Yes??
Submitted by Rue D on September 5 2001 10:40:30
In reply to Calling Out Cat-Daddy; or, Stuart, do you know submitted by Rue D on September 5 2001 01:16:00
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yes Okay, fine. But lets talk about that a bit, shall we? fast food restaurant owners, people with bad teeth, bird watchers, or kite flyers Ah, well, you’d have to leave out the “fast food restaurant owners,” for they surely qualify as a special interest group: they have convergent interests which they are highly organized and dedicated to achieving. I’m not about to get into it here, but lets just say you really shouldn’t be eating at McDonald’s et al, that is, if you really believe in the “traditional family.” I suppose it depends on how you define “special interest group.” Personally, I’d define it as any group of people who have some interest in common and are organized around that interest. Thus, Mother’s Against Drunk Driving, The Cattle Industry, and Save the Snails all qualify as “special interests.” What you seem to be saying is that homosexuals shouldn’t have any interests in common, at least not those interests that might arise from a lack of protection from abuses of their human/civil rights as citizens. But this would depend on those rights being fully protected by law, as in the case of your bird watchers. But is that really the case? Lets leave out for a moment your concern about the “traditional family,” which could only be referring to attempts by homosexuals to get laws passes allowing them to marry or adopt. And there are certainly laws against beating people up and burning down their houses, events happening to gay people all too often, and because they are gay, whether or not those laws are actually enforced is another matter. If one law is not enforced, then making another is hardly going to fix the problem. Hate laws? I think I’m against them. But homosexuals have also been fired from their jobs, been refused housing, and during the first excesses of the AIDS hysteria, yes, they were occasionally refused medical care. We’ve had to enact laws to prevent that sort of thing from happening to African Americans; do you think those laws unjust? Do African Americans now enjoy special privileges? Well, perhaps. “Affirmative action” springs to mind. But there are no attempts by gays to get laws saying companies have to hire so many homosexuals, no moves to get entrance quotas at universities. If AI somehow found that he were your boss, and fired you on the spot, because he hates your religion, you would certainly think that an infringement of your civil rights. If that sort of thing were happening all the time, you would undoubtedly want a law forbidding it. Whenever I hear a Christian going on about gays and their wanting “special rights,” I want to wack them on the side of the head and say, “Like what??” Name one. Name one special right that gays want that other people don’t have. Which brings us to the marriage thing. Okay, if we have to. I honestly can’t understand the problem with it. It’s not as if they’re demanding you allow them to get married in your church, now is it? What they want is a piece of paper from the state acknowledging a commitment to one another, one that gives them certain legal rights that they do NOT have at the moment. A wife is “next of kin.” Your “friend” is just a friend, as far as the law is concerned. “Sorry, sir, you can’t come in. Just family.” How does this affect you, personally? How does this affect the “traditional family?” Get a grip, dude. Leaving out the issue of adoption for the moment, lets have a look at what marriage might get for a gay couple. Aside from the occasional instance of one partner being forbidden to see the other in hospital settings because they weren’t “family,” the majority of what they would get would be financial. For example, they could list one another as dependants on health insurance applications and claims, as well as life insurance. I am again clueless as to why this would bother you. Seriously, just how many different rights, or privileges if you want, do legally married people really enjoy over those who are simply living together? Not many. It doesn’t even help out with the taxes. It’s the fact that marriage means less and less these days to straight people, not to gays, that’s causing the nearly seventy-five percent divorce rate we’re seeing. That’s the real threat to the family, that the very idea of it seems to be dying away. And there are myriad economic and social causes behind this trend that have nothing to do with the sexuality of a tiny minority of the population. Like I said. Get a grip. Besides, conservatives are forever going on about how the “gay lifestyle” is evil because of all the promiscuity and so forth. So now you’re getting hysterical about their wanting to show commitment? I don’t get it. Which brings us to adoption, and recent court decisions affirming bans of adoptions by homosexuals, most notably in Florida. Where they’re going to get Janet Reno for governor. It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? But back to adoptions. The most frequently cited argument for keeping gays from adopting children has to do with the idea that Little Johnny needs both Mom and Dad to grow up a balanced youngster. While this may seem a reasonable thought at first, it fails to take into account the fact that nearly half of our children today are being raised by a single parent; that percentage goes far higher if you include grandparents. And many jurisdictions that forbid gay adoption do not forbid adoption by single people. The obvious conclusion here is that the ban has nothing to do with family composition at all and everything to do with the idea that gays cannot make good parents. That they may raise their children to think well of other gay people…maybe even influence the kid to become gay themselves. Studies do in fact show that children raised by gay parents have a higher degree of tolerance for, and a higher probability of experimenting with, homosexual behavior, but do not show that these children are any more likely to actually be gay. There is a difference, you know. So no matter what the argument, such bans are at their core no defense of the family at all, but rather a condemnation of homosexuality itself. Gay people are simply unfit to be parents because they’re gay, not because their family structure is “non traditional.” So I’m going to ask you again, Cat-D, do you think homosexuals have the exact same rights, human and civil, as non-homosexuals? evam me sutam, RueDeLaLevee |
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