Nope. Go back and read what was written in the sequence that it was written.
My first post noted that “my enemies have to lose”, (understood as–and later clarified as–“my enemies have to be humiliated”), was understandable emotionally, but that it was unfortunate.
My second post simply noted that it was possible to understand that one’s opponents might simply be in error or come from a background that sets their understanding in a particular way which would make humiliation unnecessary (as well as counterproductive).
In response, Czarcasm decided to introduce the word “oppression” to the discussion from nowhere, Miller and Dr. Drake focused on the emotional reactions of those who have suffered from homophobia–something I had neither ignored nor discounted–and you decided to get all personal and pissy. Now jsgoddess is riffing on Czarcasm’s “oppression” hijack as if anything I had posted argued against fighting oppression.
If you (collectively) insist on humiliating your opponents and treating them as evil, you are simply adopting the tactics of Robertson, Santorum, and others of similar stripes. You will preach to the converted and do more to offend those who might be persuaded to your position. You will also seriously misjudge a large number of people who are not in opposition based on evil motives.
I have watched this occur. A number of people who have wavered on the topic of SSM in recent elections have decided to oppose it after having insults hurled at them. ::: shrug :::
This all sounds like you’re worried about the tone. I think all approaches can work, if the goal is to change hearts and minds. The softer approach might be more likely to convince some people, but the same goes for the ‘harder’ approach. Some people aren’t shaken out of long-held convictions until they’re actually called a bigot. Others immediately turn defensive and harden their views.
But both approaches can work, and both can fail. I don’t think one is inherently better than the other.
Every year, they come out with a flu vaccine because every year has a flu season.
It seems every thread about SSM has a “but don’t be mean because you’ll lose support” season. Or “don’t be blatantly gay” or “don’t be too black” or “don’t be noticeably female” or “don’t admit you’re an atheist” or “you don’t need to say you’re a liberal” or all of the millions of ways we’re told all our lives that if you rock the boat, someone will hate you or be sad and then they’ll reject you.
Reject away, delicate flowers of the world. Your conditional support has so many strings that it’s worthless in a real fight.
Unfortunately, this is not true. The world would be a simpler place if it were true.
In fact, opposition to Gay Rights can be the result of a lot of things, genuinely evil motives, confusion, misunderstandings, fear. Laying them all at the foot of evil motives means that one pre-judges every opponent to Gay rights as evil, closing off any effort to understand them, reducing the chances of persuading them of their error.
Tomndebb, when you hint that this specific topic is not oppressive, you are committing a microagression, specifically a microinvalidation. I don’t mean to say that we should let emotions dominate or even really color rational debate, but pretending it’s just like any other topic really does invalidate the experiences of gay people.
Now, you very carefully haven’t taken a stand on whether it is or isn’t oppression, just said that the word was introduced “from nowhere,” which is true. Nevertheless, you really come across as invalidating the gay experience.
(I should add that this is all separate from the note you gave me for using an insult, earlier, which was justified, as that was inappropriate for this forum.)
No problem. The evil can be met with whatever rhetorical weapons are most effective in a given situation – flatly sticking the “bigot” label to them, sniggering about their real reasons for being so focused on Teh Ghey, etc, without worrying oneself overmuch about the bare-knuckledness of it all. By this means, the drivers of the anti-equality side can be defenestrated out the Overton Window of respectable society. Once that happens, the merely ignorant will follow the new social consensus, or at least will let the matter drop and the bigotry die with them.
To the Shodans of the world, you’re perfectly free to not use the word “marriage” to refer to a same-sex union. But are you arguing that the rest of us–who actually support SSM–shouldn’t use the word “marriage” either? But why should we?
Or are you complaining that we’ll think you’re an asshole if you refuse to pretend two men are married? Well, it depends. If you’re a hospital worker who refuses to allow visitation of a legally recognized but ontologically fictitious spouse, then sure. If you’re an IRS agent who refuses to act as if two people are married for the purposes of the tax code, then sure. If you’re a judge who refuses to enforce probate law as if the two people are married, then sure. As long as you agree to act as if two people are married when it comes to your job, then there’s no problem.
Socially, you have no obligation to act as if two people are married, if you don’t believe they really are. So if you have two gay neighbors who have a legally recognized union that they call a “marriage”, you don’t have an obligation to refer to it as a marriage. But what you really want is to refuse to recognize gay marriages socially but not have anyone think you’re an asshole over it.
But you don’t have that right. You don’t have to recognize the legal fiction of gay marriage socially, as long as you recognize it legally. But you can’t dictate how people feel about you once you’ve made that choice. Just like a gay guy might have the right to walk down street holding hands with another man, but he can’t stop you from looking down on him for being gay.
It’s all well and good to claim to support civil unions for everyone but oppose SSM, but the reality is that civil unions are off the table, and it wasn’t SSM supporters who took civil unions off the table, it was SSM opponents. So you can either oppose SSM without the fallback of civil unions, or you can support SSM even if in a perfect world you’d rather see civil unions. Your preferred option doesn’t exist in today’s world.
You don’t have to call same-sex unions “marriages” but if you loudly interrupt any time someone refers to a same-sex union as a marriage and insist that it is not a marriage but a legal fiction that has the same legal rights as marriage but is not a marriage, then a few people will start to think you’re a jerk. Your call on whether it’s worth it to insist on the truth at the cost of annoying some people.
Really? You get all that (referring to the deliberate efforts at insult described in your link) from a statement that wanting to humiliate one’s opponents is “unfortunate”? Note that I did not denigrate the emotion or in any way declare that it was not legitimate. I noted only that it was unfortunate, because acting on it is counterproductive.
