HOMOSEXUAL

[celtic_gangsta]

I hear lots of argument over gay marriage, gay rights, and so on. It's one of those polarizing questions that tends to send people into blind angry rants. So many people feel the need to express their viewpoints on it in the most belligerant of ways. Even writing about it is cliche. All the same, I feel like many Americans - even liberal, pro-gay-

Comments

[celtic_gangsta]

well, like i wrote in the entry:

"In the past, in many cultures gay people were accepted and appreciated as a normal part of life in many ancient cultures. But that was a long long time ago, and for the last thousand years, their history has increasingly become one of persecution and oppression."

so I don't think that they've been oppressed since the dawn of time, I think they've been increasingly persecuted more and more. In much of the modern world there has been pretty vicious bigotry: "Between 1250 and 1300, homosexual activity passed from being completely legal in most of Europe to incurring the death penalty in all but a few contemporary legal compilations." - John Boswell, "Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality". It wouldn't be until 1861 that the penalty for conviction for sodomy in England was reduced from Hanging to Imprisonment

This, on top of increasingly anti-gay sentiment coming from the middle east, the atrocities against gays committed by the nazis, etc. leads me to believe that homosexuals have faced incredible persecution.

But I guess since whole races have already been wiped out (like what Columbus did, certain Native American tribes, etc.) and there ARE cultures that are accepting of gays entirely, then perhaps I shouldn't call gays one of the most oppressed people in human history.

But that's not really the point of this entry, it's just a sentence out of context. The point is that for some reason GLBTQ people are rarely given respect for the pain they as a people have had to bear.

But whatever. I'll change the sentence. Good point.