The Gay Fray

I am . . . .

  • Homosexual

    Votes: 25 9.2%

  • Heterosexual

    Votes: 201 73.6%

  • Bisexual

    Votes: 31 11.4%

  • Other (I would have complained if there wasn't an "other" option)

    Votes: 16 5.9%
  • Total voters
    273
I have no problem with gay people and never have. It was always a heterosexual that was infringing on my rights or dignity.

Not that there doesnt exist bad gay people but ive not had any unwelcome advances or persistent harassment like from heterosexuals which cause grief and stress.
 
birch said:
I have no problem with gay people and never have. It was always a heterosexual that was infringing on my rights or dignity.
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That's true for most. I just can't look at it and pretend that I agree. But the point is moot. They can do as they please. And we continue down the road...
Some day I'm going to pretend I'm the King of England. Wouldn't it be great should the world agree?
 
Bowser said:
That's true for most. I just can't look at it and pretend that I agree. But the point is moot. They can do as they please. And we continue down the road...
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No one is asking you to agree - or even to look, for that matter. People are simply asking you to mind your own business and not try to enforce your homophobic bigotry on the rest of the world.

Why is it so hard for the Republican moral majority to stay the f**k out of everyone else's bedroom? Is it some kind of compulsion inherent in right wing bible-thumpers? Similar to the need to gather at Trump rallies and bask in the glory of the Donald?

I jsut don't get it...
 
Randwolf said:
No one is asking you to agree - or even to look, for that matter. People are simply asking you to mind your own business and not try to enforce your homophobic bigotry on the rest of the world.
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Nobody is enforcing sexuality on anyone. Last time I checked, sodomy laws were not anywhere enforced in the U.S. If I recognize that the topic is socialized, politicized and dramatized in our culture, then I'm commenting on the issue, just as I would on any other issue that I might agree with or disagree with.

Tiassa, what do you think? Should the guy in the above video be allowed to return to elementary school, so he doesn't feel excluded?
 
Bowser said:
Should the guy in the above video be allowed to return to elementary school, so he doesn't feel excluded?
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I don't know Bowser. How about answering this oldie but goody?

Are women (in general) entitled to full rights as a human being? As in, full stop - yes or no?

I lost all respect for any view you have, on any issue whatsoever, when you refused to answer that question.
 
Bowser said:
Nobody is enforcing sexuality on anyone. Last time I checked, sodomy laws were not anywhere enforced in the U.S. If I recognize that the topic is socialized, politicized and dramatized in our culture, then I'm commenting on the issue, just as I would on any other issue that I might agree with or disagree with.

Tiassa, what do you think? Should the guy in the above video be allowed to return to elementary school, so he doesn't feel excluded?
Click to expand...
My God, will you ever stop lying? Ever?

Firstly, "he" is a she. She is transgender. She was married with 7 children.

She dresses like a 6 year old and plays like a 6 year old to help cope with the horrors of life she has had to endure. She is doing the things she was denied the right to do when she was little. It is a coping mechanism.

“By not acting my age, I don’t have to deal with the reality of my past, because it hurt” she says.

She goes on to explain that she has a “whole bunch of friends who want to play, so they still do their job during the day, but when they’re stressed out, there’s nothing wrong with us pulling out a puzzle, or colouring in a colouring book, or watching cartoons.”

She says that some people turn to drugs, some people turn to different kind of fetishes, medication or therapy.

But for Ms Wolscht, she prefers to “just let it go and stop thinking about big people’s stuff.”

When asked what she hopes this will achieve, Ms Wolscht replies, “Well, eventually I will grow up.”​

Nowhere, and I mean nowhere, does she say she wants to return to elementary school. So that was your second lie. Your first lie is to claim she is a "he".
 
Boogie Is Better


Click and shake it: You know you want to.​

Magical Realist said:
Is that what she is requesting? Or are you just making up shit again?
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Clearly the latter.

As I see it, he's welcome to embarrass himself all he wants wandering around reciting template talking points and responses; he just has to learn that saying intentionally cruel things and making shit up and random just to get whatever miniature thrill he can manage is, at its heart, antisocial behavior.

