deep said:
For you race and "gay" should be treated the same. It is not the law.
Perhaps it should the "Law of Interference"?
I sure hope not.
I don't want my pretend world to not reflect the things in "Real World" that I think should be changed.
Yes, this is more or less why threads on this topic are unlikely to get automatically locked, unless they descend into vulgar diatribe, advocation of violence etc. As public opinion polls will attest, this is very much an active and mainstream debate in the US (and some other posters' countries as well), and we should not shrink from it. Had FYM been around in the days when black people couldn't attend school with white people in some states, or when Jews couldn't hold public office in some states, or when women couldn't vote in some states, then I expect debates as to the acceptability and justifiability of such laws--subject to the same qualifications already mentioned--would have taken place in here, as well. The eventual arrival of various statutory or case laws and constitutional amendments may have had the 'Real World' effect of a
on what was left of the "Let the laws stand unchanged" side of those arguments, but no one who's studied the history of the processes behind them could say that the debate, struggle, and mass mobilization of support on both sides preceding those outcomes played no role; that those laws and amendments just fell from the sky one day and magically transformed what was once near-universally accepted as "just" across the country into what was near-universally reviled. And debate happens to be all we can meaingfully achieve in this forum.
That's the argument from reason, anyway. The emotional side of it is something else. It's easy for me as a Jew to shrug off the reality that some people believe that means I'm "going to hell" and don't mind telling me so, because I'm not going to lose my job or my home or the thousand-plus legal benefits protecting my status as support for my family over it...or if for some unexpected reason I did, I'd have the law there to back me up. And legal manifestations aside, I'm not going to get cast out of my family, or be afraid to walk down the street holding my partner's hand, or have to resort to regarding most of the country, much of the media, and a zillion-and-one other local social arenas as no-go zones, should I wish to avoid being constantly marinated in a popular belief that what I am is profoundly shameful, contemptible, and vile. Were those things in fact the case, I'd certainly have a hell of a time convincing myself that there are those who openly endorse various parts of the above, yet somehow "don't mean it in a
bad way."
I'm not saying this to demonize or stigmatize--I belong to a denomination myself which currently allows its clerics the option of denying the blessings of marriage to their gay and lesbian congregants (though campaigning for such in the civil sphere is technically forbidden them), as part of a transitional phase which I'm confident will end, and while I accept that some would deem me a bigot and a homophobe and deeply in the wrong for not having abandoned said community, in the end I don't accept that reasoning. I do understand it emotionally though, because I'd have to be blind and deaf and utterly incapable of moral imagination not to recognize the anguish and suffering that results from such beliefs and practices being writ large and pervasive across the state, church, and fabric of society. And I can hear it in Michael Glatze's writings as well--the self-contempt, self-loathing, self-dread and shame (a very different and altogether less worthy emotion than guilt, which is the awareness of having wronged others) damningly intertwined with all the "joy" and "liberation" and "relief." I don't suppose whatever it is that's happening to him is straightforward or simple on any account, and were it not for the fact that his testimony will be--and was intended to be--exploited to spread this anguish and moral schizophrenia to others, I'd be content to simply write it off as one individual's contestable experience of what self-"healing" consists of.
Nonetheless, the debate will inevitably continue until a political end result emerges, and its aftermath attends to the rest.