What’s more is that the proportion of people who identify as LGBT increases and decreases over time, as well, because it is such a blurry line. It’s not a steady %age, either in time or in culture. I wish I had something to cite for you on it, but I don’t. I just remember it from my readings.
With race, it is more determinable because race/ethnicity is more visually appreciable so the line is less blurry. Yes it is not a 100% visual thing, but there is more of a visual aspect than with determining if someone else is LGBT. And there are of course exceptions, i.e. people with hard-to-determine skin pigmentation or ancestry, but the generalization is true that you can spot a white or brown person with your eyes. You can’t necessarily spot someone who is LGBT. My point is that the nature of that bigotry gets played out differently. It comes out on different terms, such as “choice” and “religion” and “morality.” But people have a much harder time, nowadays, saying black people are immoral. It washes wrong. It didn’t used to, but it does now.
All of that to say, fighting LGBT acceptance is just a hair more inside people’s heads than other forms of bigotry such as racism, ageism, sexism, ableism, which have visual components. I’m saying this in response to the comment about not understanding it, so I am lending mine.
Well, it’s also not something that was defined the way we talk about it now until recently. “Homosexual” is a late 19th century word. Recently I think a lot about homo- and heterosexual and how they are defined in terms of the subject’s gender identity.
If you have a non-binary gender identity then you aren’t homosexual or heterosexual because the words cease to work. If a person who have lived and identified as male for most of their life comes to the realization that they are a woman, they may swap from hetero- to homosexual (or vice versa) over night.
I have a friend who started sleeping with men in their early 30s after sleeping with women for the rest of their lives. I don’t think they thought of this as their sexual orientation changing (or of them discovering their sexual orientation) but it was just that they slept with men now. I’ve spoken with several millenials who think this way too: they are attracted to who they are attracted to without worrying about whether that is a man or a woman and don’t really identify as having a “sexual orientation” (even some who know that they are only attracted to one sex or the other but don’t take that as a fixed fact or an identity).
Obviously some people definitely have the experience of being homosexual, and some people have the experience of being heterosexual, but I think any historical understanding of who people chose to have sex with and how that was accepted or vilified probably shouldn’t be seen through those lenses.
Yes, sexual preference is interpretable along a scale at both the individual level and at the societal level. It can’t be pinned neatly. Even gender alone cannot be pinned as neatly as the white hetero male establishment would like to pin it. Which is all fantastic. It makes everything so much more interesting.
It is like a fantasy of mine that one day I’ll be old and actually think that the young people are taking rights too far. Just so that I can look at myself and say, “Et tu?” I probably deserve it.
There was literally an article in the National Post today about how these niqab wearing motherfuckers (/s) have too many rights! And the columnist doesn’t have the right to not rent or not hire them because they wear a niqab and how horrible that is for them to not be able to “shun” these niqab wearing motherfuckers! (not linking cuz fuck her clicks)
Also good to note, the author of that column is Jewish.
The irony, it burrrrrns me.
Yeah, forgive me if I said this already, but global economic collapse leads to increased sympathy for extremist right-wing political parties that are selling “blame this religious minority” as a strategy to get votes. John Oliver’s bit on the refugee crisis showed a Polish parliamentarian referring to refugees as “human trash.” Nothing like this has happened before that we could use as a reference point, right? Surely not in the last hundred years!
But yeah, at this point it is no longer morally acceptable to vote for the Conservatives. It is not a reasonable difference of opinion about how the country is to be run. I had a Conservative candidate come to my door the other day. I wasn’t feeling up to anything so I just took their pamphlet, said, “Thank you for your time” and closed the door. But if someone asks me if I’m thinking of voting Conservative, my response is going to be, “At this point, if one of my friends was voting Conservative, they wouldn’t be my friend anymore.”
And islamophobia aside, how fucked up is it that people are directing their hate of muslims (supposedly for their backward culture that oppresses women) towards the women they say the culture oppresses. What could possibly be worse?
Hide who you are so you don’t offend others lest they KILL YOU, then when the coast is clear you can be yourself again. So… she’s admitting that its actually dangerous to wear a niqab? Its such amazing double speak and hypocrisy… I wonder what its like to live her world?
I swear, before this whole niqab thing I was thinking that if Harper won again I’d move to Montreal and become a separatist. Now it turns out that Quebec is more islamophobic than anyone. Come on with that.
This isn’t really new, though. Remember Marois’ bullshit “Quebec Charter of Values” thing last year, attempting to ban all public sector workers from wearing religious symbols?