At some point, we have to accept that these are simply people not equipped to deal with civilized society.

Or, you know, maybe that's the point. Maybe this is a step along the way to finally admitting he has a problem.
 
Tiassa said:
​

As I see it, he's welcome to embarrass himself all he wants wandering around reciting template talking points and responses; he just has to learn that saying intentionally cruel things and making shit up and random just to get whatever miniature thrill he can manage is, at its heart, antisocial behavior.
Click to expand...

Yet you never answered the question.
 
Randwolf said:
I don't know Bowser. How about answering this oldie but goody?

Are women (in general) entitled to full rights as a human being? As in, full stop - yes or no?

I lost all respect for any view you have, on any issue whatsoever, when you refused to answer that question.
Click to expand...

I think women have all the rights of a man, in my home country. If you want to resurrect the abortion thread, I suppose we can jump back on the marry-go-round.
 
Any Excuse to Whip It Out

​

What is it about transgenderism that brings out the pervert in every good, family-values oriented soul?

Or we might ask what some old guy in North Carolina expected when citing transphobia as the reason he threatened to whip out his penis to show a woman.

Fayetteville Councilman John La Tour, a tea party member and recipient of Josh Duggars campaign funding, is being accused of threatening to expose himself to a female employee of a city restaurant. People who witnessed the incident say he approached the woman assuming she was transgender and told her that he was man and that could prove it by dropping his pants.

The Arkansas Gazette reports that La Tour, who represents Ward 4 on the city’s western side, said Friday morning he asked an employee at Arsaga’s at the Depot on Dickson Street what her gender was because “we live under an ordinance which lets me choose my gender based on how I feel that day” ....

.... La Tour said the incident began during his regular Friday morning stop at Arsaga’s to meet a group of acquaintances. The music was overly loud despite his request to lower the volume, so he responded by dancing along with it, he said. He intended to ask the employee to dance with him but wanted to confirm she was a woman first, La Tour said, citing the ordinance.

“You can declare you’re a man or you’re a woman, whatever you want to,” La Tour said. “I’m not going to ask a man to dance with me.”

(Busey↱)​

No, really. We heard family-values presidential also-rans Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee↱ going on about restroom masturbation, and Seattle recently witnessed one of those ultimately uncomfortable situations where some family-values pervert decided to walk into a women's locker room, sexually harass women, and blame the transgendered―our Washington State Human Rights Commission did very well to take that one seriously and not fall over laughing. And it is a serious issue, and as much as we would like to simply laugh at all these old, moralizing perverts coming out of the closet, it's kind of hard to laugh off dangerous behavior.

Because there is, after all, this conservative tendency we've witnessed in recent years, whereby they make up some sound bite because they think it sounds effective, and that quip suddenly replaces reality. It's one thing to chide conservatives for complaining about intrusive government while trying to regualte your sex life, assert authority over women's bodies, and write zoning laws to close businesses they simply don't like, but now we've escalated to fake mythopoeia as excuses for sexual misconduct.

Then again, they're Republicans. The moral of the story here seems to be, "Any excuse to whip it out."

It's getting to the point that I wonder if I should allow a Republican within a hundred yards of any children under my care. I mean, if the response to not getting their way with a fake constitutional tantrum is sexual belligerence, they are dangerous.

​
____________________

Notes:

Brownstone, Sidney. "Human Rights Commission: Guy Entering Women's Bathroom in Seattle Was 'Absolutely Not Protected Under the Law'". Slog. 26 February 2016. TheStranger.com. 22 March 2016. http://bit.ly/1XKSNji

Busey, Kelli. "Fayetteville Councilman John La Tour threatens to wave his penis at a woman he thought was trans". Planet Transgender. 22 March 2016. PlanetTransgender.com. 22 March 2016. http://bit.ly/1o4WC6S
 
Unforeseen

​

The joke is that Republicans are all for local governance except when communities govern themselves in a way that displeases conservatives. To wit, Charlotte, North Carolina passed an anti-discrimination measure protecting LGBTQ rights; Republicans called a special session of the General Assembly to pass HB2, which forbids cities from passing anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBTQ rights↱, and also restricts public restroom use to one's genetic sex.

