Queer links
Test your homophobia (my score was 8 - Your score rates you as "high-grade non-homophobic.").
It was not much fun being queer in old Dutch New Amsterdam (now New York):
The journal chronicles van den Bogaert’s journey through the Mohawk Valley to Oneida, a pathbreaking trip in the winter of 1634.
Years later, van den Bogaert was made commander of Fort Orange, site of present-day Albany, but fled back into Indian country after his fellow colonists discovered he was gay. Van den Bogaert was pursued by the Dutch, captured and brought back, but he escaped when a sheet of floating ice damaged the fort. He drowned in the Hudson before he got very far.
Prominent Welsh rugby union player announces he is gay. His ex-wife on that. About the costs of the closet and equal rights as breaking down the “fabric of insincerity”.
Spike in LGBT murders in Honduras.
Site with series of posts and links covering the Ugandan issue. The Ugandan “kill gays” bill is here. Illustrating the role of ex-gay activism in Uganda. Having a gay wedding in Uganda.
The Rwanda Minister of Justice announces Rwanda is not going to criminalise homosexuality:
The government I serve and speak for on certain issues cannot and will not in any way criminalize homosexuality; sexual orientation is a private matter and each individual has his or her own orientation - - this is not a State matter at all.
About being sparing in the use of the word ‘bigot’.
Commenting on homophobia in the Afro-American community and the Houston mayoral race where the openly lesbian Annise Parker became the first openly gay mayor of a major American city.
Swearing in the new US Ambassador to Kiwiland, who is gay.
Learning lessons from (pdf) the same-sex marriage loss in Maine
About putting people in opinion boxes and suggesting a divorce between civil unions and marriage. (Separation of Church and State, how radical.)
Poll finds a plurality of New Jersey Catholics support same-sex marriage. About that.
The Oz Senate report on marriage equality (pdf). About the ACT’s gays-only civil unions law:
It was a reminder that laws preventing gay marriage don’t just discriminate against gay people. These laws also discriminate against their friends and families, all the straight people who have a stake in gay lives going as well as possible.
Defining marriage so same-sex marriage is excluded.
All men and all women have a right to marry, provided they wish to marry members of the opposite sex to whom they are not closely related by blood. Heterosexuals, like homosexuals, are prohibited from marrying people of their own sex. It is no more valid to allege wrongful discrimination in this context against gays than to argue that cycle lanes “discriminate” wrongfully against wheelbarrows.
A rebuttal. Making the same claim:
The few countries and states where gay marriage is legal had to redefine marriage to do so. This new definition does not require the two halves of humanity, as had been the case in all diverse cultures throughout time - regardless of religion, law, or culture. …
Marriage is about the fundamental essence of humanity. Are male and female only needed in marriage and family if either is desired by the adults? This would seem to make the mystery and essence of your femininity and my masculinity pretty thin in human experience. It also changes the nature of parentage. …
Same-sex marriage prohibits us from saying there is anything uniquely special about a child being raised by her mother and father! Both become merely ornamental. …
At its core, same-sex marriage is not really marriage at all, but a deconstruction of our historic and universal understanding that humanity is one nature embodied in two mysteriously powerful forms - male and female - and that the family and every human child need what both provide.
A rebuttal:
According to Stanton same-sex parenting and parenting by other people than the biological parents are less than fully human.
So much of this debate is about people trying to define the same-sex attracted out of the range of the properly human.
It was not much fun being queer in old Dutch New Amsterdam (now New York):
The journal chronicles van den Bogaert’s journey through the Mohawk Valley to Oneida, a pathbreaking trip in the winter of 1634.
Years later, van den Bogaert was made commander of Fort Orange, site of present-day Albany, but fled back into Indian country after his fellow colonists discovered he was gay. Van den Bogaert was pursued by the Dutch, captured and brought back, but he escaped when a sheet of floating ice damaged the fort. He drowned in the Hudson before he got very far.
Prominent Welsh rugby union player announces he is gay. His ex-wife on that. About the costs of the closet and equal rights as breaking down the “fabric of insincerity”.
Spike in LGBT murders in Honduras.
Site with series of posts and links covering the Ugandan issue. The Ugandan “kill gays” bill is here. Illustrating the role of ex-gay activism in Uganda. Having a gay wedding in Uganda.
The Rwanda Minister of Justice announces Rwanda is not going to criminalise homosexuality:
The government I serve and speak for on certain issues cannot and will not in any way criminalize homosexuality; sexual orientation is a private matter and each individual has his or her own orientation - - this is not a State matter at all.
About being sparing in the use of the word ‘bigot’.
Commenting on homophobia in the Afro-American community and the Houston mayoral race where the openly lesbian Annise Parker became the first openly gay mayor of a major American city.
Swearing in the new US Ambassador to Kiwiland, who is gay.
Learning lessons from (pdf) the same-sex marriage loss in Maine
About putting people in opinion boxes and suggesting a divorce between civil unions and marriage. (Separation of Church and State, how radical.)
Poll finds a plurality of New Jersey Catholics support same-sex marriage. About that.
The Oz Senate report on marriage equality (pdf). About the ACT’s gays-only civil unions law:
It was a reminder that laws preventing gay marriage don’t just discriminate against gay people. These laws also discriminate against their friends and families, all the straight people who have a stake in gay lives going as well as possible.
Defining marriage so same-sex marriage is excluded.
All men and all women have a right to marry, provided they wish to marry members of the opposite sex to whom they are not closely related by blood. Heterosexuals, like homosexuals, are prohibited from marrying people of their own sex. It is no more valid to allege wrongful discrimination in this context against gays than to argue that cycle lanes “discriminate” wrongfully against wheelbarrows.
A rebuttal. Making the same claim:
The few countries and states where gay marriage is legal had to redefine marriage to do so. This new definition does not require the two halves of humanity, as had been the case in all diverse cultures throughout time - regardless of religion, law, or culture. …
Marriage is about the fundamental essence of humanity. Are male and female only needed in marriage and family if either is desired by the adults? This would seem to make the mystery and essence of your femininity and my masculinity pretty thin in human experience. It also changes the nature of parentage. …
Same-sex marriage prohibits us from saying there is anything uniquely special about a child being raised by her mother and father! Both become merely ornamental. …
At its core, same-sex marriage is not really marriage at all, but a deconstruction of our historic and universal understanding that humanity is one nature embodied in two mysteriously powerful forms - male and female - and that the family and every human child need what both provide.
A rebuttal:
According to Stanton same-sex parenting and parenting by other people than the biological parents are less than fully human.
So much of this debate is about people trying to define the same-sex attracted out of the range of the properly human.