From the Comments
Jason Kuznicki on May 31st 2008
The guy who posted this probably imagined that I’d delete it. Instead, I’m promoting it to the front page. There’s some strong language, and some potentially offensive content, so I’m putting it below the fold. I’ve not edited it in any way, except to make the hyperlink work.
So I seen it asked here how can a stranger make sweeping generalizations about complete strangers living a homosexual lifestyle. Below is a picture taken at IML 2008 in Chicago. Different than average conventions IML celebrates the perversions of gay sexuality that most gays find “fringe” behaviors but go on to say they support everything gay.
http://americansfortruth.com/uploads/2008/05/iml-2008-bestiality-scat-videos-final.JPGSure gays want tolerance for their lifestyle while advocating hate and intolerance toward those who believe in something other than their selfish desires. Gays just want to beat the message of “we’re here, get used to it” and were supposed to gleam that there’s a healthy lifestyle in there somewhere between the barebacking and celebrated promiscuity of bath houses and anonymous sex through the internet and personals. But gays still paint themselves as the victims of society when in reality in the last 20 years gays have become the victims of themselves and the behaviors they glorify and use “social intolerance” as their rallying cry. Most people I know don’t care who plays butt darts. They do care being told what to do by a minority who seeks to serve themselves in defiance while countless gays with STD’s and mental issues go ignored as they’re considered to be the “misrepresentation” or the “very few” of the gay culture and do not represent gay life as a whole. It sad you seek to attack and silence those who want to protect the traditional family. No one will ever silence those who are for the traditional families even if the government tries to silence talk of Christianity in public. The First Amendment applies to EVERYONE, not just those with a hostile immoral agenda. In biology class wonder if they’re gonna teach kids babies come from 2 dudes playing butt darts-thats what gays are trying to say when common sense tells you it’s biologically impossible to have 2 male or 2 female anything reproduce and turkey basters aren’t biological either. Lastly-You may think you’re getting what is right for society-no gay has ever mentioned this: When we die and are accountable for our lives Christians know that doing what is right by God is more important than trying to appeal to the masses. Which is more temporary-your single human life or The Creator of the universe?
To summarize:
I’ve seen it asked here how a stranger can make judgments about the lives of two people whom he’s never met. I’m not going to answer that question, I’m just going to assume that it has an answer — and go from there. To support my point, I’m going to post a picture of some items that the target of my criticism has never seen before in his life, and that are so obviously amateurish that one can easily see how little they represent most gay people. Then I’m going to assume that if one gay person has some sick fetishes, they all must be evil.
Well done, my friend, well done.
Filed in The Basement
I’d like to see this person locked in a room, and told that he can’t come out until he can either 1) come up with a rational justification for his assertion that gay people threaten the existence of the traditional family, or 2) admit that his assertion is nonsense.
Jason, are you trying to say that babies can come from two dudes?
LOL!
I mean you know the guy has problems when he can’t even come up with two crude euphamisms for anal sex, and ends up repeating himself… I mean there has to be hundreds of different ones out there, right? I must say that one was new to me though, so maybe he just discovered it and is airing it out as much as possible. Sort of like when you teach a 5 year-old a new vocabulary term…
Wow. I’ll never get over how Christians think that gays are somehow “forcing” them to do something.
To the author of that comment,
Guess what, buddy, the First Amendment protects your right to believe in magical books, faeries, sprites, angels, demons, and myths about the origin of the planet, but it does not give you the right to write your beliefs into the law when those beliefs are in stark conflict with the United States Constitution. You have every right to whine about gays all you want, but neither they nor their protection under the law aren’t going anywhere. And despite what your persecution complex tells you, you are not being oppressed for your religion because we won’t let you imprison or stone homosexuals. Deal with life, or move to Iran where your beliefs are put into practice.
P.S.