Republican legislatures and governors in Arkansas and Tennessee have also passed laws to prevent cities from protecting LGBTQ rights.

So there is the joke about intrusive government. And now, as the queer community groans at yet another desperate, stupid conservative attempt to remind everyone else that only Republicans get to decide who has rights, we do, at least, get one more joke out of it.

Except it's not a joke.

​

It is well-known in the queer community that the Republican fixation on gay rights is all about women, except for the part where it's not. That is to say, consider the concept of the "sufficiently invisible lesbian"; the idea is that homophobes focus largely on gay men for aesthetic reasons. I've seen this before, occasionally recalling my time in Oregon during the Measure 9 fight, and how bizarre it was to hear men complaining about homosexuality while watching two women perform together on the stage. (Even better punch line: If they are or pretend to be sisters, it's even more popular.)

And while one light way of putting it is that men want to restrict competition―after all, women are to have sex with men, not other women, as the argument goes―the gibe gets heavier when it starts seeming that the heterosupremacist argument never really gets past that in order to genuinely consider women.

Consider the aesthetics of Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee↱ warning of men pretending to be transgender in order to sneak into a women's restroom for sexual gratification. Or perhaps the bizarre occasion in Seattle↱ last month when a man twice entered a city park women's locker room and began undressing, one of those times in front of young girls, claiming that transgender bathroom access meant he could be there; apparently he never even bothered to claim he was transgender. It seems a political stunt, actually, coming two days before the state Senate voted on a Republican-driven bathroom bill―which failed, anyway―while conservatives warned of men preying on women in public restrooms and locker rooms if transgender people were allowed to use facilities matching their gender. The Washington State Human Rights Commission did well enough to not laugh openly at the pretense that the policy was somehow confusing. Sydney Brownstone↱ of The Stranger reported:

Apparently this dude isn't the first person with the idea to undress in women's restrooms to stir up false and idiotic fears about transgender people being allowed in same-sex restrooms. A number of trolls have been suggesting similar stunts↱ on anti-LGBTQ Facebook pages.​

Yet in all of this, did nobody of any influence in conservative ranks stop to think about the born females who undertake the transition to male?

Apparently not.

And, you know, it might be that they just don't think a person lacking a Y chromosome is anything to worry about.

To the other, the state of North Carolina just ordered J. P. Sheffield to use a women's restroom.

Or maybe that's what they really wanted to do. After all, if J. P. Sheffield must use a women's restroom, well, maybe some perverted men will try to slip through.

In other words, North Carolina just went out of its way to accomplish pretty much nothing other than reiterating its disdain for women and forcing men like J. P. Sheffield to use women's restrooms.

And while it's true that many include urine and feces in their intimacy, quite honestly I've never known someone whose thing was to sneak into a restroom in order to watch or listen to someone else on the toilet. That is to say, it's generally a more (ahem!) direct application.

Suffice to say, J. P. Sheffield and other men like him are now obliged, under force of law, to use the same restroom as the wives and daughters of North Carolina.

And it will be somewhat astounding when we get the first photos or videos of people's amazement when they call the police because a man is using a women's restroom, and the guy makes the point that the law obliges him to use it instead of the men's. Part of me looks forward to the shocked expressions.

Seriously, North Carolina conservatives are perverts.

Oh, right. And check this part out: HB2 also forbids cities from passing anti-discrimination laws protecting veterans and service members.

Yes, really.

Nobody's sure what's up with that, though Rep. Paul Stam (R-37) apparently argued that such protections are unnecessary.
____________________

Notes:

Brownstone, Sydney. "Conservative Trolls Have Been Suggesting Men Go into Women's Restrooms to Help Legislators Discriminate Against Trans People". Slog. 17 February 2016. TheStranger.com. 24 March 2016. http://bit.ly/21JZuTJ

—————. "Human Rights Commission: Guy Entering Women's Bathroom in Seattle Was 'Absolutely Not Protected Under the Law'". Slog. 26 February 2016. TheStranger.com. 24 March 2016. http://bit.ly/1XKSNji

