$1:
Khar, end the nonsensical talk of leaving. You no longer posting here is like cancelling HBO and being left with The Learning Channel.
$1:
Finally, I hope you'll stick around here, or at least pop in once in a while. Your voice will be greatly missed if you pack up and flee.
$1:
Beautiful post Khar, I hope you ultimately decide to not leave - you're one of my favourite eggs in this basket
Thanks for the thought guys, but I've not been enjoying myself here for a while, and I don't add much to the site anyways. A periodic post every other week, save for the odd heated thread, isn't the greatest of contributions.
In any case, off to Jasper!
BartSimpson BartSimpson:
First off, I do not make a habit of hunting down my posts to see if anyone's responded to them. If you want to make sure I respond to a post then feel free to pm me and I promise that I will follow up with a response.
EDIT: I should also note that I am typically at work when I am on CKA and I get interrupted
FREQUENTLY and I frankly don't always remember to come back to a topic I had been interested in.
I don't know if you've ever noticed but plenty of my posts go without responses and I don't
ever complain about it. If what I've said is simply accepted or rejected then why should anyone respond to it? When I make a post I cast my bread upon the waters and whatever comes back is what comes back.
Now, as to actually responding to the posts of gay people you'll find that I do so when my post is
actually responded to.
Confused by that?
What does it mean to 'actually respond' to a post?
In this case my question was simple:
$1:
Gays argue that straight people can turn gay all the time. Why can't a gay person go straight?
The responses I received were boiler plate.
My question is based in the fact that a straight person in Europe or North America can go to a therapist and express their difficulites with their orientation and the therapist, as an acceptable option, can counsel the person to accept being gay.
No big deal from your point of view, right?
Yet in many jurisdictions now (California being one of them) a gay person with the same orientation issues who goes to a therapist can expect to be counseled to accept being gay because counseling someone to identify as straight - even if it is in the best interest of the patient - is
illegal (SB 1172).
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/us/da ... .html?_r=0This law did not occur in a vacuum. The law was heavily supported by gay advocacy groups so when I asked my question the question accurately reflects the reality in California right now. With other states such as New Jersey with similar measures pending it's also clear that the inherent concepts in the measure represent a broad swath of the gay community and are not just isolated to a 'fringe' in California.
The lawsuit against this measure proceeds in court today so it will be interesting to see the outcome.
In the meantime the measure represents a prevailing attitude among gays (via their political lobbying groups) that a straight person can seek therapy to become gay while a gay person is supposed to accept being gay even if they're not completely happy that way.
You don't go hunting down your own posts? The example I provided you showed you responding multiple times in the thread afterward. Your post was a whole TWO after mine. In other threads its often right afterwards, or on the same page as the post you are replying to... or even AFTER the post you are replying to. In this thread, you were replying concurrently, repeatedly, with the person I am criticizing you for ignoring! As another example,
when you repeated your attacks on gay parents, even after posting in a thread (and repping me) to a situation where
I tore that criticism apart before. How did you manage to miss what you were repping?
Here is another thread, where you actively responded to CanadianJeff and I, but only to parts of our post that had nothing to do with homosexuality, in a thread where you were attacking the homosexual community. Indeed, your pattern is to broadly ignore posts, as you have been doing in this thread, but keep on posting after them like they never happened. I even noted that you usually stuck around to joke around in the thread afterwards. If you have managed to miss posts in threads you continue to be involved in, posts right before your replies, posts right after essential questions or as first responses to your own threads, then I apologize, but maybe you should stop posting at work if you can't stay that involved in discussions you care so much about.
You've been in all these threads post-response, and you continue to repeat the same questions every single time I turn around, even when you are given responses. If you don't want an answer, don't even pretend to offer the question. It's why I pointed out the Thimerosol bit, because it's exactly the same. You tried arguing for a single post, and then went on to another thread to post the exact same original argument. When I called you on it, a lot of other people came in and reposted old content they had used before, old content you never replied to, even though you stuck around in those threads. If you would like, open up the link; I was thorough, so you can look back at some past instances where you did the exact same thing you did with the homosexuality debate.
This isn't about whether or not you got a response. A great deal of mine go without responses too. This is about you continuing to repeat yourself even after you are actually given one, and ignoring it, which is different from simply not responding. This is you actively going out of your way to engage a topic in the forum and then leaving it every chance you get so you can repeat yourself and keep attacking homosexuals. I'm calling you on it now because there is no reason, no reason, you should be able to keep repeating yourself as you have been.
I have answered your post at least a dozen times, so that says something for "always responding when gay people respond." As for your redefining of your post here...