You don’t have an immortal immaterial soul, and motive force of the universe has no conscious awareness of your existence. You will be worm food, just like everyone else. This, as is your stated belief about meeting your creator, is my opinion. Unlike yours, however, my opinion is an inference from models informed by reason and modern scientific observations. You inherited yours from your parents, and from a book written by frightened nomads and farmers living in the wastes thousands of years ago.
(Sometimes I just need to poke at these people. You know, play brain darts.)
In biology class wonder if they’re gonna teach kids babies come from 2 dudes playing butt darts-thats what gays are trying to say when common sense tells you it’s biologically impossible to have 2 male or 2 female anything reproduce and turkey basters aren’t biological either.
What class was he paying attention in, anyway? It sure as hell wasn’t English.
Whoa whoa whoa, this is getting out of hand here now Chuck. This commenter clearly isn’t someone anyone really needs to be worried about, and resorting to directly straw-manning an entire belief system just brings the conversation down to his level. Nobody’s answers are any more valid when it comes to metaphysical questions, despite how many “models informed by reason and modern scientific observations” you might have consulted. It’s just definitionally impossible to disprove the existence of an ethereal presence.
The commenter actually does, in a crude, obtuse, and likely accidental manner, point out a problem with the gay rights movement, and that is the general problem of collectivist thought. Just as there are many immoral heterosexual people, there are immoral homosexual people, and the movement is better served by utilizing a discussion of individual human rights, and not resorting to groupthink and divisive partisan attacks. Confrontationalist actions or lascivious displays at “gay pride” parades, and borderline-rabid bible bashing through public forums are just the gay rights movements version of the same sort of tactics that he is employing here, and the whole movement is cheapened by their employment.
Now in response to Braxton: “gays” are forcing Christians to do something, they’re forcing them to acknowledge and tolerate their existence, which just hasn’t been the case in the recent history of this country, and for some people is going to be hard… that isn’t to say that it isn’t also the Christian thing to do.
Okay, Chuck pretty much made an atheist straw man of himself in his P.S., which as an atheist is something I always hate to see. Let’s be real–people like the original poster are going to hate the Other no matter what. Religion is just a convenient excuse.
That said, what’s wrong with confrontational actions in opposition to injustice, Greyson? Aren’t all protests by their nature confrontational? I agree protests can be counterproductive if poorly staged, but I think they can also be a useful tool in changing public opinion and policy. I’m sure the suffragettes were considered “confrontational” in their day, too.
What’s wrong with gay pride parades? I’m assuming the answer is that there’s a certain amount of sexual innuendo or license involved with some of them. And there is, of course, but no more than you’d see at a lot of heterosexual celebrations, and I’m not just talking about Mardi Gras. I live in a college town, and I see more public mayhem every time the team wins a football game than I’ve ever seen at a pride march.
I know this can be hard for straight people to understand, but being gay, even for someone who’s out, even for someone in a relatively tolerant community, can be isolating. Every time you meet a new person you have to ask yourself a series of questions no straight person ever does: “Do I come out?” “When?” “How?” “How will they react?” You have to evaluate your actions every time you’re out with a date or a partner–”If I hold her hand, if I touch her face, if I put my arm around her, will it be obvious we’re gay? Is this a safe place to do that?” The answer a lot of times is no, to the extent that many gay couples avoid touching in public at all.
For those people, Pride is one day a year when everyone around them knows they’re gay and embraces it, when they don’t have to be afraid of public displays of affection, and when they can see that no matter how alone they feel the other 364 days of the year, there are a lot of amazing people in the community going through the same struggles they are. Pride was never my thing (I don’t handle crowds well), and yeah, some events can have moments that are embarrassing to people interested in the political strategery of gay rights, myself included. But it can be powerful, and it’s not some stunt done to antagonize the straights. It certainly doesn’t deserve to be compared to the bile spewed by the original poster.
