Just mt opinion
 

Well, I am not going to bring anyone around to my way of thinking...not that I would even try. I guess I was just born in the wrong age....I just see people following MaggieL's way of thinking about being touchy feely and making sure we don't hurt anyones feelings. Meanwhile look around you the world you are living is falling apart in little shards and has been doing so ever since World War II ended. Not to say that the world was a bed or roses before. I agree it was not.

I will say this, in my mind the politically correct, touchy feely, make sure no on is excluded concept is turning this country and several others into a bed of horseshit, which may grow flowers for your guns but isn't doing a darn thing for the good of the country. Am I calling for hatred and brutal anarchy? NO!

What I am saying is that frivolous lawsuits are teeming, self-respect is at an all time low for most teenagers (just look at the girl who just came to this country, had a baby smothered it to death, and is now being defended by lawyers that she didn't understand because of the culture she is from) and everyone seems to care less for his fellowman than ever he did before. Yet you still say that this type of segregation and sub dividing is working!

All is seems to do is breed resentment not togetherness, it breeds mistrust not communication, it breeds misunderstandings not community pride! If you think that the gay/lesbian/transgendered community showed up to see a drag-queen on ice because they were proud, think again. I have been in the gay community all my life and it is not pride that this kind of spectacle invokes; it is humor. Yes, I am sorry everyone is laughing at him not with him, and it is not the evil 'straight' people. It is the very people you are calling the 'Queer Community'. I have been around enough to know what the 'Queer Community' is about and it is not pride.

It is about boastful, egotistical, pompous, hedonists, (and before someone jumps in, I am speaking in generalities but for the most part if people are honest will agree, don’t believe me watch a gay film.) that only care about the next person they can have sex with. They for the most part are a group of people that place no value or worth on a person beyond the money they have in the bank, the size of the penis they have in their pants, or what kind of body they have. You may convince some people here that this is a stereotype that doesn’t exist, but you aren’t piss on me and tell me it is raining. I may have been born on a Tuesday but, it wasn’t last Tuesday.

Lawman
 

Well, one good thing came out of my post, I bet you lawman didn't get flamed even once.

It's really not as simple as that. Your sexuality is a part of you, and comes up in many more situations than just in the bedroom.

For example:<ul><li>holding hands
<li>kissing
<li>flirting
<li>having a crush on someone (and if they're straight, trying to hide it)
<li>checking someone out that you think is hot
<li>going out on a date</ul>These are all things that straight people don't have to hide. If you're gay, though, engaging in any of these results in innumerable interpersonal consequences. People will start treating you differently. You can lose friends. You could lose your job. Or, people could just start taunting and harrasing you. It is not easy to keep it a secret. It requires constant effort. If there are people who know, you know who all of them are, and if they tell someone else without your permission, it's a big deal. Being in the closet is very stressful. The whole point of being "out" is so that you don't have to deal with all that bullshit. If you're out, some people are going to start treating you like shit, but you don't care anymore because it's too much stress to have to hide it all the time. If you're not maintaining the lie, you may not go around announcing your sexuality to people, but it will be obvious in the things that you do. The first thing you're going to want to do when you're out is to hold hands in public. Not because you want to flaunt your sexuality, but because you want to feel liberated from the oppression of the constant lying.

Any sort of talk about people not needing to know is bullshit. When they find out, they're going to start treating you differently. They could be okay with it, but they might be prejudiced and start hating you with extreme vigilance. Until they find out, you just don't know which it's going to be, and the stress in the meantime could be killer.

What?!?
 

Juju, are you speaking from experience? I met Jon in College, in Memphis, Tennessee at Crichton College which is a Christian Bible Collage. All my friends there know and they are all still my friends. They still fly down to Florida to visit me.

Only one out of maybe 20 friends, decided to be an asshole about the whole thing, and even he an ex-military person didn't attack me physically. He just decided we shouldn't be friends.

There are going to be assholes in every group up until this good old earth is either blown up, we all evolve, or become extinct.

I am not saying gay-bashing, race crimes, or even or any hate crimes do not exist, but they are NOT as often as you think and if any one would like to do the statistics I think it was determined that gays performs more crimes on others gays that there are straight-gay crimes. I wish I had those facts at hand.

My point is even if every straight person was forced to love every gay ( I refuse to use the word queer). There would still be hate. It is the nature of the beast, people will hate you for religion, political affiliation, color, creed, whether you like cream or whole kernel. . . . it just goes on and on.

