The winning entries in the Watcher’s Council vote for this week are South Africa’s Neville Chamberlain by The Razor, and Why You Should Apologize — Ineffectively and Dishonestly — For What You Didn’t Do by Classical Values.  Here’s where you…

And now…  the winning entries in the Watcher’s Council vote for this week are South Africa’s Neville Chamberlain by The Razor, and Why You Should Apologize — Ineffectively and Dishonestly — For What You Didn’t Do by Classical Values.  …

First off…  any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here,  and here.  Die spambots, die!  And now…  the winning entries in the Watcher’s Council vote for this week are South Africa’s Neville Chamberlai…

That’s a fake liberal myth, that radical Islam has inflamed its critics or that its critics use Islam to inflame sentiments. It’s actually Islam that does that and we would be a poor counter to radical Islam if we adopted their exact playbook. Americans are known for their originality and ingenuity, we should not copy other inferior ideologies and cultures.

Radical Islam is the purest of all demonstrators of folly and ill wisdom. If you cannot accept such a thing, it says more about you than about the passion of Islam either way.

Obtuse or not, you don’t get to choose my comparisons.

What values?

>>No one’s oppressing you. >>

Agreed. But this behavior is certainly offensive.

In addition, the refusal by the police to arrest gays for what is clearly a violation of the law is offensive to anyone who else who is arrested for indecent exposure or behavior. Choosing to arrest some citizens for a given behavior while choosing not to arrest others is corrupt.

I was led to believe gay people only cared about the beliefs of their immediate family, rather more than they cared about some unnamed pastor in the great beyond.

Unless, of course, one’s political views are inconsistent with one’s personal views. In that gays think that if you can get these preachers to stop talking about gays in that fashion, that family and friends will suddenly change their minds. Not really sure preachers have that much power in today’s America, although I suppose it depends on geography and locale.

If I wanted my religion unsullied by white fundamentalist preachers, I would speak out against them. Since I’m neither Christian nor Muslim nor Jewish, that’d be rather hard to do. But in general cases, yes religious members do have an obligation to condemn anti-social behavior amongst their members or lose their status in society and be ostracized as being holders of extremist views.

Let’s leave the comparisons to jihadists out, shall we? That’s really unnecessary.

All minorities share certain fundamental common values and behaviors. It’s nothing to be ashamed of to say that one’s minority acts the same way as another minority, that just happens to be insane and self-destructive. It is, perhaps, unfortunate and undesired, but all minorities share a fundamental commonality in that they have an inferior and superior value of themselves. They feel inferior because they are not the mainstream, for whatever reason, yet they also feel superior because they are few and select. You mix them together and what you get is Black Pride and the emphasis on the Hood and Ebonics and Afrikan culture being superior to American culture and what not. Essentially the minority copes with a hostile universe by delving deep into what made them different and a minority in the first place and exaggerating the effect.

What you have to know, and you cannot refuse to look away simply because the truth would be unpleasant to your eyes, is that if you focus on your differences to a very extreme extent, what you are going to get is self-destruction. And if you don’t like the looks of the Palestinians, then don’t act like them. Don’t put into power leaders like Arafat that perpetuate the gay condition of social ostracization just so they can get political power and benefits over the rest of you, simply because Arafat was their “own” and Jews were not. It is a mixed metaphor but it is shorter than outlining the exact analogy.

Those parades were radical, outrageous, and yes, offensive even by contemporary standards of offense.

Anything in the 60s and 70s were going to be counter-culture. Gay pride was nothing new in that vein.

To read many of your comments, one would think that gay people are oppressing you on a daily basis.

It is always true that minorities may be oppressed by the majority but that also the majority may be oppressed by the minority, depending on who wields the political lawfare powers of a nation or society.

No one’s oppressing you. Stop playing the straight-laced victim, please.

Who’s oppressing you then? Small rural towns? What’s they got to do with gay actions in a city like San Fran? Is that what small rural towns should expect as the price of accepting gays socially or what not?

See, the self-destructive impulses at work?

might sometimes cause damage and deep resentment.

I had to learn English as a second language. Did I find it rather hard to take the damage and deep resentment due to the fact that it made me almost uncommunicable in terms of certain popular euphemisms such as “what’s up”? You ever wonder what this might sound like to someone just learning English and didn’t want to embarass himself with a response that was “the ceiling”? Yeah, but you either accept the majority’s standard and raise yourself up to them, or you bring the mainstream standards down to a level more to your liking. There is no other choice. I chose to exceed the maximum ceiling rather than try to bring others to my level.

Adults realize that there’s mainstream opinion and there’s nothing much you can do about it in terms of expecting everyone to act like you want them to, but there is something you can do for yourself, for your own personal standards of conduct.

