I don’t think most people want to really discuss this issue. It is a generic issue—important in the glbt community due to “Christianists” from America going to African nations, etc, and telling them that homosexuality, etc, is bad and how they need to follow OUR example—America is what all other nations should become. It is the excuse given for the radical Islamists attacking America: that we have come into “their” part of the world and tried to not only convert them to Christianity but to western ways, etc.
In the opposite direction, we do not want Muslims, or any other group, coming to America—which means they acknowledge is the best place to live—and then try to change it to fit the place they ran away from, Sharia law being only one example.
It reminds me of what I was told about Arizona and that part of the nation. Years ago many people with medical problems were told by their physicians that they could breathe and feel better if they went to a dry area, such as Arizona. So many moved there and immediately started trying to make it like the place they came from, planting the very plants that they were told to get away from, etc.
So while we take offense at Russia rejecting our people who come there and try to tell them what to do, we should take care of our own problems and stop trying to run the rest of the world. It is arrogance, extreme, to think that other people/nations need US to tell them how to think and act.
This may not seem “right” when we think about the black civil rights movement in America. There were people, influential, in the south that were never going to end slavery so people from other areas had to come and enforce the law and shame the “Christians” who were racists. Such people were attacked as outsiders but that was nonsense, they were Americans. (Although of course my relatives lied and called anyone attempting to end racial injustice an “outsider” and that included other southerners born and raised here.
4 comments:
Billy, you are 100% right about Arizona! As a child, that was the promised land (because I had asthma). I moved to Phoenix in 1986, and by then, so many Midwesterners had moved (and brought their trees and grasses with them) that it lost the pristine quality it had. Now it's just like Los Angeles, only hotter. We left in 2001, and while I enjoyed my time there, I can't say I was that sorry to leave.
It is behavior hard to understand-it goes against logic. (Going to a dry weather state with few plants and then planting the plants that caused you to move TO Arizona.)
By the way, spell check can be frustrating, now it is indicating that "Los Angeles" is a bad spelling, As is midwesteners. But I think it still rejects Mattachine and some other words that are used a lot.
I am not thinking about global warming, etc, and perhaps I ignored weather when younger but for months everything I hear is bad/strange weather. Here it is normal—about 98 and hot—but we have had rain. If I am seeing the weather channel right, it is as hot or hotter north, setting records in St. Louis, etc.
Plus tornadoes, hurricane weather, flooding in some cities and drought in some areas, etc. Poor bigots like Pat Robertson, it is hard to say it is glbt people in all these areas causing it. But then we are everywhere.
As I reread ONE Magazine issues from the 1960s I relive the arrests, religious attacks, newspaper harm—as shown in Gay Press, Gay power, I remember (I think it is by Jim Kepner) an article about homosexuality being normal—and how today sex is not just for procreation-today finally Obama’s administration is saying the pill can be obtained by teenagers. I connect that to “Arizona,” Houston, etc. and how they are not normal—but are ok since we have air conditioning (spell check gives several choices on this word).
Young people will thankfully never know living here before Air, or picking cotton in the hot sun, and the racial bigotry by law and religious teaching.
And while now some websites seem to have found pictures of people in our community in the good ole days, I doubt they were “out” and I compare the lack of pictures in early ONEs, with all the pictures in almost every lgbt publication and think:
It is not that important in our movement's history what the Supreme Court says about marriage, etc, because you can see our community's future in the faces of “always out” young lgbt people. Take, for instance, if you can, a look at the young glbt people on the cover of the June issue of OutSmart Magazine.
Maybe some older members of the community don't get the message, BUT I think the bigots do, and it tells them they have lost the battle and war. To their shame, the last one's to get the message are religious bigots. But then they have Always been the least “Christian” of Americans, And were anti-swomen and anti-black equality.
Amen!
I do have faith that sooner or later most Americans will understand all the arguments and support the one they think best for themselves and the nation.
That is also what I was trying to say in the email I just sent out—they are seeing REAL lgbt people and that may “educate” them as much as a court decision—not that we don’t want the favorable decisions.
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