I did a tolerance course once and they split the room into two groups, behind the scenes they had noted the eye color of everyone in the room. The blue eyes were moved to the left while the others were moved to the right. This was all unbeknownst to the people being split up. Then the teacher had us each read an article about how science had, figured out that people of blue eyes were of a greater intelligence than that people of any other color. We were to read the article and report back as a group. All but physical violence almost broke out. Why, 10 minutes earlier eye color was the last thing on anyone’s mind? The answer was, because someone pointed out that there WAS a difference. The teacher went on to say that the article was fake and that there were no such findings, but what do you know the blue-eyed people were still smug about the whole thing at break and I still think blue-eyed people have this arrogance about them, that my friends is a real life lesson in hatred. Make your self stand out, force others to notice and I promise you people WILL hate you for it. It is the very nature of what we are. Maybe it is leftover from our primal past where being different meant you could pose a greater danger to the group, you know the strong survive. It may not be right but it is factual!

Re: What?!?
 

Yep. I've had many gay friends and it's always like I described with them.

In fact, it's my experience that most Christians think gays are evil and going straight to hell. That must be a pretty liberal Christian College you went to.

I watched a video about that in sociology last year. It was actually done with a group of 2nd graders. It was crazy how quickly this kids began to treat their friends like crap due to something there teacher taught them. Then they showed it the next day when the reverse was taught and guess what, the ones who had been discriminated against the day before were as mean as the others.

Boy so that means that the great majority of the US(protestants) thinks gays are evil and going straight to hell. That's quite the generalization.
I'm assuming you actually mean Catholics because catholics are usually associated with being the strongest believers in that theory. But then I'm Catholic, went to a Catholic church and met very few people who believed Gays were going straight to hell. In fact I've never heard that from a fellow Catholic who garners any respect among the majority of his/her peers.
In fact we had a protest on campus last weekend against the fact that our University supports the "10% society" This came yes from a Catholic church, but more people came out to protest the protesters, in fact not a single Catholic from Grand Forks came out in the support of those again the Gay society. Quite an illustration of this great majority that hates gays. 10 - 300 wow.

Most people around here are baptists, and nearly all of them think that being gay is immoral.

okay sorry I got a littlle out of hand. I still think saying most chrisitians think all gays are going to hell is a little extreme. Not that there aren't those that due. I'm sure the percentage of christians who believe gay's are going to hell is the same percentage of those in of other religions that think gays are evil and should die.(pulled completely out of my ass, with no statistical proof)

Where I live(the bible belt), about 95% are anti-gay. I don't know how other places and denominations are. I can only judge from the set of Christians i've personally met. I really hope it's different in other places, but most of the Christians i've met are bigots (case in point).

I know it's quite likely they're not all like this. It's just that for some reason I don't know very many of the good ones.

I think it really is a bible belt thing. My sister and brother-in-law spent a few years bouncing around the South while he was getting his career on track. My sister spent a lot of time among right wing "christians" and I don't think she gained from it. Her life down south was strange. It seemed like men and women were segregated with a lot of womens groups and the like, hardly a Christian way of life IMHO. Like Cam, I'm a Catholic and was never exposed to the kind of hate juju's link exposes. For most Catholics our faith is about living the sort of life that others might look at and think "those folks have something special going there." Leading by example has taken a big hit with the abuse scandals and may yet get uglier as the conservatives try to drive gay priests out of the church. Gotta get to work....

"for example" of what? Brandon Teena was a girl who liked girls.

It's good to know there's some sanity out there. I guess this is one of those cases where you look around you and assume it's that way everywhere. A false assumption, but an easy one to make.

I'll be getting my CS degree at the end of next year (yay!), then Kathy and I are going to get the hell out of this crazy place. I'm really thinking of Dallas, Texas, though, so i'm not sure how different religion is in that area. Not that that would affect my decision. :)

Brandon (born "Teena Brandon") was a transsexual man who liked girls. When it was discovered that he'd been born female, he was raped, then when he filed a criminal complaint on the rape, he was murdered, along with several of his friends.

When I said "referenced to their desired sex", I meant the sex they identified as. Brandon was living full-time in a male role. As far as I'm concened he was "straight" as a male, and queer because he was transsexual. That he had not yet had reassignment surgery at age 20 doen't make him a woman as far as I'm concerned.

I'm not sure exactly what my opinion on the whole thing is, as far as what constitues a "woman" vs. "living as a man"... okay, so "Brandon" was living as a man, but... had a vagina. Which is a pretty distintively female characteristic. I think probably the most accurate way to describe it would be "Teena Brandon was a girl, living as a man, who liked girls." But I'm not sure that I feel it's accurate to call her a man.