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This post was originally posted at FRS Daily Times on Blogger
As a straight man I’m obviously not the most qualified person to speak about homosexuality and what homosexuals go through in America or anywhere else around the world. But I am qualified to speak about what I see as far as the bigotry that’s thrown at homosexuals as a Liberal, as a blogger and as someone who is friends with gay people and someone whose worked with Gay people as well. Plus the bigotry that I’ve seen and read get thrown at gays just because they are gay and who they are attracted to.
And how gays carry themselves. Which is what I’m going to do in this blog, and not trying to speak as an expert on homosexuality which I’m clearly not. Just like a gay person wouldn’t be an expert on heterosexuality because of simple fact they aren’t straight and they do not know what it’s like to be straight. And bisexuals may be the only people who could possibly be qualified to be experts on both homosexuality and heterosexuality because they’ve lived the life as both at least to a certain extent.
As a Liberal I actually do believe in the old fashion conservative notion of personal responsibility. That we must be held accountable for our actions for good and bad. Fine I agree with that, but I’m going to give homophobes a pass when it comes to their homophobia just for this reason. Because and I don’t know this as a fact, but if I had to guess the overwhelming majority of homophobes didn’t decide that they are against homosexuality. Or the way they would put it, they do not agree with homosexuality. When they turned eighteen or twenty-one.
That its something that was already part of homophobes lives much longer before those two very important birthdays. And that since a lot of their homophobia if not all of it comes from a religious vantage point and they grow up in strict religious households or communities, that a lot of their homophobia comes to them when they are in church or from their families. That’s one theory and the other one coming from lets say lack of exposure to gay people and not being friends with those people and not having a good idea what its like to be around gay people.
This might sound like a fantasy or something, but I bet if you took the one-hundred of the most bigoted homophobes who didn’t have violent or murderous tendencies, that their homophobia was purely verbal and how they think rather than how they act and you had them live in a community of homosexuals for let’s say a week or a month or even longer than that, the Homophobes views of homosexuals would change drastically. Because they would see that gay people are people almost just like them, but attracted to the other gender and perhaps a little more feminine or masculine. To play off of a gay stereotype.
And that hay people perhaps have different interests, but that they would find things to agree on as well. And even talk about that and homophobia like all other forms of bigotry are based on simple ignorance. Having strong feelings about something that you simply don’t know much about which of course is dangerous. I really believe this because just look at the last ten years where back in 2003-04 gay-marriage was seen as a fringe issue. Now at least half of Americans are in favor of gay-marriage.
But even ten years ago when gay-marriage was unpopular the idea of civil unions seemed mainstream and an appropriate alternative. So we’ve made a lot of progress in just ten years. Which gets to my point that the more people know about something and see that it’s not dangerous and certainly not a threat to you, the harder it is to hate that thing. And more Americans are simply learning more about homosexuality and knowing gay people and seeing that these people are good people by in large just like straights.
The Daily Times 