So, you first tell us you only respond when gay people actually respond. Even though your wording was so vague that WMG gave you a legitimate response? Even though I gave you a legitimate response you never replied to? If we had it wrong, why did you not tell us what you "actually meant" instead of just not responding, so we actually could? What did you gain from ignoring this issue twice in the last week alone?
Our boilerplate responses were both valid explanations of why you cannot change someone's sexuality. It's a truthful examination of a situation that does impact this situation as well. That case simply made it impossible for people to force gay conversion therapy on minors. Apparently, this has been taken, wrongly, by some to mean that if you question your sexuality, you will be told you are gay.
Bull.
The point of this decision is that if you know you are gay, you should not be forced to go through with it as a minor so you can "become" straight. It is changing a
known identity into something else, of kids who know they are homosexual. If someone is struggling with understanding a homosexual experience, they won't get the "well obviously you are a homosexual" speech, they would get the exact one raydan and I have both provided you; your actions don't identify your sexuality 100% of the time. They can help a kid develop their sexuality, but they do not play a role in orienting that sexuality. The answers given to kids who are having trouble with their sexuality are not black and white -- only in conversion therapy do you have that kind of thinking. Outside of it, you don't try to define a kid's sexuality for them. You are not being "taught" your sexuality, which is the important distinction here. In line with the inability to "teach" sexual identities, the case was thrown out, as it should have been. There is a world of difference between not actively seeking to turn gay kids straight, and teaching them to be gay, as is your view here.
Even as an aside, if straight kids did go through conversion therapy to become straight, the therapy itself is damaging to most who take it and is considered harmful by most who have undergone it, straight or otherwise. There is general consensus in the psychiatric community that putting children through such an experience would be more harmful than anything else you could do there. Even if conversion therapy worked, if, it would be better if it wasn't happening to minors.
Your entire stance is even dependent on this being learned behaviour. In a
previous thread where you brought this up (where BeverFeaver goes unanswered, following your entering the thread four times in quick succession previously), you described the psychiatrist as orienting a child. For your criticisms to be valid, kids must be able to be "taught" to be gay. When you are given two valid responses to that, then you cannot simply bypass them to make this argument. Your entire point is based on a premise we've demonstrated as faulty (both WMG and myself from this thread's own examples) -- you can't ignore that we've targeted your premise and then simply move on to deliver the point anyways.
Especially since you said "gays argue straight people can turn gay all the time." What? Where did we argue that? We've been saying the opposite this entire time! This case of yours shows we view meddling with a child and trying to force a different sexuality on his identity as bad the entire time! You made a massive comment about us believing that straight men can become gay. How did you manage to decide that none of our posts were responding to
that?
As an aside, if this was your true meaning, you should have made it far more clear.
Lemmy Lemmy:
I can't speak for Bart. And I am, in no way, suggesting that your free speech be limited in any way. I'm am suggesting, however, that lots of topics that me be protected by the right of free speech are, nonetheless, inappropriate in many circumstances. Is it appropriate to say, "Hey, Grandma, would you tell me about the times when you sucked Grandpa's cock?" What may be common discussions in a ship's galley (to use Gunnair's example) are not appropriate elsewhere.
So would you mind showing me where it was inappropriate in this case, Lemmy? A person has actively engaged in bringing this topic to the site repeatedly and has demonstratively refused to engage whilst attacking several members of this site implicitly, in an overarching pattern similar to his stance on other topics, like thimerosol. I am directly answering his questions and forcing discussion on the topic since I am one of the so targeted.
To be relevant to this discussion, you'd have to teach me more than base decorum I already know, and which my actions here do not breach any said strictures. Where, in a thread
about homosexuality, where I noted Bart was already ignoring a well thought out challenge to his ongoing stance on the site even as he continued to post in the thread, and even as WMG continued to post as well? I really don't get why you posted that I could not challenge Bart on this. Discourse is not a one way street.
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I think you're wrong, and perhaps my word choices last evening were poor, but I am certainly not being inconsistent. I just think that matters of personal sexuality are not matters for public consumption. And, sadly, homosexuals will never have equal rights as long as they define themselves by that aspect of their lives. Straight people don't define themselves by being straight. One day I'm hopeful that sexuality (as well as race, colour, religion, etc) will also be none issues. I'll leave it at that because I've clearly done a poor job of stating my position, which is essentially the libertarian position: live and let live, to each his/her own. It was not my intention to offend you, just to suggest that if gays continue to define themselves by their homosexuality they will continue to be marginalized. To most straight folks (myself included) it's no longer an issue. Bart, maybe not so much. Nothing that I've said is a "slam" on homosexuals in any way. If you've misinterpreted or I've misstated something to lead you to that conclusion, again, I apologize. That was not my intention.
