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I'm a gay male, but if I had the ability to choose, I'd choose being hetero.
Not because it's "better," but because it's the way to avoid the anti-gay bigotry that many people still harbor
(and btw, I was lucky -- I had great parents. Many gay young people are not so fortunate-- they get rejected,
or told they're sick and have to be "cured", or that they're going to burn in hell... and school can bring its own torments).
In a society with no discrimination, it wouldn't matter so much whether someone was born gay or straight, black or white,
male or female. But is there any such society?
By the way, why are most forms of bigotry named "isms" (racism, sexism, etc.),
but anti-gay bigotry is called a "phobia"? Phobias are fears, usually of non-human things
(e.g. claustrophobia, arachnophobia).
I'm a gay male, but if I had the ability to choose, I'd choose being hetero.
Not because it's "better," but because it's the way to avoid the anti-gay bigotry that many people still harbor
(and btw, I was lucky -- I had great parents. Many gay young people are not so fortunate-- they get rejected,
or told they're sick and have to be "cured", or that they're going to burn in hell... and school can bring its own torments).
In a society with no discrimination, it wouldn't matter so much whether someone was born gay or straight, black or white,
male or female. But is there any such society?
By the way, why are most forms of bigotry named "isms" (racism, sexism, etc.),
but anti-gay bigotry is called a "phobia"? Phobias are fears, usually of non-human things
(e.g. claustrophobia, arachnophobia).
You and a lot of people wonder about that, and there are some who have proposed replacing the term. One suggestion has been to use the word "gaycism" (rhymes with "racism"). I don't know how serious that suggestion is, though.
The Oxford English Dictionary, historically considered to be the principal dictionary of the English language, defines "homophobia" as being either "fear or hatred of homosexuals and homosexuality."
I think that the biggest problem comes from the stigma placed on homosexuality by some religions, by which people justify their homophobia. But I also think that attitudes are changing even with some religions. I know that, within both Conservative and Reform Judaism in America, same-sex marriages are now recognized. I have heard one rabbi explain it this way: "One makes a choice to sin. Because one does not choose to be a homosexual, then being a homosexual is not a sin."
I am what you call tolerant AND acceptable of any LGBTQ person, but if God were to tell me which would you rather be re-born as, I would say "hetero please". Would that label me homophobic?
It would not reasonably label you homophobic. I don't see how it would reasonably label you pro-hetero, either. A strategic choice does not imply affirmative support for something. Were there a deity, and if it informed me that I had to get a pet and that my only choices were wolverine or possum, I'd go with the latter. But I'd hardly consider myself pro-possum.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NW4me
By the way, why are most forms of bigotry named "isms" (racism, sexism, etc.),
but anti-gay bigotry is called a "phobia"? Phobias are fears, usually of non-human things
(e.g. claustrophobia, arachnophobia).
Thomas Jefferson used Anglophobia in writing to James Madison. There's also xenophobe and Islamophobe and Christophobe. I suspect this derives from an increasing awareness that intense aversions to a demographic are often rooted in irrational fears of said demographic. Also, such are the of language. The terms racist/racism replaced racialist/racialism. Why? I don't know. They also entered the English language about the same time as homophobe/homophobia, though the latter were originally used in English to denote a (female) dislike of the male sex. A somewhat earlier attestation occurs in French, interestingly along with gynephobia. In fiction in the 1940s, Ellery Queen used homophobia as a 'morbid fear of men'. The modern usage is attested back to a 1969 article in Time Magazine, where it is labelled as understandable yet entailing misconceptions.
I am what you call tolerant AND acceptable of any LGBTQ person, but if God were to tell me which would you rather be re-born as, I would say "hetero please". Would that label me homophobic?
Another example would be if God were to ask a Caucasion person the same thing, but choose either Caucasion or minority. If they choose Caucasion, would that automatically make them a racist?
The DW and I had a discussion about this last night.
It is the popular thing to label people racist, somethingphobic, sexist, and on and on if you disagree with an opinion, display a different unpopular behavior, or simply express an opinion.
Sadly, people have lost that ability to accept differences that are not popular. They go to extremes to label someone that does not match mainstream views.
I learned a long time ago (late 1970s) that people can have racist views and still be fair and good towards others. I was in the Army, and I had a great first line supervisor as my boss. He was very fair with all of us, blacks, Hispanics, and whites. The First Sergeant was clearly racist in action. He always was after the black soldiers in the company. My supervisor was a white guy. One day he got fed up because the First Sergeant was mistreating the black soldiers in our section. The supervisor went to the First Sergeant office and told him that if he did not leave his black soldiers alone, he would F him up even if he was the First Sergeant. An E5 sergeant would not dare talk to a First Sergeant like that, but he had the courage to confront the First Sergeant and took a big risk with his career. All of us in the section were very happy how he stood up for us.
