(Title me, baby! - Or, "Smokeadelica in Lieu of a Real Title")
Why do you avoid it Tiassa, does it scare you. Is this one of your uneventfull area of expertise where you have found comfort in ignoring it or playing both sides.
No ... I just didn't feel like scorching the earth and salting the fields. A more reasonable response was attainable, so I chose to wait for it.
Actually, you get angry so seldom that I think it's not good for you, I'd like to see you vent more, it's very healthy.
I actually spend most of my life in a simmer. It's a conundrum.
Most of my thoughts so far on the issue have been a mild rash and could have been cured easily with reasonable arguments coupled with valid field data, but what I have found about this issue is much emotion on both sides empty of facts and sound arguments.
This is a bit of a sticky issue. Homosexuals, much like Muslims in America, grow weary of having many people despise them for reasons equating to myths. Gays are ____. Gays do ____. Take a listen. It sounds an awful lot like the demonization of Muslims in America.
And that's not just intended for the poignant, aim-for-the-heart potency of the point. I don't mean it as empty rhetoric. Two faults that people react to if they perceive in criticism of homosexuality are one-sided applications of fault in behavior and the exaggeration of human faults into a stereotype.
In moral issues, I prefer the guilty until proven innocent approach, it's just much safer and more effective. Look at slavery for example, we deemed it okay for centuries and now that we found it morally unacceptalbe, we couldn't totally get rid of it as it embedded our ways of life in all ways and just metamorphised it in other aspects of our lives instead of nipping it in the butt from the first place.
I
would concur
if morality was fixed and stable. Despite the best efforts and arguments of monotheists, however, this is not the case. There is no objective morality. A moral issue only exists where we choose to create one. Slavery wasn't really a problem in people's consciences until someone decided to have a conscience issue and assert "freedom". True, my modern values compel me to judge slavery as downright wrong, but I'm not sure that all the components of a logical structure to oppose the issue of slavery on behalf of individual self-determination could have existed without the human species enduring a number of grim chapters.
Same goes for the gay issues, the liberals are busy putting bandage on it and modeling it in an unstudied bull shit shape that satisfies their unfounded idea of liberty that they figure out as they go, and the conservatives are busy opposing the whole idea to avoid the future damadge that may or may not happen.
Well, it's sort of a part of being American. Free people are free to learn their lessons. "Avoid the future damage that may or may not happen" has, in America, always been appropriate when used to suppress smaller groups, but the American people in general will not accept a broad application.
Try figuring out your taxes for you and your spouce as singles and you'll see the difference. Why the higher taxes for two married people with two incomes? Do you think it's the lower cost of living resulting in the occupancy of one resident, I don't think so, because no one is penalizing or stopping the ten bachelors downtown who elect to pile up in one room so that they can save up.
Definitely a conservative sham.
Okay, look ... the ten bachelors living together downtown to save money
cannot afford to live on their own. I live in Seattle, for instance, where unmarried cohabitation is fairly high not merely as an election of lovers, but also as a financial necessity. Furthermore, marriage is documented, which makes it easier to recognize in a legal sense. With the bachelors downtown, by the time the paperwork is processed, one of 'em might be gone.
It is, in fact, the difference in the cost of living. Look, married people want the fucking world,
Flores. They want a tax break for being married. They want a tax break when they buy a house. They want tax breaks when they reproduce accidentally. They want tax breaks when they have a good year on the stock market (not restricted to married people, obviously).
The rights and privileges of a married household exceed those of multiple single persons living together. Remember when Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act? For a week, I thought he had a greater plan. And then I realized that he was out of cards. Because he turned around and signed a new tax break on home sales and purchases. For married people. They got a tax break that benefitted them as much as a quarter of a million dollars compared to anyone else in the same position. And it was
after that that we heard the GOP yelling "marriage penalty!"
"Marriage Penalty" is such a tawdry term. I highly doubt anyone sought to "penalize" marriage. Given the way this country strokes marriage and family, it's either adulterous or incestuous. Alright, I'll be a little more serious:
Who woke up one day and wrote a tax code with the specific intention of "penalizing" married couples?
And if you say Barney Frank, I'll laugh while I tell you to fuck off
(Really, Rep. Frank would be the obvious fake answer.)
Meaning that this is not a problem unless the individuals want to have kids. Well, precisely, it's always a problem for gays who want to be parents becuase they can't have biological children....So Duh.
Why single out just the gays? What about heterosexual couples who cannot naturally reproduce by their own faculties?