Wait, maybe they are silent because this is normal homosexual behavior on display.

men are naturally interested in sex and think about it a lot. If you get two men together that’s interested in sex and they have to setup their own personal boundaries for having sex with each other, then that’s always almost going to be more sexualized than for women, who lack certain hormones to remind them of sex every time they see certain visual images.

Society tries hard to control sexual energy and taboos because primarily that’s what powers relationships and the new generation. But when you can have sex and not have any children or what not, you are almost naturally going to exclude yourself from prior restraints. This exclusion inclusion business seems to make gays bitter in some fashion. On the one hand, they feel they are special or select or elite, on the other hand, they just want the approval of the mainstream. But the mainstream’s approval was never ended to harness sexual energy that was nothing but entertainment. It’s like getting people to accept Bondage and sexual masochism. You could do it, in some fashion, but what’s the point. It wouldn’t do anything for greater society, it wouldn’t help raise children better, and it won’t increase tax revenues.

Many things that most of us now find objectionable were once considered mainstream (denying women the right to vote, outlawing miscegenation, abiding by racial segregation, etc.).

Women and blacks acquired more privileges and rights because they exceeded society’s maximal expectation of those two group’s behaviors in WWI, the Civil War, and WWII. What have gays done for their country to merit the same treatment? Do gays highlight gay military heroes and try to shame the majority with such articles? Or do they find pride in something more prosaic.

Growing up, I was taught by both church and parents that my homosexuality was a terrible blight upon my character and an automatic hindrance to my relationship with God

This is a free country. If you don’t like how you were raised or your religion, go somewhere else once you’re an adult.

Nobody chooses how they were raised or what they were taught or what people might expect of them as they grow up, but they can change their own individual actions.

But for me, coming to terms with such “mainstream” teaching caused me no small amount of anguish during my early 20s, and left a deeply bitter aftertaste that keeps me hostile toward most organized religion.

yeah well, when blacks returned from WWII and found that while Jerry and the Krauts as POWs could sit in cafes with their white prison keepers, that cafe had a sign that mentioned “No Blacks or Dogs Allowed”.

You want to talk about being deeply bitter? Get a sense of history, why dontcha, and also see how blacks acted towards the mainstream. They still fought for a nation that didn’t desegregate the military until after WWII, all because they had personal standards and wouldn’t let the whites and the mainstream hold them down.

Gays can’t say the same for their society or group, however.

Anyway, my point is that “mainstream” (a word whose meaning changes depending on whoever you’re speaking to) is not automatically “good.”

Nobody said the minority opinion was automatically “good”, either, but unless you like a lot of diversity and not much toleration, you’re going to have to convince the mainstream to accept the minority, and not because the mainstream is required to by law. The law comes second to acceptance or recognition.

On balance, I like the pluralism and wackiness and anything-goes mentality of gay San Francisco (yes, even of the Folsom Street Fair). I understand very well that many gay people aren’t comfortable with those aspects of gay urban life, and that many of them choose to live elsewhere, or to live quieter lives in quieter neighborhoods in this city. I respect and welcome their dissension, as I respect and welcome yours.

What? This is wackiness? It looks to me like a lot of degrading sex performed in public. And I agree with Zombie, I’m not sure it’s even sex.

Let me repeat, this is not a gay-straight issue. Decency demands that one not fondle his or her genitals in public.

Are there any standards left to uphold? Apparently not.

On balance, I like the pluralism and wackiness and anything-goes mentality of gay San Francisco (yes, even of the Folsom Street Fair). I understand very well that many gay people aren’t comfortable with those aspects of gay urban life, and that many of them choose to live elsewhere, or to live quieter lives in quieter neighborhoods in this city. I respect and welcome their dissension, as I respect and welcome yours.

I’m curious, is their any behavior that you would think is not appropriate in public?
Is it appropriate one day a year, or can someone just whip out their penis and offer it to passerbys 365 days a year?

Wow, how wacky and pluralistic of you.

And, what the heck do mainstream values have to do with these utterly disgusting public displays.

I’ll repeat, this isn’t a gay-straight issue. This is just a common courtesy issue, where people don’t fondle their genitals in public– or maybe we’ve moved past that in this brave new world.

Isn’t there a standard somewhere that should be upheld? Oh, sorry, wrong– no standards here.

Yes, mainstream is *sometimes* bad. That’s what I was saying from the beginning. Your original response simplified my statement to say that mainstream *is* bad. That’s different. Let me repeat: the concept of “mainstream” is sometimes good, sometimes bad. My apologies for offering something so challenging as a nuanced opinion.

As for the gay-jihad analogy: you’re not “just making a comparison.” You know how inflammatory it is to invoke radical Islam. Don’t be obtuse.