Good As You

I would rather have molten stakes rammed into my eyes for three hundred years than watch this. Your nap was totally the right response.

"Prohibitionism [of homosexuality] was of course the absolute concensus in America and indeed most of the world for the vast majority of humankind."
And "...a very small minority of human beings have that experience [love] with members of the same gender", as well something like "there just aren't so very many of us".

Hate yourself much as a gay man, Andrew? That first line could have come from any anti-gay Christianist, as could that idea that we are "a very small minority of human beings". They love to tell us how we've been hated practically forever, and what an itty bitty, teeny weenie [:)] minority we really are. I'm surprised you didn't say we're "only two percent of the population"!

Oh, and what's with incoherent drivel around "Liberationism"? I'd say that you were creating a straw man to knock down, except that I couldn't be sure just what the hell you were talking about. Were you talking about just post-Stonewall gay liberationists, Queer Nationalists or what? Regardless, if you are saying that ANY gay person is saying that our sexuality is totally "socially constructed" and not at all innate, then you're really out in lala land. In fact, the gay movement, whether "Liberal" in your eyes, or "Liberationist", holds that our sexuality is innate. Which is why we are against homophobes who say we can and should "change".

And your point about "Liberalism"? Sorry, Andrew, but the categories of "gay" and "straight" and "black" and "white", not to mention "male" and "female", are already out there and very well established in people's minds. Hate crime laws won't further "balkanize" - wasn't that your word? - our society along those lines. And since you've already shown a tendency to buy into what homophobic conservatives say about us, are you actually trying to tell us that hate crime laws only protect "minorities", that they don't also protect majority groups like straight and white people? It's my understanding that the majority of uses of hate crime laws are against people of color for allegedly attacking white people.

And while you might believe you can take anything the haters can dish out, the rest of us think the government owes us some help against them.

And PLEASE don't try to sell us that crap that the Religious Right is pushing, that hate crime laws are criminalizing speech and expression. Okay, you're a little cleverer about it by using the slippery slope argument that hate crime laws might "lead to" the criminalization of speech, rather than just lying about the contents of hate crime laws. But do you really think that only you and your buddies on the Right care about the First Amendment? Maybe you don't get out much beyond your own political boundaries, but First Amendmentism is a strongly held position among pretty much all political tendencies in the United States. We (gay people who are not as far to the right as you) aren't calling for group libel laws or any of those other Western European legal defenses against their ongoing susceptibility to fascist ideology.

And while we're on the subject of legal remedies against bigoted actions, what is this about how it's always "the government" that shouldn't discriminate? There's a great big hole in everything you've said that doesn't include private employers, landlords or other providers of goods and services. So are you saying, like so many conservatives and just about all libertarians, that private business people should be able to discriminate against us?

I gotta hand it to you, though. You do understand your own people on the Right. Prohibitionism is as illogical and shot through with convenient exceptions as you say, and there is a great deal of cultural "Conservatism" in regard to us. In fact "Conservatism" was and still is the default position of most straight people. Most of them really don't want to talk about us most of the time, or have to deal with the fact of our existence very often. That's changing, but, to my mind, not quickly enough.