It's the responsbility of the adoptive parents who chose the route of adoption to adopt both the kids and the biological parents and try to make of an already wrong situation right, instead of being selfish and trying to look like they have a perfect family to protect their image while the situation boils underneath with kids who are constantly questioning and biological parents who are constantly regretting and tormenting.
Yet you're pointing to the genealogical, social, and familial difficulties that can result from adoption. Are we to apply these concerns only to gays?
I don't argue with the ideals you've expressed toward the responsibilities of adoptive parents, but why would the problematic aspects be limited in any way to gays?
Why the hell would a woman be like a man or a man be like a woman.
"
One is not born, but rather becomes a woman." (Simone de Beauvoir)
Both are special and different for good reasons, and kids need to learn the healthy differences that make both sexes so they can grow in a balance.
Aside from the practical art of childmaking, I'm unsure which differences you find healthy. Most of the social distinctions between a man and a woman's role in society are fallacious and even sinister.
What closet and what gun. Gays have by nature gotten out of every closet imaginable by persisting in their abnormal sexual behavior....They are not shy, they have taken a big stab into one of the most sacred and senstive issues of marriage and sex, polluted it, and now they demand that we bless it...
The closet formed by walls of ignorance in people around them. The gun will shatter every facet of life. Gays, more often than heterosexuals, are rejected by their families for the simple crime of falling in love.
What else do you want, a party for them to congratulate them on their bahavior???
Equality before the law and a bit of human respect is all I ask. Doesn't seem
too hard.
Where is your priorities? what age and moral code are we dealing with when it's okay to use third world countries as nuclear and waste dumb grounds while we raise hell over homosexual behavior?
Sounds like America in the 21st century to me. In fact, I look at it in the sense of where are people's priorities if we're worrying about the gender of
someone else's sexual partner?
When your civil rights are under constant assault, what would you have someone do? Oh, that's right ... society will get along better if we all just accept the bigots ideas as policy and live on in a hateful, discriminatory human nightmare and believe it's the right thing because our personal sensibilities are actually more offended by other people's happiness than by, say, the dumping of toxins into the third world.
Who's priorities? All gays are asking for is the rights they are entitled to by law and human equality.
How much torture does a gay person go through in trying to make a straight family work, is it as much work as an orphan living in an orphanage have to go through to figure out why is god seemingly so unfair to him/her, yet learn to worship and love the god that created them and gave them life regardless of the upsets.
Some can get by lying to their families.
And frankly, I guess I should thank you for pointing out that dishonesty is the epitome of love.
Some eventually crack. This could hurt them, their families, and people they don't even know.
Of course, that's their problem, isn't it? Bigots hating a person to the point of breaking that person is the problem of the person being hated? Let me guess, let me guess ... bigots murdering Matthew Shepherd are actually the late Mr. Shepherd's problem and nobody else's?
For context,
Flores: In 1992, Oregonians defeated by less than two per cent a ballot measure that would have essentially legalized the murder of gays by preventing the prosecutor from trying those cases.
You know ... everybody lives with a little bit of unnecessary shit coming their way. But don't even try to pretend that gays are responsible for the stupid hatreds infecting the people around them. What anybody chooses to feel is their own responsibility, and if one chooses to feel such hate as to discriminate against a person on the basis of the gender of that person's sexual partner ... well, excuse me if I find that choice to hate just a little bit ridiculous.
If you have a patient who suffered a car accident and is in need of blood for survival, do you transfer blood to him/her from an AIDS patient or a healthy patient.? All your examples imply that you wish to trasfer AIDS contaminated blood to healthy patients in the name of tolerance and satisfying the realities of a society full of diseace.
I honestly would have thought you would sum it up with a
relevant question at least.
I refuse to see it as relevant,
Flores, because the aspect which I can extend to make it relevant paints such an ugly picture of what it is you seem to be trying to explain that I'm actually coming to question whether or not you're seeking genuine insight to your concerns with this topic or merely looking to alleviate some of that hateful pressure that builds up when people stay quiet about the people they don't like for too long.
Don't use the fact that a single mother can be successfull or that a mother an aunt are successful in rasing families to establish ground rules
I think it's a perfectly acceptable point in light of your concerns about "lack of sexual diversity".
Why would you not want to discuss the comparison between a stable and healthy same-sex relationship as a parental team as opposed to the gender-role precedents set by a constant parade of second-tier lovers to keep mom or dad entertained? You have concerns about gender roles - sexual diversity, as you put it. Well? Take two precedents and tell me about them:
- Two gay parents who love their child
- A parent who loves the child and a parent's lover who is in it for whatever reasons
That's a very strong point actually. And the slight sickness in your head that a man and woman should be the same and that the women are somehow with the short end of the sex stick is blurring your vision from seeing the sexes in the correct light. This blurred vision is not one that is healthy to use as a filter glass for another kid to learn from.
