I appreciate your coming back to explain.

Are you a new reader? I do not use arguments based on shame or accusations of bigotry or hatred to advocate for homosexual equality. I began to educate straight people about what it’s like to be gay at about the age of 20, which is now 36 years ago, when I was a student at the University of Michigan. What I find gives straight people that, “Aha!” moment that leads them to support homosexual equality are love and a comprehensive understanding of why it’s the right thing to do. So, here I am in my little blog, making myself all lovable, explaining my case for homosexual equality, and doing my best to love, respect and see the highest good in everyone who comes here.

I am giggling a bit that you think your examples refute my case. This is why I keep explaining the gay experience. Straight people just can’t imagine how comprehensive and insidious the devastation of second-class citizenship is for homosexuals. First, if you are straight, you have the right to marry, you have just committed to not exercising it. There’s an obvious difference between having a right you choose not to use and not having it in the first place. However, it is a red flag to me that you may be bitter about marriage in the first place, so you really cannot relate at all to the idea that homosexuals are fighting for same-sex marriage equality — in other words, to have something you reject strongly for yourself. In one of my posts I explained that one reason I decided to stop talking to liberals about marriage equality was because my first job was always to sell them on the goodness of marriage and every single day I would have to start over. At least more conservatives love and understand marriage, so a LOT more of them get why homosexuals want same-sex marriage equality.

As for your example of being turned away at the lunch counter, ironically, generally SINGLE homosexuals can get service in a public accommodation like a restaurant — even though there is no federal law guaranteeing our right to freedom from discrimination in access to public accommodations (i.e., restaurants, stores, concerts, parks, recreation facilities, etc.), housing or employment — but we are more likely to get thrown out as COUPLES for doing simple things that straight people think nothing of, like holding hands or an arm around the spouse’s shoulder.

You build separate drinking fountains for groups you perceive as lesser than yours. That would be a step up for us. You don’t build separate drinking fountains for people you want dead. Also, there’s the issue of so many of us appearing straight, which makes discerning who can and can’t use the drinking fountain/rest room/whatever too much of a hassle.

The coalition of religions fighting homosexual equality do not have pure motives for doing so, as I’ve explained in other posts. Right now their argument seems to be that marriage is NOT about love and NOT about the ability of the couple to build a life together and is only about producing children and should only be reserved for couples where the spouses are directly able to produce children with one another. And my argument in reply — besides, “You’ve got to be kidding, that’s all you’ve got?” — is that the likelihood of a couple directly to produce children together is NOT a sufficient reason to deprive the couple of 1,138 federal rights, uncounted state and local rights, uncounted privileges businesses reserve for married couples and to impose almost $500,000 in extra fees, taxes and expenses that married couples do not have to pay.

Because I say so.

Cynthia

I am not going to be shamed into giving you something you say you’re entitled to, just because you say you’re entitled to it.
.-= Jim Treacher´s last blog ..JTlol: "Andrew Sullivan is, on many issues, an interesting writer." [citation needed] http://j.mp/4bqVy1 =-.

Thanks for coming to my humble abode — I enjoy your work, as you can see since I have your blog in my newsfeed.

But I can’t really tell which way you are going with your comment, “There’s nothing more conservative than an overwhelming sense of entitlement.” To me, it is Carrie Prejean who has the sense of entitlement and I have been asserting all along that she will say or do anything to get the fame, power and money to which she feels entitled. I have never believed that she had a moral center and was saying what she truly believed — in my opinion, she said what she thought would get her what she wanted. In addition, one of the purposes of the Q&A part of a pageant competition is to weed out the bomb throwers who antagonize people and the dimwits who would be certain to embarrass the pageant enterprise. Gay marriage was a polarizing issue in California at the time of the Miss USA pageant and Prejean was Miss California USA. It was her JOB to have a diplomatic and non-polarizing answer to the question of what she thought about gay marriage. She showed she was a bomb thrower instead of a diplomat and only diplomats get the job of Miss USA. She self-destructed.

Or did you mean that homosexuals are the ones with the “overwhelming sense of entitlement”? It rather seems like you are saying that like it’s a bad thing. Homosexuals are working for equality under the law. It is shocking to us that the rationale for forcing us into second-class citizenship is that we cannot directly conceive children with a same-sex partner. I am not going to be shamed by anyone about having an “overwhelming sense of entitlement” to equality. And the better I understand conservatism and its embrace of liberty, the more it seems to me that homosexuals fare much better as fiscal conservatives on the Right than they ever will on the Left.

