Brokeback Mountain
- Thread starter Ricter
- Start date
You can think what you want about gay people, but when you call homosexuality a medical condition that is a factual error. The mental health professions define disorders by their negative effect on the patient. By the '70s it was becoming quite clear that homosexuality alone was not debilitating, by the simple evidence of so many homosexuals living their lives without any sign of abnormal distress. As a result, homosexuality has not been classified as a disorder for more than 30 years.
Martin
I'm not saying you can't. Think what you want! However, in my experience, people who speak positively about the '50s did not live through them, and those who did live through the '50s don't have a lot of nostalgia for that era.
Talk to some elderly folks and ask them which decade in their lives had the greatest sense of fear and paranoia.
Martin
To be candid, spect8or, I'm not sure what the "dignity model" would look like. But we are talking about compassion for law abiding, productive human beings here, not criminals. I imagine that after the Civil War, many of the South's plantation owners were commiserating about the "good old days" before slavery was abolished. And while their lives may have had to undergo some difficult changes, I think it was for the best, don't you? Well, now we recognize that we have another form of oppression against people who, similarly, are being persecuted simply for who they are.
Make no mistake. I am extremely glad that I am straight and I would not wish homosexuality upon anyone. Aside from being glad that I am attracted to women, I would hate to be persecuted for no other reason than because I am being true to my own nature which does not cause outward harm to anyone else. What a world it must be for those who were born that way -- for people who are not allowed to be true to themselves as the rest of us are. Can you imagine living in a world like that? Well, we do. We just happen to be on the other side.
As for friends, to each his own. As I said earlier, I do not have any friends who I believe are gay. If a good friend decided to "come out," yes I would be surprised and it would not be very comfortable. But since the friendship was not formed on the basis of sexuality, I would hope it would not necessarily end on that basis. Having said that, I will admit that I would still be somewhat uncomfortable if a gay person openly displays his homosexuality. And I cannot tolerate flamers for the same reason that I find any extreme behavior offensive, on either side of the spectrum. But that's just me, and I don't expect the world to revolve around just me and people like me.
Whaddya know, so did I. In what capacity, may I ask? I was almost one of them.
In any case, simply spending time with them doesn't really give one the authority to declare to what extent they were born or made.
Research, some quite disturbing research, when you think about it, has shown, imo, quite conclusively, that a large amount behavior we once considered to be the result of nurture is instead the result of nature. Why should criminal behavior be exempt from this?
I am speaking, of course, in terms of proclivities, not preordination. Just because Joe's nature is more criminal than Bill's doesn't mean Joe will commit more crime than Bill. But in the absence of traditional restraints - such as we have since the 60s - Joe's criminal nature is given more opportunity to flower.