I’m sorry if it feels like I’m jumping on you, Greyson. You seem reasonable and sincere. It’s just that the thought underlying your post could easily be interpreted as: I’m all for gay rights, as long as gay people make no affirmative efforts to gain them. The thing is that for a lot of people any organized pressure to change laws and attitudes toward gay people is going to look “angry” or “excessive” or “confrontational,”–the same labels attached to activists for black or women’s rights in the past.
Slapping the label “collectivist” onto us is basically an excuse to write us off without listening to us. If working for gay rights is “collectivist,” then every civil rights movement–heck, every movement or organization for any purpose, ever–is collectivist, no matter how voluntary or decentralized it might be. Including, of course, Christianity.
Thanks for the reply Tilts, and no I didn’t feel like you were jumping on me, I’m capable of taking constructive criticism, and I’m sure my quick-reply blog activity is generally in need of it…
In my haste it appears I may have painted with too big a brush, or at least allowed myself to be interpreted that way. I have nothing against Gay Pride events in general, but I think you’re probably much more aware than I as to some of the counterproductive activity that might accompany them along the fringes, which is what I was getting at. I should stress I have no first-hand experience with these sorts of events, but I imagine the activities I’m referring to are generally uncommon in total, but probably take place in some limited form at a majority of such events. There’s nothing wrong with “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” but I don’t think “we’re here, we’re queer, you better stay off Main Street this Saturday if you don’t want to see us accentuating our behavior to the nth degree” is really going to help anyone’s cause. I can certainly understand, though I’m sure not fully, the yearning for a safe place to seek acceptance and express oneself uninhibited by dominant societal pressures, but that is probably best reserved for more out-of-the-way events, like perhaps the convention that our protagonist friend was taking pictures at (though I’m sure it was only “his friend” whose curiosity led him there, or perhaps he was “on assignment.”)
Your reference to sports-crazed “celebrating” is certainly a reasonable one, but there is one major difference: sports fans aren’t seeking to make any public statement, at least more than an endorsement of alcohol and the local sports team du jour. I certainly wouldn’t say that it is any more inappropriate for gay pride participants to engage in similar lewdness, actually given that they’ve atleast satisfied permit requirements they’re probably more entitled to, but I do think from a tactical standpoint it would be best to avoid it. I would also imagine, or at least hope, that some form of self-policing does occur to remind participants that they are in public representing the wider movement at-large.
Again, with my reference to collectivist thought, I wasn’t meaning to label everyone in the homosexual rights movement, but to point out exactly what you mention, and that is that every large-scale movement is going to encounter collectivist thought. In my opinion, any equality-seeking movement needs to be conscious of this and understand that their case is undermined if they buy into the “us versus them” false dichotomy, and fail to assert themselves as individuals first (perhaps our protagonists main error, though to be sure he’s made others.) To continue your analogy, though I didn’t live through the times, from what I gather the most effective proponents of the civil rights era, those whose efforts produced the most durable, long-lasting results, were non-violent unifying figures like King, and not the more radical and divisive elements, such as the Nation of Islam (not to discredit the latter, but just to illustrate the relative success of a more pragmatic, incrementalized tact.)
As a libertarian, most likely my best claim to a disenfranchised minority, I understand the importance of organizations based around idealist undertakings in providing avenues of acceptance and expression to like-minded individuals, but as a pragmatic agent of change I have realized that the public at-large is much more receptive to discussions and activities that they can identify with more readily. I’m simply suggesting an analogous tact might be more productive than some of the activities currently undertaken. Though I do understand that in some instances there is a massive difference in orders of magnitude here. Certainly well-meaning, and right-thinking activists have been labelled incorrectly in the past, and they’ll continue to be, but I think the general public eventually comes around to realize the absurdity of those sorts of tactics, as long as there aren’t large segments of the movement acting to earn those labels.
I hope I’ve done a better job of expressing my sentiments this time around. Thanks again for the discussion.
You might find this post interesting in re: the comment and the image linked above.