On a later day I went to the sergeant's house to pick up something. We ended up talking and he invited me to have a soda. Along the way the conversation of race came up. He said that if his daughter married a black guy, he would disown her, and she would stop being his daughter. I was shocked. I struggled with it for a while, but I also learned that people can have their biases and prejudices and still be fair and not discriminate. I have seen the same with other people.
To me, what you described is having a preference, it is not racist. Discriminators are not necessarily wrong. We all do it at work and other situations. They are used in employment, in selecting friends that have more in common with us, and selecting a spouse.
It is bad when you try to harm in any form others because they are different than us in some ways.
You have a great day.
elamigo
It is the popular thing to label people racist, somethingphobic, sexist, and on and on if you disagree with an opinion, display a different unpopular behavior, or simply express an opinion.
Sadly, people have lost that ability to accept differences that are not popular. They go to extremes to label someone that does not match mainstream views.
I learned a long time ago (late 1970s) that people can have racist views and still be fair and good towards others. I was in the Army, and I had a great first line supervisor as my boss. He was very fair with all of us, blacks, Hispanics, and whites. The First Sergeant was clearly racist in action. He always was after the black soldiers in the company. My supervisor was a white guy. One day he got fed up because the First Sergeant was mistreating the black soldiers in our section. The supervisor went to the First Sergeant office and told him that if he did not leave his black soldiers alone, he would F him up even if he was the First Sergeant. An E5 sergeant would not dare talk to a First Sergeant like that, but he had the courage to confront the First Sergeant and took a big risk with his career. All of us in the section were very happy how he stood up for us.
On a later day I went to the sergeant's house to pick up something. We ended up talking and he invited me to have a soda. Along the way the conversation of race came up. He said that if his daughter married a black guy, he would disown her, and she would stop being his daughter. I was shocked. I struggled with it for a while, but I also learned that people can have their biases and prejudices and still be fair and not discriminate. I have seen the same with other people.
To me, what you described is having a preference, it is not racist. Discriminators are not necessarily wrong. We all do it at work and other situations. They are used in employment, in selecting friends that have more in common with us, and selecting a spouse.
It is bad when you try to harm in any form others because they are different than us in some ways.
You have a great day.
elamigo
I would have liked to have known what the daughter thought of her father's prejudice, had she fallen in love with a Black man and married him. It seems to me that your friend's response to the thought of his daughter marrying a Black man would result in a lot of hurt for his daughter -- and also for any of his grandchildren born of the marriage. I honestly think that disowning one's child and causing one's child such hurt is one of the worst things one can do. But then, I'm one of those people who believes in unconditional love for one's children.
I have known at least one person who expressed the same sentiments such as your sergeant friend did. When his own daughter actually did marry outside of her race, though, and the father took the time to get to know his son-in-law, his attitude changed. Then, when the baby came along, this man became a very proud grandfather.
I have also known at least two different sets of parents who, upon finding out that their child was gay, nevertheless accepted their child as he is.
This may sound corny, but I do believe that love can win out over hate and distrust if given half a chance. It starts with each of us letting down our barriers first, and making an effort to know the other person. We're all human beings, after all.
It is the popular thing to label people racist, somethingphobic, sexist, and on and on if you disagree with an opinion, display a different unpopular behavior, or simply express an opinion.
Sadly, people have lost that ability to accept differences that are not popular. They go to extremes to label someone that does not match mainstream views.
I learned a long time ago (late 1970s) that people can have racist views and still be fair and good towards others. I was in the Army, and I had a great first line supervisor as my boss. He was very fair with all of us, blacks, Hispanics, and whites. The First Sergeant was clearly racist in action. He always was after the black soldiers in the company. My supervisor was a white guy. One day he got fed up because the First Sergeant was mistreating the black soldiers in our section. The supervisor went to the First Sergeant office and told him that if he did not leave his black soldiers alone, he would F him up even if he was the First Sergeant. An E5 sergeant would not dare talk to a First Sergeant like that, but he had the courage to confront the First Sergeant and took a big risk with his career. All of us in the section were very happy how he stood up for us.
On a later day I went to the sergeant's house to pick up something. We ended up talking and he invited me to have a soda. Along the way the conversation of race came up. He said that if his daughter married a black guy, he would disown her, and she would stop being his daughter. I was shocked. I struggled with it for a while, but I also learned that people can have their biases and prejudices and still be fair and not discriminate. I have seen the same with other people. To me, what you described is having a preference, it is not racist. Discriminators are not necessarily wrong. We all do it at work and other situations. They are used in employment, in selecting friends that have more in common with us, and selecting a spouse.