—————. "Two Days Before a State Senate Vote on an Anti-Trans Bathroom Bill, Pool Employees Say a Man Showed Up in a Women's Locker Room". 17 February 2016. TheStranger.com. 24 March 2016. http://bit.ly/1Pq842T

Reilly, Mollie. "North Carolina Governor Signs Bill Banning Cities From Protecting LGBT People". The Huffington Post. 23 March 2016. HuffingtonPost.com. 24 March 2016. http://huff.to/1RpeYI1

Sheffield, J. P. "It's now the law for me to share a restroom with your wife". Twitter. 23 March 2016. Twitter.com. 24 March 2016. http://bit.ly/22JCNBD
 
Companies boycotting Georgia over their anti-gay "religious liberty" house bill 757. Good for them! Now waiting for the Walking Dead episode where they travel to Oregon!
============================================================

"Georgia governor Nathan Deal’s is considering signing House Bill 757, a “religious liberty” law conservatives in the state call a necessary protection of “religious viewpoints and prevent discrimination against faith-based groups.” The legislation would allow faith-based organizations and business owners to deny services to people who don’t mesh with their “sincerely held religious belief” (think: the Colorado bakery that wouldn’t make a wedding cake for a gay couple). It would also allow them to fire any employee they think doesn’t adhere to their religious beliefs.

Opponents cite the obvious, that the law smacks of discrimination, that it’s bad for Georgia businesses, and then there’s the people who say the bill would’t go far enough. In an attempt to get Governor Deal to veto HB757, several major, multi-million-dollar businesses and organizations have come out against the bill and even threatened to boycott the state and take their money or events elsewhere. Here’s a running list of those companies and organizations:"

http://fusion.net/story/284140/disney-marvel-nfl-georgia-boycott-anti-gay-bill/
 
The fight for equality has just exploded on a new front. Are you gay? Then be prepared to be discriminated against in these hick states:

"DURHAM, N.C. — The divide between social conservatives and diversity-minded corporations widened Tuesday with developments in Mississippi and North Carolina related to the rights of gay, lesbian bisexual and transgender people in both states.

Mississippi’s governor signed far-reaching legislation allowing individuals and institutions with religious objections to deny services to gay couples, and the online-payment company PayPal announced it was canceling a $3.6 million investment in North Carolina.

The measure signed by Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi allows churches, religious charities and privately held businesses to decline services to people if doing so would violate their religious beliefs on marriage and gender. Gov. Nathan Deal of Georgia, under pressure from business interests, two weeks ago vetoed a similar bill passed by the State Legislature.

PayPal said it had dropped plans to put in global operations center in Charlotte, N.C., because of the state’s recent passage of a law banning anti-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation and requiring transgender people in government buildings and public schools to use bathrooms that match the gender on their birth certificates. PayPal had pledged to bring 400 jobs and invest $3.6 million in the area by the end of 2017.

The developments in Republican-controlled states reflected growing fissures between business interests and social conservatives, whose alliance has played a central role in the Republican coalition. Similar disputes have erupted in Indiana, Arkansas and other Republican-controlled states since the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage last year.

Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina and Mr. Bryant join a list of Republican governors who are being squeezed between the business groups that have formed the core of their support and conservative state lawmakers pushing back against recent gains made by advocates of gay rights and same-sex marriage.

The divide played out with particular force a year ago in Indiana after a national outcry over its adoption of what was billed as a religious liberty bill. After an uproar that included questions about whether Indianapolis should host the men’s Final Four tournament, Indiana weakened the law somewhat. But that dispute and a continuing fight over whether the state should adopt anti-discrimination protections may have cost Indiana a dozen conferences and $60 million, a state visitors bureau estimated...."

Continue reading the main story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/us/gay-rights-mississippi-north-carolina.html?_r=0
 
The United States Military
Pentagon lifts transgender ban

​

So, this happened:

The Pentagon on Thursday lifted a long-standing ban against transgender men and women serving openly in the military, removing one of its last discriminatory hurdles and placing gender identity on par with race, religion, color, sex and sexual orientation.

