you rescind that accusation, and you agree that I do NOT call people homophobes simply for disagreeing with me? In which case, thanks very much.
If not, please elaborate.
(Don’t mean to sound abrupt; I appreciate your last post. Just not sure in what way I should re-process your earlier posts in its light.)
If people refuse to talk to other people because they consider them sinners, or evil, or morally corupt. Then the world will be silent but for the screams of those dieing in endless wars.
If people don’t challenge the precepts of the society arround them. Then they are no more than slaves of that society.
So basically, lissener has become the Andrea Dworkin of the SDMB?
Oh, and lissener:
What do you mean, if?
Yeah, I mean I retract the accusation, I completely misunderstood that thread, and I could have sworn I read something that I knew was by you, but after reading it over several times, it turns out it wasn’t really there.
I’m really sorry, I guess I just really misunderstood what you were saying and read incorrectly between the lines.
All right, lissener, let me ask you an “on the street” question. Let’s just pretend that I didn’t hang out here and read the neat and thoughtful stuff others write. Let’s pretend I’ve never seen the Zenster banning recap thread, and have never entertained a second thought about the weightiness of pejoratively using the term cocksucker.
It’s real life in this scenario.
You are at a restaurant waiting to pick up your takeout and you overhear my loud conversation with my wife about one of my rotten employees.
“He’s embezzled from our parents’ company. I really can’t wait to fire that little cocksucker.”
What would you do?
Oh. One other thing:
At which point did you feel my prejudices warranted your [ecch] “letting the rude loose?” Perhaps you don’t like that I have in the past considered myself homophobic?
My position is that sexual preference is not entirely determined by genetics; it is not entirely determined by environment; you are telling the truth when you say choice didn’t enter into your sexuality; and choice’s role in sexuality is less important than either genetics or environment, but nonetheless exists as a role in some cases (e.g., radical feminists who make a conscious choice to become lesbian).
Okay, maybe this is really a case of you being ignorant, not a case of you attacking me.
My girlfriend who left me for an older woman, and who later married a man? She was unsure of her sexuality when she was dating me, sure – but she was sixteen at the time, and what sort of fool IS sure about their sexuality when they’re 16? Certainly she was perfectly sure of her sexuality when she dated a woman. And she is perfectly sure of her sexuality now that she is married to a man. And in neither case did she consider herself to be bisexual, near as I know. (I am not 100% confident in that statement, but I’m reasonably confident – she and I were having pretty open and often conversations at the point where she switched from dating a woman to dating men again).
And my relative whose sexuality has drifted all over the map has never expressed uncertainty about his sexuality; indeed, he’s always seemed pretty comfortable with it.
Their unsureness didn’t change: their sexuality did.
I’ll add another example: a dear friend of mine growing up was an older gay man. He introduced me to the pagan scene, and was dealing heavily with the death of his lover from AIDS when I met him. For awhile, he was the closest person I’ve ever had to a spiritual mentor.
I lost touch with him for a few years, and when I met him again, he told me, with a deer-in-the-headlights-look, that he had fallen madly in love with a woman. He had always, he said, been the kind of queer radical who excoriated “bisexuals” for their hypocrisy, claimed they were trying to get the best of both worlds, and so it took him completely by surprise when he fell for a woman.
Sure, he was unsure of his sexuality for awhile – but near as I can tell, that’s because he’d pigeonholed his sexuality too much. He went from being a dyed-in-the-wool homosexual to being, in a specific case, hetero. Last I heard of him a few years ago, he and this woman were still together.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been on the borders of the gay and the straight world, but people seem to me to drift between categories pretty often. Unsureness is a byproduct of, not the cause for, this shift.
When you cavalierly state that these people were unsure of their sexuality without knowing them, without spending hours talking to them, it comes across as presumptuous. When you dismiss my experiences by belittling my friends, it comes across as rude.
So yes: I felt attacked.
Daniel
I have already said–and resaid and cut and pasted into other threads–that I don’t, personally, have a problem with that position, so I’m not sure why you feel attacked on that account.