Right now, matters of sexuality are essential to an ongoing human rights problem in the United States, and around the world. Just as race, and gender, came to the fore as major problems that did not effect a good deal of Canadians, Americans, and so forth, so has another topic come forth which deserves equal credence and weight to previous instances. A group is being oppressed. The only way to fight oppression is to make it a public issue and demonstrate that they are being thusly oppressed. A matter of civil rights, where millions of disadvantaged people are being targeted with segregation-esque tactics, deserves to be heard in the public sphere.
As for straight people not defining themselves as straight... I think you're going off on a limb there. You don't define part of yourself as being a husband to your wife, as being a father to your children? You don't define yourself as someone who enjoys posting in the Wednesday thread, or at least checking it out once in a while? You don't define yourself by what you do and do not like? Whether you like it or not, your sexuality plays a distinctive role in defining you, along with a lot of other characteristics about yourself. It shouldn't be your defining feature, no, but in a nation where that feature of yourself is what limits you and restricts you visibly, it tends to become much more of a defining characteristic, because that is what is making you different from people as a whole.
I'm lucky in that, in Canada, I am not as targeted as people in other countries, and hence I am easily able to keep that part of myself scattered among other definitions. In other states, where it limits your life, liberty and happiness, it should be your defining characteristic, because it is defining what you are able to do, and who you are able to be. When it no longer is something that can force you to be defined differently by your fellow man, then it no longer becomes something defining you in such a way, see? That definition is the result of the marginalization; when that marginalization goes away, it becomes far more irrelevant. Hence, for example, the Netherlands, where generally it doesn't matter to the people there anymore whether or not you are gay or straight, because it is has become that ingrained in society not to care. So no one actually does care or define themselves as such.
The problem isn't that you offended me (I wasn't, this is me in actual debate mode, I go for the throat), the problem is that you don't exactly get how these movements tend to work, or seem to have missed how they work in this case. Silence isn't going to solve any issue. Silence isn't going to fix these problems. Silence has never fixed any social problems ever. The only way you make changes is to get them into public domain, and overcome blocks to them. Women's lib got a lot bigger in the nineties, for example, because a lot of newspapers had opinion columns with people saying "women would be much better off it they took on the typical feminine role while fighting for their rights," or that "they got enough, the rest will just take time, and eventually will happen." This is why I brought this up; because people demanded more decorum of the women's liberation movement, when that would have just harmed women in the long run. Decorum is a good thing, but I find more often then not, when people demand decorum, they are saying "it's offensive for me, so be quiet," not "it's offensive to everyone, and hence hurting your cause." It's a subtle difference, but I have a feeling, even unconsciously, it's used more as the former than as the latter. So I do have a bit of a negative reaction to it being used as a limiter on discourse, yes.
Nothing is gained when decorum steals discussion topics, only when decorum steals discussion etiquette, I find.
$1:
No, a pride festival once a year is not too much, but it doesn't further the cause that homosexuals think it does. They will not have truly won the fight until they no longer have those parades though. I see it kind of like 420 pot head demonstrations. Potheads should certainly be allowed to do so, but they also need to understand that they're not generating sympathy for their cause among non potheads by doing so. Getting baked and listening to reggae and playing hackey sack in the local park doesn't further the cause of pot legalization. It just makes non pot users think potheads are a bunch of losers. Same with gay pride celebrations; they just reinforce negative stereotypes that straight people have about gays.
Pride up here was apparently much more businessmen than anything else. Often, people who see pride for the first time are shocked at the sheer normality of a great deal of it. More "parents with strollers" than drag queens. The point of it is to keep public perception of gays in focus, to remind people that they still exist and are not ignored, to celebrate the fact that they are gay, to have a chance to actually
be gay, to remember the Stonewall Riots, and to remind everyone that normal people, even there family, friends, and coworkers, could be gay. The latter is the most important; making a show that we exist in large numbers is important, as is the idea of creating and environment where people you don't normally associate with "gay" go out and ARE gay. Those most likely to support a cause are those who know a gay person, after all.
As for the stereotypes, those exist anyways. "Reinforcing" a stereotype is a fancy way of saying "they already think that way," and being quiet in suits marching down the street isn't going to change that perception at all. Besides which, perceptions that the gay community does carry a little bit of a leather scene, a drag scene, a feminine men scene, etc, aren't exactly false. It makes no sense to change the community to conform to heterosexual standards (when they have equally deviant sub communities too). If we could change that, we'd all go straight! As a guy who does feel it is over-sexualized (the parade, anyways), I can get that criticism, but I get why it is so sexualized as well.
I think most other members have already responded better about the other aims.
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