Talking to the anti-abortion, pro-adoption crowd about gay issues brings up such gems, my favorite being “Marriage is for monogamy, and gays can’t be monogamous. So gays can’t get married.”
They’ve also told me “There is no such thing as gay marriage” and “Gay parenting is child abuse.” News to my sister, her wife and eight daughters.
Some Roma are from Romania. Some are from other countries. Linguists say our primary language hails from India. it’s very close to Sanskit. For many centuries Roma have been called Gypsies because of a mistaken belief that we were from Egypt. However that name has also been applied to other groups in the Western world such as the Irish Travelers or plain Travelers (some do not claim an Irish origin). Roma and Travelers are not the same groups though they may get along (or may not depending on the personalites involved). Language, culture and religion (actually those last two are more or less the same thing) are what unites the Romany people not geographic location.
Thanks. Ihave heard Gypsy, but never Roma. So the Roma are a stateless lot.
About 8 years ago I was pretty much forced out of a cashier position when I ‘let slip’ I was an atheist. Was all very friendly, was working there for months, someone brings up their faith (I think inviting me to church or whatnot) and I mentioned I was an atheist. All of a sudden I start getting snide remarks, my schedule begins seeing a lot of last minute changes that are hard to keep track of, and it became a generally unfriendly environment to work in. They didn’t outright fire me, so maybe it wasn’t outright discrimination, but always left a bad taste anyways. Only time I’ve ever encountered outright hostility to my atheism other than schoolyard bullying.
Other than that just all the discrimination you get being born and growing up white in Hawaii (seriously, look it up), where no matter where you go you’re just a “dum fuckin’ haole” who “stole our land”.
I’m sure you have other reasons to realize it was sexism, but I’ve read that comment as a pickup line before.
A lesbian my sister knew got pregnant via a rape. She decided to have the child and raise it with her long time partner. I told her to talk to some anti-abortion protestors. They all told her she should “have the baby and give it to a real family.”
I am neither a woman nor a pick-up line expert. But I’m still willing to bet that a stranger throwing out, “I’ve observed you, and now I can tell you without your solicitation what you need to do to improve your physical appearance” is not likely to win a lot of brownie points.
What Asmovian said, plus what gave you the impression that pick-up lines can’t be sexist? I’d wager that a large proportion of them are.
I’m curious as to the nature of your objections to Obama. Mine were (and are) from the Left. Obama is comparable to Nixon and other Republicans in a lot of key ways (individual mandate!), and would be a conservative in most other rich countries, thus liberals ask why do Republicans hate him so much, if not for something racial? With that said, I don’t know if it’s simply because he’s black. If everything else about him was the same, but his name was Bernard Hopkins Olson rather than Barack Hussein Obama, what would be the reaction?
Did your company make this one up on their own, or is it being sold to companies by a third party? That’s incompetent.
And yet gays have the fewest abortions. Why do some people have so many hang-ups about sex, family, etc.? It’s all due to religion, right?
If you don’t mind my asking, what sort of snide comments, and where was this?
In a protest in front of the White House the last time the Israel Offense Force massacred Gazans, a police cordon separated me and many others from a bunch of Zionists singing and dancing with lyrics about Gazans being bombed.
A co-worker complaining about some customers thus: “Indian people are so fucking Jewish!”
Eleven years or so ago, I was protesting the imminent invasion of Iraq, when someone drove past and yelled “Bomb the sand niggers!”
Mindless anti-Muslim forum posters and bulk-chain e-mailers.
Nearly the exact same thing happened to me. I was interviewing candidates for a network tech job, and first thing out of one guy’s mouth after the initial office tour was “It’s nice to see that you don’t have any Indians here.”
NEXT.
Anyway, as a hetero white dude, I can’t say that I’ve experienced anything worse than being called a “fucking honky” by the occasional obviously-mentally-ill panhandler when I turn them down. Life is pretty good.
A co-worker once sent an email to the entire 800 person company basically shilling for a video documentary about “the radical Muslim threat.” I was pretty amazed that he thought that was appropriate. He sent another mass email out a few weeks later: a goodbye email. Some other co-workers swear up and down that it wasn’t actually because of the first email, but I’m dubious.
One situation was being the captive audience to a supervisor at work blathering on about how all the Jews control the media and the government are are just out for money. The kicker is he knew I was Jewish, and started out with that, “I know you’re Jewish and I don’t want to offend you but…” thing, and proceeded to lecture me for about five minutes on how greedy all Jews are.
Same employer, different position, different supervisor. There are five of us, all females, and Boss takes over in a supervisory position (Boss is also female). Boss sits down with us one-by-one to chat, see how things are going, any concerns, etc. For context: Colleague 1 is a lesbian and married, colleague 2 also lesbian and single, I’m often assumed to be a lesbian, colleague 3 is straight and married, and colleague 4 is straight and single.
Boss sits down with us one by one for a little chat, how are things going, blah blah. 4 comes out of her little meeting wide-eyed and sits down with us and tells us we are not going to believe this. Boss apparently said to her that she knows 4 is “surrounded by lesbians” and if we do anything to make her uncomfortable she’s to tell Boss right away, and there’s no room for misconduct here, etc. She then tells 4 that us queers are just “confused” and that lots of women “experiment” in situations like this, and 4 shouldn’t “encourage” it.
5 finishes up with Boss, comes over to us. “You are not going to believe what Boss said to me.” Same thing. So that was a fun couple months until we managed to get rid of her.
There are a number of worse situations I have either been directly involved in or witnessed, but those cross the line into sexual harassment/assault, so I’m not sure if they belong here.
I was using an internet cafe in Rotarua, New Zealand when the owner overhead my wife and I talking in our American accents.
He came over to us and said “get the f*** out of my shop and go find yourselves some Iraqi prisoners to torture!”
We’ve been to Iran, Syria, Lebanon, North Korea and other countries that are perceived as anti-American, but have never run into any abuse over our nationality except in New Zealand.
Yeah. Except for those Presbyterians who are splitting from the church over gay ministers and gay marriage. Not a lot of tolerance there.
I’m mostly European and in Australia.
In just one semester alone, I suffered significant racist and xenophobic abuse from two sets of Chinese students in two projects. They called me Alien 老外 and foreign devil 洋鬼子。 They refused to tell me meeting times, and then complained to the teacher that I didn’t come along and they ignored my emailed contribution, submitting without me.
Because of this, I failed one of the modules, and passed the other due to my high exam scores. I would have failed that too, if I hadn’t told the university I would would take legal action if my groupmates were given the authority to allocate my marks.
A new lecturer co-ordinated the module, and quite thankfully, she had everyone conduct their group project in a monitored online forum. I didn’t encounter any discrimination. I doubt all of them were strongly bigotted, it just takes one to hate and the rest to go with the flow for discrimination to happen. On the other hand, I often wonder if I was let into the prestigious university because of my ethnicity… pretty much all my classmates there were Chinese.
Witnessed: A friendly, open-minded and kind Chinese friend of mine suddenly motioned for me to cross the street. When we got to the other side, I asked her why, she said, because she saw some black people approach. Whaattt??? It seems not all racism comes from consistent racists.
I am not sure Anglos are that much better, I have a very aboriginal surname and I have only started getting interviews when I’ve omitted it. Seriously… people would rather interview someone dumb enough to forget to write down their surname than consider someone of potentially Koori descent.
Excellent point. Next time they get in my face about “teh gay,” I am so going to ask “Excuse me, but how many abortions have been caused by homosexuals?”