I do hope you visit again and clarify what you meant.

Cynthia

I deserve better than to have my work positioned as “the anti-gay hysteria you keep claiming is raging through us rednecks.” That is a straw man tactic.

Just because someone you say “hello” who looks OK to you does not mean that second-class citizenship is not damaging or destroying her life. Second-class citizenship is a death of a thousand cuts. For one thing, I recently posted about the New York Times — not everything they publish is wrong — study showing that gays have to pay up to half a million more dollars over the course of a lifetime than straight people do just because we cannot marry and have our marriages legally recognized at both the state and federal level. For another, marriage, adoption and service in the military all allow people to build their lives. The ability to serve openly in the military potentially would save the lives of the teens who now die because their parents threw them out for being gay — as Randall Terry discarded his gay son and Alan Keyes threw away his lesbian daughter (the last straw was her speaking publicly about the death of one of her gay friends who died as a result of being thrown out on the streets by his parents for being gay).

Have there been no times in your life when you and Linda Lou would have split up if your lives were not so deeply interwoven due to your marriage and/or the fact that, due to your marriage, splitting up would be so much hassle and so financially devastating that you stayed together and somehow got through your rough patch?

As your Parkinson’s advances, isn’t it a huge comfort and support to you that you have a wife and children who are there for you? And don’t they serve as magnets for additional friends and relatives to be part of your support system? Research on cancer patients definitively concludes that the ones with large support systems live longer with a higher quality of life than those who have little or no support system.

Speaking of support systems, mine is my father. He is 93 and in failing health. Do the math.

I know I absolutely would be dead from sleep apnea if I had not had Margaret. I still don’t know if I’m going to recover enough to live much longer. I have not discussed my challenges from hypoxic brain damage or depression here. But I definitely would have died in my thirties or forties if I had been on my own.

It is not hyperbole to say that forcing homosexuals into second-class citizenship is murder by a thousand cuts. If you are truly a moral person, you will stop doing it by supporting equality for homosexuals. Now.

Cynthia

Since the Prejean flap my pal has not looked frightened at all, nor have I noticed anyone chasing her or her friend with pitchforks and torches.

I still contend that the problems between the LGBT community and straight community is caused by nonsense like that Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco and other excesses just as much as the anti-gay hysteria you keep claiming is raging through us rednecks. I’m about as redneck as it comes (actually it’s not that are necks are so red, it’s just a reflection off the backs of our ears) and I’ve yet to do anything worse than mildly disagree with some of the political aims of the organised gay groups.

How, exactly, does one reclaim the word “cunt” by using it as an epithet for a person you clearly despise?

I am actually a big fan of yours, and have been reading you ever since you were linked by Ann Coulter. I agree that Carrie Prejean’s worldview is harmful to the LGBT community. I don’t agree with linking to a site where you can download a private video of a woman
that she did not give permission to be made available to the public.

Those are the tactics of the enemy.

Why, yes, homosexuals have always marched for pretty much everyone else, but pretty much no one else marches in our parades for us. In one of the big gay marches on Washington in the late 1980′s, I think, Margaret and I sat about 100 feet from Rev. Jesse Jackson while he went on about the Rainbow Coalition, which we all really believed in and worked for. Well, Jackson forgot all about it years ago, while Al Sharpton seems busy on CNN disappearing every color from the rainbow except black. So, we worked our hearts out for the equality of people who promised us reciprocity and their support when our turn came, and now they are organizing and voting against us while illegal aliens are stampeding past us to full citizenship — even as illegals, they have more rights than we do. If you don’t see blacks advocating for homosexual equality, I expect it’s because of the intense backlash they will get from Sharpton’s organization, black churches and now Obama’s Organizing for America.

I also have the sneaking suspicion that when blacks and Latins denounce homosexuality that it’s a safe, coded way to express anti-white hatred.

Also, I keep telling liberal gays that it is the Religious Left that is their implacable foe, not the Religious Right. The Religious Left seems to me to be a coalition of the Catholic Church and evangelical Protestant churches, including the AME, as far as I can tell — the LDS (Mormons) are in the mix, but I’m not sure where. Religions need converts to grow and the easiest converts are children, so the churches do everything they can to force people toward having babies. I think that’s why this religious coalition wants to deny same-sex marriage equality and destroy gay lives through second-class citizenship — they are motivated by greed and lust for power and they need their followers to make all the babies they can. The only part I have a problem with is being denied full equality.

Lanny, I appreciate your kind words and candor.

Cynthia