From: cramer@optilink.UUCP (Clayton Cramer)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,ca.politics,ba.politics
Subject: Re: Against Our Will
Date: 28 Jul 92 20:27:45 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: Optilink Corporation, Petaluma, CA

In article <1992Jul28.013305.15005@morrow.stanford.edu>, farthing@leland.Stanford.EDU (ljf) writes:
> In article <11400@optilink.UUCP> cramer@optilink.UUCP (Clayton Cramer) writes:
> >In article <14nhu1INN238@agate.berkeley.edu>, jbuck@forney.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck) writes:
> >Then again, no one is running around, trying to get laws passed to
> >FORCE us to eat lima beans.  I supported the repeal of California's
> >sodomy law.  I argued vigorously for repeal of such laws elsewhere.
> >I remember a particularly memorable discussion with my father-in-law
> >about 1981 on this subject, in which he argued that any political
> >party that made an issue of gay rights was doomed to failure, and
> >I failed to understand his anger against homosexuals.
> 
> No, no one is trying to force you to eat lima beans, we're just trying
> to force you to respect the rights of lima beans eaters.  If you
> showed the same bigotry towards lima beans eaters as you do towards
> lesbigay people, you'd be laughed off the map.

But no one would pass a law requiring me to hire lima bean eaters.
"[R]espect the rights of lima beans eaters."  How about respecting
my right to be left alone, and not forced to associate against my
will?

> >1. Homosexuals are no longer an "oppressed minority" (at least in
> >California) -- most of them are aggressively pursuing a campaign to
> >force the rest of us to associate with them against our will.
> 
> You're wrong here, Clayton.  A poll right after Wilson vetoed AB101
> suggests that something like 2/3 of Californians think sexual
> orientation should be treated the same way that race, religion, and
> sex are (i.e., protected under anti-discrimination laws).

How does that make me wrong?  Read what I wrote: most homosexuals
are aggressively pursuing a campaign to force people to associate
with them.  It doesn't matter if it's 51% or 20% who are not 
desirous of being forced.  If 2/3 of the state wanted sodomy made
illegal, it wouldn't be a defense of the law that a majority wanted
it.

> >4. Nor is this just in books and articles.  I have acquaintances
> >who were molested as kids.  One guy I know who was molested by his
> >Scoutmaster at 10 would consider me and Phil Ronzone to be flaming
> >liberals.  What causes gay-bashing?  Is it perhaps angry victims, 
> >all grown up, and too inarticulate to express their fury except
> >by violence?  It doesn't make it right, because they are doubtless
> >attacking homosexuals who haven't molested anyone, but it should
> >not be surprising that gay-bashing is on the increase now in 
> >areas where homosexuality hasn't been a crime for many years.
> 
> Most child molesters are heterosexual men. 

Of course.  Heterosexual men outnumber homosexual men by a large
percentage.  However, females (for many reasons, both cultural
and biological) are considerably less likely to respond to abuse
with violence.

Also, the straight community isn't trying to defend child molestation.
What did the signs in the S.F. parade say this year about defending
NAMBLA from yellow journalism?

> If gay bashing is an understandable response to being molested by gay

Note; understandable doesn't mean right, as I made clear.

> men, would bands of women who were molested as children by
> heterosexual men attacking heterosexual men be equally understandable?

It sure would be understandable, and still not right.  Women victims
tend to engage in self-destructive, rather than other-destructive
activities: prostitution, drug abuse, finding abusive men as adults.
But not always.  Remember the two 14-year-old girls that were convicted
of murdering an old lady up in the Sierra foothills a couple of years
ago?  One of them had been raped repeatedly from the time she was about
three by brothers, uncles, etc.  Her diaries were used both to 
convict her, "It was fun," is how she described knifing this old lady
to death, and to demonstrate how seriously damaged she had been by
the abuse.

> I seriously doubt that most gay bashers are victims of sexual abuse by
> gay men.  More likely, they know that gay bashing is not taken very
> seriously by a lot of people and so lesbigay people are easy targets.
> The same mentality that enabled young white men in the South to beat
> up and/or rape African Americans without much fear of getting caught.

Tell me about these people that don't take it seriously.  Everyone
I know would like to see ALL violent criminals locked up and kept
there (except for some liberals, who don't seem to much care).

> >5. I have seen too much anecdotal evidence, and some poor quality
> >statistical evidence, that homosexuality and child sexual and
> >physical abuse are correlated.  It's not a big leap from, "molested
> >as a child" to "confused sexuality."
> 
> Heaven only knows how so many women are molested as children but end
> up heterosexual.

Yup.  But many end up pretty screwed up in their own self of self-
worth and sexual identity.
-- 
Clayton E. Cramer {uunet,pyramid}!optilink!cramer  My opinions, all mine!
"Well, maybe the Holocaust was right *for that culture*." -- a moral relativist
with whom I work.
Xref: sparky talk.politics.misc:36771 alt.politics.elections:9406