🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1356@hpda.UUCP> on@hpda.UUCP (Owen Rowley) writes:
>
>Lets get real about name calling. Any cultural group is bound to develop
>unkind tags for another cultural group that is significantly different, and 
>the level of unkindness or sarcasm is bound to rise depending on the level
>of hostility between the groups. I feel no guilt in the matter of refering
>to heterosexuals as breeders ofr more generically as the breding population.
>
>When all the names are dropped we are all just people, fat skinny black white
>yellow silly wise strange and dull. Whats a few adjectives amongst friends 
>right?

Name calling may be inevitable in the general sense, but on the 
level of *personal responsibility* you have to make a personal
choice either to call other people names or not to.  What use does name
calling serve?  Well, it lets you let off steam.  It is nice to be able
to let off steam. But there are people who believe in a powerful
creature who will send them to Hell if some of the evil that is in the
world rubs off and sticks to them.  The strain that they must be under
is incredible.  But I still don't think that this gives them the right
to call other people ``faggot''.  Calling people names hurts them.
Before you go off and do it, make sure that you really want to hurt them.
If they call you ``faggot'' in the street and you want to call them
``breeder'' back -- well, you are excellerating the argument, but that is
your choice.  But to tar hetorosexual humanity at large is to hurt those
people who aren't enlightened enough to forgive you and let it pass --
which is an awful lot of people.

Another sub-group of people you may be hurting, who may interest you more
than heterosexual humanity at large  is those people who grapple with the
question ``Am I Gay?''  Great, they reason -- if I am Gay I am a faggot and
if I am not I am a breeder.  Shit.  Am I  involved in a war I never asked
for?  And what about all those other aspects of my life that I thought
were so important.  I mean I am an [engineer/author/artist/construction
worker]  and a [republican/democrat/libertarian/socialist/anarchist].
And I am an [atheist/agnostic/humanist/christian/jew/buddhist/pagan/themelite].
Are all of these aspects of me suppposed to take a back seat to my sexuality?

I don't know about you, but I really like the science fiction of John Varley.
In Varley's future world, cloning and like techniques have been perfected,
and you can make an X chromosone out of a Y and vice versa.  So people
can be either male or female as they choose -- and they typically choose
to be both, changing all the time.  (As you may have gathered from this,
they are also more or less immmortal.)  And nobody gives a shit whether
you are male or female heterosexual or homosexual.  And gender roles have
become blurred. I really like this world.  I don't know how to get there.
(in Varley's universe the Earth was also invaded and the survivors who
live on the other planets build this society over a thousand years.  The
hard core prejudiced jerks were all at home and were killed in the invasion.)
I think that name calling is a step in  the wrong direction, though.




-- 
Laura Creighton		
ihnp4!hoptoad!laura  utzoo!hoptoad!laura  sun!hoptoad!laura
toad@lll-crg.arpa