古崇賢的学报

I posted a thing over on Facebook -- it's public, but you may need an account.

In the threads on that post of a letter from a Philadelphia City Countilmember censuring Don Cathy, a friend of many years said Ok. My turn. Please let it be known that I am in NO WAY homophobic or other such nonsense, but I DO believe that a private company should be allowed to conduct business however it sees fit. This grandstanding is getting ridiculous, IMHO. Again. key word here: Private. Meaning they can do what they please and believe what they please and pass those beliefs onto their employees. If there was a national food chain that professed the opposite of CFA's beliefs, I would not have an issue with it. I don't quite understand the whole outrage thing. Maybe it is just me.

I replied in a series of comments:
Don Cathy, and CFA, have come to represent the old ways in the negative, rather like the Dixiecrats and Massive Resistance during the dying throes of Jim Crow and a bit past the death of Jim Crow (at least til the current round of voter ID laws have revived ol' Jim).

As to the outrage. I've been utterly dumbfounded by the complete acceptance of my European friends and the TOTAL non issue my partner preference is. The outrage stems from needing to fight against people like Cathy and CFA funding hate organizations (according to SPLC -- the Southern Poverty Law Center). The outrage comes from knowing that people like Cathy, NOM, some churches (LDS and Roman Catholic, among others), and organizations/funds/POCs they support looking to recriminalize people like myself, to prevent us from having equal rights, from being able to openly live as we are, just as anyone else.


Frank Kammeny once came and yelled at a bunch of 20-something queer folk, telling us we didn't know what it was like for his generation -- the secrecy, the shame. But, we of GenX DO know. We're old enough to remember how it was, to have watched it changing, but not trusting it, only in the last decade to fully embrace the now that is not the then of our youth. We will NOT tolerate people like Don Cathy working to put things back as they were.

All that said, that was not aimed at you personally, [Redacted], i know you well enough to know that _you_, among others whom i know, are not part of that problem. But, that is where the outrage rises from.

‎(That got me a bit more worked up than i'd realized.)

Big social change is always hard, and in the US, it always seems to flow down the more difficult path, alas.

P1: "Happy Father's Day to all those fathers that are handling their business!"
P2: "And moms who are doing double duty!!!"

I saw that on Facebook. I agree with P1. As for P2:

NO NO NO NO NO! As many of you know, my father died when i was 15. It infuriated me when anyone suggested that now my mother would need to play both roles. NO! She is not my father, could not be my father, and should not in any way try to be so. NO!

IT is NOT the same. At ALL.

There is a whole world of support and understanding that no woman could have meaningfully supplied for me at that age. And for that matter, there's still myriad ways that no woman can support me and provide insight into various things at this point in my life.

I'm all for equality in society, respect and work. At the same time, i see use for separate spaces some of the time.

BUT no mother can be a father nor vice-versa, and i feel it is wrong of someone to purport to be doing so. There are, in fact, some things that are gender-specific, and textbook understanding, though good, is not sufficient.


P.S. Thank you, Ghassan, may you be peacefully in a better place.

ONE exception. I know a few women who were fathers. THOSE women can provide some of that support and insight, if they so choose, for they have lived it.

Equality does not equal sameness. And as most humans, i think, know, there are some things one wants to discuss with others of one's own gender, and that is not a bad thing.

In another forum, happylion said:

Traditionally, Jewish law says that marriage is about procreation. Therefore, the Pentateuch prohibits a woman from marrying a man whose testes have been damaged or removed. Also, if a couple do not succeed in having children for ten years, they are forcibly divorced and remarried (this happened to distant cousins of mine; they both had children in their second marriage).

American law does not follow the Jewish tradition. Therefore, an American marriage is not simply about procreation, and any arguments based on procreation are meaningless.

in response to this letter to the editor in Monday's Washington Post, page A14:

( Therefore these rights are not absolute but curtailed by the laws of nature of that Creator, who clearly designed his creatures to procreate heterosexually, not homosexually. (It just doesn't work any other way.) )

Discuss.