When an army of women takes over my city and proceeds to rape all the men to the point that their recta need surgical repair, we'll talk. It is true, though, that women in the US can behave in ways that would get men arrested. Of course, this is the fault of men in the collective sense. Even the guys I know who don't rape women seem pretty down with many of the principles that lead to the devaluation of women as human beings.
It's not tragic Tiassa, you missed the point becuase of your pity on yourself that manifested itself in anger toward others that tried to not so elequontely point out some truth to you.
Correct. The sense of tragedy was a fallacy. Just like girls and boys: the sense of proper roles is false.
The adoptive parents here are not really doing a great deed. It seems sometimes that they are selfish and just trying to acquire children because they couldn't have one of their own.
One of the things which I feared most going into parenthood was the fact that so many people around me treat their children as status symbols. The children are praised for their success in school, criticized for their failures to have adult knowledge, persecuted when they seek adult knowledge, and generally regarded as an outward measure of the parents. Perhaps it's a middle-class white-Lutheran thing, but if I hear phrases like "earn your keep", "we sacrifice for you", "we raised you to be better than that", or "did you think about what the neighbors will say" much more I will ... well, I can't stand such talk.
I generally tend to think that a large number of biological and adoptive parents treat their kids as status symbols. When my partner was five, her adoptive mother got mad at her about something and actually threatened, "You know, we
can take you back! I saved the receipt!"
You should have witnessed the naming debate before my daughter was born. All I wanted was a name that connected essentially with me when spoken. All my partner wanted was a name that was like every other kid's name. Despite my explicit wishes, she named my daughter after a TV baby. I didn't know it at the time, but then again I shouldn't have to watch hours of bad television in order to protect myself against anyone's machinations. I watch enough bad TV as it is for the hell of it. Talk about society- and image-ridden ....
You nipped it in the butt here.
Interesting choice of words, all things considered.
But you've overlooked the point that it was a social filtering over time that separated out the issues. Until that point, sensation was sensation. It is social conditioning that limits the manners of expression.
Supressing homosexuality and excercising straight sex is the right thing to do, and noone said that the right path is the easy path...
As a statement of faith, you're welcome to it. But such a declaration has no objective root.
And why do others not figure out what me and you figured out?
Depends on what you think we've figured out. What I figured out was that there was an identifiable bisexual or homosexual streak running through the range of my physical comforts.
What that means ... that's become sort of a lifetime enterprise with me. It's at least as interesting to examine the dynamic within myself as it is to act on it. But I've never understood it in terms of an identity politic.
Myself, I don't pursue men for the reason I don't pursue other women: there's really no point. To keep the point short, where my partner used to complain that other women before her exhausted certain of my resources, one of the main reasons she stuck around so long was that it wasn't worth committing violence to make her go away just in order to go back out and play the field.
I dislike marriage in the first place, so it's a weird thing for me. But as long as society panders to marriage, it's only a child's spiteful game of keep-away that removes a portion of people from the benefits of society on the basis of someone else's gender.
You are not alone, we all have two aspects that we must deal with, and you are doing good with what you were given.
But that doesn't mean that I'm going to refuse a prize if it happens to fall into my lap, so to speak.
Humans are like an optimum function with dependant factors. These factors are not all optimum, but together they behave optimumly. If you try to optimize one of the parameters, you'll throw your function into inefficiency status and screw things up. Sexuality is just a paremeter of our being....It needs to be balanced for the entire function to perform. If you optimize sex, other things will suffer equally.
I'm going to have to hit this from a couple of sides. I may still miss exactly what you're getting after.
Undue focus on the sexual aspect is indeed problematic, as is undue focus on industrious productivity.
Undue focus on sin is a little like that, too. Internalized, a mind can drive itself crazy, can sacrifice its own body for relief. Externalized, that focus makes your point in a way I'm not sure you were after.
One of the most wise and prophetic political tricks I ever saw was Clinton asking for definitions of
is and
sex. Sure, it was annoying to me as a Clinton supporter; I just wanted him to say, "Yeah, I did her. So freaking what?" But while attempting to keep this point short, I must revisit an older one:
- I occasionally have discussed the period in which I witnessed a friend obsessing over his daughter's sex life--before she was even born. It's a long story, but the punchline is that he devoted a good amount of energy to thinking about his daughter and sex.