It is bad when you try to harm in any form others because they are different than us in some ways.
You have a great day.
elamigo
Yes but...
My father, who happened to be a Tech Sergeant in the Air Force was a bit racist. Nothing extreme, but he clearly didn't seem to like African Americans. He told me a couple of stories about negative interactions with Black soldiers, and clearly didn't see his behavior as racist...or at the very least, just plain stupid. For example, he was in charge of a mess hall at a base in Texas sometime in the mid-1950s. One day after hours he was fixing himself dinner -- a mixup of leftover sorta stir fried. A Black soldier asked him, "What ya cookin' up Sergeant?" My father answered, "[N-word] stew". Now my father may have only had a high school education, but he was surprisingly well read. He certainly knew the inappropriateness of saying that. It was racist. No excusing it. And he learned a valuable lesson since the soldier pulled a switch blade on him and he cut my father, although not badly.
Take it forward a decade later when my father was stationed at Pease AFB in New Hampshire. My aunt and uncle and I went up to visit my father...they had a camping trailer. My father asked me if I wanted to see the mess hall where he worked. A big deal for me. We got there, and this was at a time when almost all the privates working in the mess hall were Black. When my father walked in with me, the Black men all crowded around me and were VERY complimentary about my father and how good it was to work for him. And it seemed genuine. That didn't make my father not a racist, because even a subtle racist is still a racist.
What you miss, in my view, above is what I bolded. I spent 20 years as an administrator at a middle school outside of Washington, D.C. The first 13 years I was a vice principal. Not the one that made the hiring decisions, but always part of the process. We had a staff of around 80, 1 of whom was Black, in a county where the African-American and Black population was about 10%. And yet our staff was about 1% Black. And what I noticed over time was that Black teacher candidates never got the job. There was always some reason they didn't get the job. And as a result, we had the whitest school staff -- by far -- out of approximately 170 schools in the system. I couldn't always predict which candidate would get the job, but I could always predict which one wouldn't. And then, after 13 years in the school we got a new principal. Me. And things changed. Our staff started looking more like our student population.
You and a lot of people wonder about that, and there are some who have proposed replacing the term. One suggestion has been to use the word "gaycism" (rhymes with "racism"). I don't know how serious that suggestion is, though.
The Oxford English Dictionary, historically considered to be the principal dictionary of the English language, defines "homophobia" as being either "fear or hatred of homosexuals and homosexuality."
I think that the biggest problem comes from the stigma placed on homosexuality by some religions, by which people justify their homophobia. But I also think that attitudes are changing even with some religions. I know that, within both Conservative and Reform Judaism in America, same-sex marriages are now recognized. I have heard one rabbi explain it this way: "One makes a choice to sin. Because one does not choose to be a homosexual, then being a homosexual is not a sin."
Fear, or aversion(hate/repulsed). Rain-X is hydrophobic, but of course it doesn't fear water. Religion, specifically abrahamic ones are largely at play with the aversion and hatred of non-hetero lifestyles. Unaligned religions, such as Paganism, Hindu, even LeVeyan Satanism, does not care if you're not straight, just that you're a decent person.
That doesn't make you homophobic, or racist... as long as you don't put it on Twitter, lol. The basis of either is stemmed in negative monolithic typecasting. If you said you didn't wanna be either for x, y, z, negative things, then sure. I was actually on Twitter the other day where a transwoman said she wouldn't date bi men, because they cheat and engage coitus with other men(cleaned it up, for this lame-o puritan board), which to me is being biphobic, having reasons based on negative connotations, that they're all like that. If you said you didn't want to be black because we eat too much chicken and hot sauce- that's racist. People aren't monoliths. I actually don't like chicken... or spicy stuff... or chitterlings... Grippos... ya get it.
What I struggle to understand is why anyone would think that it makes sense to see any one way of being, as the only right/good/best way, and anything different as some kind of threat.
Like to the point where it's the highly effective psyop that pushes some of the biggest power plays any time some leader needs the backing of any mass group in society.
How and why do people keep buying this??
You can be happily white, cis, male, Christian, hetero, dude and take pride and joy in your life, but not have to be ANTI anyone who is not that. No one needs to be going around trying to force everyone to be one way or one thing. And I would consider a society where everyone is the same to be like hell on earth. Boring, autocratic hell.
I not only "tolerate" diversity, I want to know lots of people who are not like me. I want to hear about their lives. Explore the ways in which we're alike and different, and appreciate them. I don't want a narrow little perspective that can't feel safe if someone isn't just like me, and I don't understand why anyone would.
Lots of people apparently do, though.
I really don't understand it.
Seems like a really small box to try and live a whole life in.
What is the difference in being hetero and being pro-hetero?
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