The announcement by Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is part of a fundamental shift in the straight-laced, male-dominated U.S. military, which in 2011 ended discrimination against gays and lesbians. More recently, it opened all combat positions to women and appointed the first openly gay Secretary of the Army, Eric K. Fanning.

"Our mission is to defend this country, and we don't want barriers unrelated to a person's qualification to serve preventing us from recruiting or retaining the soldier, sailor, airman or Marine who can best accomplish the mission," Carter said. "We have to have access to 100% of America's population for our all-volunteer force to be able to recruit from among them the most highly qualified―and to retain them."

Ending the transgender ban, which followed an extensive one-year review, will affect a small fraction of individuals serving in the armed forces, or about 0.1% of the approximately 2 million active and reserve members in the U.S military.

Still the social and political ramifications are likely to be felt more broadly. The military has often been a trailblazer in taking steps against discrimination, most notably ending segregation of African Americans in the 1940s.

(Hennigan↱)​

Thank you, President Obama.

Thank you, Secretary Carter.

Look, I can't reiterate enough just how astounded I am by the amazing transformation of my society's regard for homosexuals and trasngender. Neither can I make the point often enough that everyone deserves not simply the dignity, but our society's insistence thereuopn, that we have been shown.

This is my president. This is my Democratic Party. These are my United States of America. Thank you all so very much.

By ending this ban, the government recognizes that transgender people do not choose their gender identity or expression, but that their gender identity or expression differs from those traditionally associated with their assigned sex at birth. Accordingly, hormone therapy, gender-transition surgery, and other kinds of medical care are not elective, but crucial to maintaining the holistic health of transgender people as they serve in the military. It’s a critical, and long overdue, correction.

Yet, as only around 0.3% of Americans identify as transgender, this move hasn’t received as much attention as the 2015 ruling that enabled lesbian, gay and bisexual people to serve openly. On its face, that makes enough sense: the LGB population is more than 10 times the size of the trans population, so more people stood to be affected then. Those statistics tell one story, but there’s a more interesting one that's been overlooked: Transgender individuals are twice as likely to join the armed forces as the average American.

According to a UCLA research study, 21% of the entire transgender population in the U.S. has served in the military, compared with about 10% of the general population.

(Batchelor Warnke↱)​
____________________

Notes:

Batchelor Warnke, Melissa. "Ending the military's transgender ban will have far more impact than you might think. Here's why." Los Angeles Times. 1 July 2016. LATimes.com. 6 July 2016. http://lat.ms/29oancT

Hennigan, W. J. "U.S. military to allow transgender men and women to serve openly". Los Angeles Times. 30 June 2016. LATimes.com. 6 July 2016. http://lat.ms/29iSAAH
 
Tiassa said:
Thank you, President Obama.

Thank you, Secretary Carter.

Look, I can't reiterate enough just how astounded I am by the amazing transformation of my society's regard for homosexuals and trasngender. Neither can I make the point often enough that everyone deserves not simply the dignity, but our society's insistence thereuopn, that we have been shown.

This is my president. This is my Democratic Party. These are my United Stats of America. Thank you all so very much.
Click to expand...
I would be interested to see how the right respond to this.

After the great bathroom moral panic, where they thought men were using the women's bathroom because transgender women were using said women's bathroom as assigned to the sex they identified with and/or had had surgery to be what they identified with, and in some States, these women were being forced to use the men's room (and vice versa for transgender men), the right incorrectly argued that "men" were using the women's bathrooms and thus, triggered laws to ban transgender from using the correct bathroom they identified with.

With the right's outrage at women serving in combat roles [insert various sexist reasons here], whether they would have less of an issue with transgender women serving combat roles in the armed forces because these tools believe that transgender women are actually men and whether they would have an issue with transgender men serving in combat roles, because the tools on the right believe that transgender men are women and whether they would resort to their sexist attacks regarding "women" in combat there too..
 
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(sigh!)

I so adore typos. United Stats ... grr!

But, yes, the right wing ... they've been pretty quiet because that was the ultimate Friday news dump.

I mean, it just worked out that way, but, what, with the holiday and then Director Comey exploding the Beltway, the queer once again slips under the radar.

We'll hear from them in a bit. Trump will get desperate enough to haul it out.
 
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