The person who grew up in an community where every homosexual was closeted, never knowing when they encountered a homosexual, who simply thinks of homosexuality as “other” and therefore wrong.
The person who grew up in a community where “family” was so tightly tied to having children that he or she cannot conceive of the word having any meaning beyond a procreative meaning.
Such people are having their preconceptions changed at an amazing rate as demonstrated by polls on the topic over the last ten or fifteen years. I am not sure how you ascribe their views to having “evil motives.”
Not from that statement, no, but from the ensuing discussion. Your continual attempts to minimize the harm done are, in fact, part of the oppression. Not the worst part, by any stretch of the imagination. But your overall message is, on balance, in defense of the people who want to preserve the status quo. They may be wrong, but they’re well-intentioned: give them more time, give them more space, give them their word choice. Sorry, no: they have had the playing field for my entire lifetime, not to speak of history. They no longer get to dictate the terms without including us.
It is not productive to insult people, you’re right, but why are you spending your time worrying about insults directed at people with privilege rather than actual harm being done to gay people?
I’d say it’s much less productive to worry about offending people with accurate terminology. “Self-righteous” has a meaning, and when it’s correct, it’s not an insult, it’s just accurately descriptive. I’d never mock someone for using the word when its use is appropriate.
Similarly, “bigot” has a meaning, and when it’s correct, it’s not an insult, it’s just accurately descriptive. We shouldn’t waste time worrying about whether someone’s feelings are hurt by an accurate descriptor applied to them. If they’re really worried about it, they can stop being bigoted. If it’s more important to them to be bigoted than to avoid having their feelings hurt, that’s their choice.
Do they want to incur harm on other people, whom they’ve never met, and whose actions are not affecting them in any way? Then that’s evil. Evil can also be stupid, or ignorant. They are quite often associated properties.
Also, this may have slipped your mind, but it’s not 1950 anymore. We have the internet. We have global-broadcast television. There are no longer any people in America who have never seen a gay person - there are some who have never met one, but the concept of homosexuality, and the issues surrounding it are common knowledge to 99% of the American public. Ignorance is no longer an excuse.
This public conversation has been going on long enough that there is no longer any legitimate excuse for opposing SSM. None.
In the early 1990s, I was not anti-homosexual but I was pro-“everything but marriage.” Whatever reasons I had for holding that position, I’ve had 20 years to reconsider and weigh against the pro-side. That’s more than enough time.
And given the way in which the anti-SSM side has conducted itself, I am in no mind to offer any benefit of the doubt.
Well, if you are going to change the meaning of my statements, I can see where you are going.
At no time and in no statement have I minimized the harm done to gay couples.
You are also changing the terms of the discussion. You explicitly noted evil motivation and I have limited my remarks to identifying those whose motives were not evil.
Nothing I have said has implied that the results were less than evil.
As to your speculation regarding who does or does not actually know gay people, (carefully sidestepping the point that that was explicit in my discussion), many people base all their judgments on personal experience. That so many people have changed their views is almost certainly due to the changes in communications and social attitudes that you mentioned. That is hardly 100% of the population, however. I do not share your willingness to accuse people of evil motives when their motives are not actually known.
You’re certainly willing enough to accuse people of self-righteous motives, though. Interesting how much more willing you are to attack people advocating for equality than people advocating against it. That may have the appearance of objectivity, but it lacks objectivity’s substance.
This statement suggests that the perception of the opposition doing wrong (in scare quotes) is invalid.
Invalidating the community’s lived experience.
Minimizing the harm done by this debate.
Again, invalidating the community’s lived experience.
This and similar statements are focused on the perceptions of the priveleged group, worrying about their vulnerability to insult, as if they were innocents in need of protection rather than in collusion, albeit ignorant collusion, with the forces of oppression.
Minimizes the harm caused by opposition to gay rights by portraying those opposed as understandably opposed.
Any one of these statements is understandable, but there’s an overall pattern of you, trying to control the terms of the debate on behalf of gay people by minimizing the harm done by a complacent majority, and trying to protect the priveleged allies at the expense of the forward momentum.
The cardinal rule for allies is take your cues from the people you are helping, and do not try to take over and control the conversation.
Rolling your eyes doesn’t make your hypocrisy go away.
I’m willing to mail you as many gold stars as you want for this. Just give me an address, and you can affix the shiny all over your keyboard.
You did more than that.
You explicitly stated that people fell into the “popular” habit of assuming evil in others out of a desire for “self-righteous back patting”. You said that. That’s a direct quote of your chosen phrase. You deliberately brought up their motives in a sneering, condescending manner. Simultaneously, you made a special point of distinguishing yourself from such uncouth behavior. You were self-righteously patting yourself on the back at the same time that were criticizing others for the same motivation. You didn’t even have the decency to start a new paragraph to put some distance between the contradiction. You had to do it simultaneously.
There are no virtue points for you to win here. On preview, I see this has already been pointed out. It personally seems like a safe bet to me to assume at least somewhat evil motives from self-identified members of a movement which has undeniably done appalling evil acts. If you think that’s not the case, and that we have to pussy-foot around this particular issue, then your own favored habit of assuming the motivations of others would seem similarly unjustifiable.
I am queer. My partner is queer. I have been an activist for LGBT rights and freedom from oppression since I was in high school in the 1980s. I watched friends die of the plague. I’ve been assaulted, verbally and physically. I’ve seen people I love assaulted, verbally and physically. I am a psychotherapist primarily serving the LGBT and poly communities.
So I hope it does not serve as a microaggression against my community when I say that I understand what you’re saying, tom~, and I agree with you.