I can’t tell you how many anecdotes I could share about friends who’s sexuality “drifted” over a lifetime of struggle; a struggle of which there was often no outward evidence. I don’t doubt that you know people–as I know people–whose understanding of their own sexuality has evolved over time. Your personal interpretation that their bedrock sexuality has mutated over time, however, does not serve to convince me–A)–that this is the universal human norm, or–B)–that you’ve made the correct interpretation. It still makes infinitely more sense to me that your anecdotes are classic examples of evolving self awareness. So, respectfully, I do not by your interpretation of your friends’ sexual journeys as proof that one can alter one’s sexuality. One can expand one’s sexual experience on the way to learning more about that sexuality, but you haven’t convinced me that their basic makeup has changed. I have a couple friends who are male escorts. Straight guys who each, individually, one day needed enough money to be “gay for pay.” (It’s extremely common in the gay porn world for an actor to be straight outside of “work.”) Both of these guys eventually accumulated enough experience in gay sex to become used to it, and even occasionally to engage in it recreationally. But both of them are still heterosexual. Again, I’m making a distinction between homosexuality and homosexual acts. No one here doubts that a prisoner who’s engaged in homosex for “relief” while locked up has become a gay man. No one doubts that he’ll come out of prison ready to get back in the old saddle, as it were. His sexuality has not changed. His circumstances, his experience, perhaps even his understanding of that sexuality has changed, but his sexuality itself has not.
If it’s rude to say that this is why I don’t buy your interpretation of your friends’ experiences, then I’m sorry.
Personally, I’d ignore it. Might not eat there again, but I wouldn’t do anything about it.
I’m on a friend’s laptop* and will take the time to reread the thread to answer this on monday.
*computer 
(Abbreviated for brevity)
Libertarian, you are so smart! 
(Please let me bear your children??? 
)
I’ll be here.
In the mean time, don’t tax the hamsters too much. I assure you I’m actually on your side, yet you choose to shit on a viewpoint that will never advocate vigilantism or “militancy” against homophobes. Unlike you, I believe even the incorrigibles have the capacity for change.
Res Ipsa Loquitur: I hope you never have to adopt. Homophobia’s a sorry enough trip to lay on a kid, let alone its cloaking in the Cloth. Parents’ feelings of pain instead of, say the exaltation at the Duty of God’s good work, are yet another burden for an adopted child. Kids pick that shit up, take it from me.
It’s not just you.
It seems to me that you are assuming some sort of basic essentialism when it comes to a human being over a entire lifetime: some sort of basic fundamental that is always the same, just is more or less revealed or discovered. This would go beyond the “it’s not a choice” idea to the idea that sexuality is basically immutable.
However, I think that view is just as questionable as its opposite. Indeed, ESPECIALLY if homosexuality is almost exclusively biological (which must, of course, include elements of both choice and environment), then it becomes perfectly plausible that, for whatever biological reason, a person’s sexuality could itself change, no more or less than any other biological feature that changes over a lifetime. The only way I can see how an essentialist, “revealed or concealed, but never chaging” idea would make full sense would be if people’s sexualities were inscribed on an immutable soul that is unaffected by anything that can happen to a person.
Some selections that contributed to my writing you off and limiting my efforts at civility in my responses to you:
First, some indications that civility wasn’t terribly high on your list:
A couple attempts to blame me for the homophobia of others:
Condemning me prejudicially, not for what I’ve done, but for what you’d ASSUME I’d do in hypothetical situations of your own inventions:
A non-sequitur or two (I’m not sure that word means what you think it means).
Understand that few of the above quotes would have, alone, led me to write you off; but in combination they seemed to me to portray an attitude that was not worth my effort or attention.
Looks like a lot of work to say “I’m not talking to you, LA LA LA”
I can choose to be with a woman, right? I don’t because I am a Christian and God frowns upon homosexuality. I think woman are beautiful (well, some woman anyway)
Do I like men. Yes! I married a man. Why? Because I love him and God made a man and a woman to be together.
So being that I believe homosexuality to be morally wrong, I am a homophobe?
I thought that homophobia was: straight people beating up gay people because they are gay, or not talking to someone or being afraid of someone because they are gay.
I know that I am not afraid of gay people. I know that I have talked to gay people.
I use to take care of AIDS hospice patients in their home, and all but one guy was not gay. I even cried and prayed for them when they passed on. I have even hugged their SO and gave my sympathy.
If I am a homophobe, then I guess we aren’t that bad.
Bullshit. Prove it.
[Lisa Kudrow]I went to a Bar Mitzva once; that DOESN’T make me Jewish.[/Lisa Kudrow]
Yes.
No; those are gaybashers; terrorists. Being a racist doesn’t make you a KKKer, so drop the bullshit.
Well, some of my best friends are bible-bangin jeezers, and though I look down on them and pity them, I consider myself better than them because I tolerate them out of a sense of charity and superiority.
Naw, I’ve seen worse. And as long as the KKK is there to compare myself too, I can feel morally smug about being a silent racist.
Since lissener has commandeered this thread into another “Everyone’s a homophobe but me” thread, can I have it closed? I think his vile behavior has proved me point…