- Now then ... to move to a more current point, add to that the idea that one of the reasons many people recoil from studies suggesting broad bisexuality among humanity is because most people draw different boundaries around "sex" than psychologists, sociologists, or cultural anthropologists. Most people don't think of playing doctor as "sex" until they catch their own kids at it and find themselves suddenly cornered by their own overreaction. But some of those innocent-seeming children's games are vital to psychosexual development.
- Consider, please, an assertion of mine which amuses me to no subversive end. It has occurred to me, after listening to many a man boast of his sexual adventures and escapades, that the infamous double-ender menage-a-trois is, in fact, a homosexual encounter. Typically speaking, the woman is incidental to the men. The primary sexual bond is between the two men who share the experience of having simultaneous pleasures from a common source.
Now ... please notice that of those three examples, the truly common aspect between them takes place in the brain.
It seems to me that people who base judgments of other people's worthiness based on the gender of a person's sexual partner are, in fact, "optimizing sex" according to your framework. I would just point out that they're devoting an awful lot of brain energy to sex. And, you know ... if you're going to devote that much attention to sex--and I say this without sarcasm--you ought to be
having sex while you're about it. Well ... not necessarily "you, Flores"
per se, but as a general assertion I'm very surprised at the amount of energy many (a surprising number of) people devote to sexual behaviors they allegedly don't like or disapprove of. To fight against it requires a certain proximity of thought. To leave it be requires no proximity of thought whatsoever. Out of mind ... well, out of mind.
Again, the civil rights activists are trying to push the limits of the parameters while they don't look at the function as a whole. They are screwing things up in ways that they can't percieve. Each of those experts is dealing with a human with thousands degrees of freedom, everytime they think they fixed one degree, the screw the next.
I must admit that it is a
rare day that I hear someone asserting that regarding the larger issue to begin with screws things up in ways people cannot perceive. Almost anything anybody does screws things up at that level. But when the point comes from a quarter known for attempting to reduce reality to something manageable and fixed around a central sacred principle. Yeah ... just about anything humanity does brings its problems as well as its benefits. But that's no reason to wallow in the problems of the here and now. If humanity wasn't determined to evolve, humanity would not fight. While this is a severe metaphysical difficulty for pacifists, it is not in humanity's nature to simply surrender to the problems of the moment. If we didn't screw things up while trying to fix them, we would not be diverse of God; we would be in complete harmony. But unless we're prepared to exscind from life everybody who we as humans think doesn't measure up to God's standards, there's not much we can do about the things people disagree on except try to get along.
(And, just to be fair, if atheists were to undertake a "logical" purge of society, they would eventually have to reconcile logic and propriety. And that cannot objectively be done beyond an immediate situational context, which is wholly subjective in its foundations and thus no proper test of that reconciliation.)
You will always be Tiassa first before you are an American, Christian, Muslim, ect. And Tiassa's experience is not fit for Flores nor is Flores fit for Tiassa. So when you become president, remember that you are dealing with millions degrees of freedom that you can't let them all loose and have to control each one on the expence of the other.
You know, I'm going to defer to
Guthrie on this one, largely because I've burned up a lot of words so far and really should be wrapping it up.
I suppose, though, to be fair, that I
should cuss you out some for what I perceive to be your incorrect presumptions, but I just don't have the energy. It's been a necessary slowburn on the home front; my mother actually called today and listened to me go blue all over the latest domestic round. So in a post-orgasmic sort of way, I'm just not up for the heavy blue streak right now. And besides, after wrecking a number of people's day with my private little war in Free Thoughts and that pompous "speech" in which I ripped most of my fellow posters, I figure that perhaps I ought to lay off for a while and be nicer. Wouldn't it be tragic to actually achieve an effect with my rhetorical fireworks and then actually nullify it by my own inability to stop? I can't make a Woody Allen joke here, and Neil Simon just isn't enough of a surrogate, so ....
I mean, take a look at this post ... it is governed by ... four other topics I'm involved in right now. I think four. Maybe five. And you can tell. These last two paragraphs are merely allusions to your comment about how seldom I get angry. Strangely, I'm seeking to spend less time with anger. Even stranger, as of last night it turns out I'm winning, but I'm not so neurotic at this point as to need to tell you that whole story in detail.
Er ...
Okay, okay, okay. I'll toddle off to twaddle my brain now. Couldn't even think of a title to twaddle the toddle of mottled mumbo-jumbo.
:m:,
Tiassa
PS on Edit: You know ... if I ever combine the ideas of "post-orgasmic" and my mother in such a direct manner again ... shoot me. I mean ... frak!