It has been 41 years since the Stonewall Riots. In 1969, gay Americans finally took to the streets to protest against the constant harassment of police in gay pubs.
Over the years, homophobes have used various arguments to justify the oppression of gay people. The common ones were "Same-sex attraction is unnatural". Various observations by wild-life observers and scientists debunked that argument. Penguins, dolphins, seagulls and many other animals exhibit same-sex behavior in nature.
You'll have to click on the image to see a larger version of it clearly.
The argument then went to "Incest, murder and cannibalism are observed in nature too, should we follow that?" Which is quite silly because homophobes came up with the "unnatural" argument in the first place.
Interestingly, another argument is that homosexuality is an import of Western decadence. Surely our own fine culture and traditions do not have such evils! Yet, in olden Japan and China, homosexual behavior were documented in literature and drawings. Such fine traditional societies on the whole do not frown upon homosexual behaviors. The homophobia started when Western priests came to Eastern shores!
In recent years, religion is a popular refuge for homophobes: "my religion is against homosexual behavior. My God is against gays. Not me!" Homophobes thought that they'd finally found the Last Stand where no scientific evidence nor reason can refute Belief.
Unfortunately, there are many behavior that religion classified as sins. Why then is a few verses and a small group of people singled out for discrimination?
I'd created a pictorial of the more popular arguments against homosexuality. Hopefully, this will help my gay and straight friends see things from a different perspective.
1 comment:
Hi I was just browsing your nifty blog and thought I'd make a quick comment! I generally agree, pretty much 100 percent about the things that were put on the "same sex marriage" flowchart or whatever, except I have to ask: don't you think that using the counterargument of "we know gays can't become straight, and straight people can't .." (vice versa) .... aren't we being a little ignorant and really no better than the homophobic argument that basically, "x or y is how everyone is, and thats all there is to it"? What about the fact that the very idea of homosexuality is really just a social construct, formed in the last couple centuries? (of course, homosexuality or whichever you call it has been around forever, but only we make such a big deal out of it. when we think we know how everyone is just because we say we know, we're no better than the bigots and backward thinking religious zealots. Actually, we're being absolutely just like them. We should elevate the discourse. It is not a fact that people are gay or straight or even that there is such a thing as those concepts.
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