Hey all my homies let’s do a little experiment, take this test and reblog with your score, age, and state/country in the tags. A passing score is 60% or 15/25 correct so let’s see who really has what it takes to be a citizen of the United States!
I’m from England and I literally could only answer a few of these
19/25, 24 from Scotland.
15/25, 22 from England
I’m from fucking America and I got 16 out of 25.
I got 10 out of 25 and i am an amercan
Huh, 19 out of 25, from Ireland.
WOO 25 OUT OF 25, I AM A TRUE COASTAL ELITE
even though i really wanted to answer #4 with this
24 for me! Screwed up the geography question. (Not my strongest suit.)
25 out of 25, I am an honorary president (36 years old, native Californian).
I think we really need to reaffirm now that no amount of homophobia can be acceptable in our culture. There is no such this as harmless or victimless homophobia. All homophobia contributes to violence against us. You can not “disagree” with lgbt people’s “lifestyles” without supporting the rhetoric and legislation that puts us in very real danger.
Homophobia isn’t that black and white though. You can hate the sin and still love the sinner.
OK, as a queer person who grew up in a genuinely loving, caring, utterly wonderful, and still deeply homophobic Church, let me try to fill in what you’re not understanding about this whole “Love the sinner” deal.
When we refer to people like you as “Homophobic” I want to be clear what we’re saying here. This is not a judgment of your intent. We are not describing you as a hateful person, as an aggressive or violent person. But we are saying that your actions and your attitudes participate in and reinforce a system of rhetoric that encourages violence against LGBT people, and, far, far more importantly, that forces millions of LGBT people to live in shame.
That’s really what this comes down to. Not hate. Not violence. Shame.
Consider the point purely theologically. Jesus tells us that to desire a sinful thing is as bad as to act on that desire. My lusting after another mans wife is as bad as actually sleeping with her. My genuine desire to hurt someone is as bad as actually hurting them.
So when you tell me that loving another man is a sin, you’re not just talking about physical acts of intimacy. You don’t get to draw the line there. You don’t get to pretend that I can be bisexual so long as I never actually physically act on it (which is already a terrible burden to place on someone). You’re saying that every time I look at a guy and imagine how soft his lips would be, or think about how beautiful his eyes are, I am sinning. I am a sinner every time a dude walks past me with a tight sweater on that shows of his arms. Every time he has nice hair or a nice smile.
My love, according to you, is a sin. That is the burden you are forcing people to live under. That burden forced me so deep into the closet that I didn’t even know I was there. It forced me to repress every genuine feeling of sexual attraction for other men, and to live for years with those feelings straining to get out, whilst I struggled with the constant guilt and shame that came from having those thoughts.
And I am one of the lucky ones, because I’m alive to have this conversation. Because for many, many LGBT people that guilt and shame manifests as self-harm, substance abuse, low esteem that leads them into abusive relationships, and very often suicide.
You tell yourself that you’re one of the good ones because you don’t hate us. You only hate what we “do”. But what we “do” is living. It’s being alive and whole and a part of this world, and if you genuinely believe that we can’t have that then you might as well put the gun to our heads and pull the trigger. Because you’re already doing that, you just don’t have the guts to admit it.
“You only hate what we do, but what we do is living” Wow. This is beautiful and so well written
reblogging for perfect commentary and future reference
I think that people who want to stop accepting refugees from countries that have poor human rights records (because they assume that the refugees will have misogynistic values and be likely to commit crimes) should join me in denouncing actual Nazis who want to deport people on the basis of their skin color. I think that by allying yourself with the actual Nazis, you unify everyone who the Nazis hate and who does not want to be deported from the country of their birth and who remembers the rise of fascism and is terrified by it.
You blunder around making enemies everywhere and making your enemies really really scared, when you could otherwise reach compromises and understanding. I think you would achieve your goals better if you said “fuck Nazis. Fuck white supremacists. Skin color has no place in our immigration decisions. That said, we really value low crime rates and want immigration decisions and lots of other public policy decisions made with really really low crime rates as the target.”
I understand that low crime rates are really important for social cohesion, happiness, personal opportunity, and other good things. I am happy to engage with you in a conversation about how to lower crime rates, because I bet we will find tons of common ground, such as “interest in reducing recidivism by making prisons more humane” and “wanting better evidentiary procedures and better followup on reported crimes, so that crimes more reliably result in consequences (since this is better for deterrence than strict penalties but rarely suffering them)”.
It’d be really nice if you could stop saying “you like rape! how much more rape do you want! which children do you want raped!” because people who disagree with you about whether stopping immigration is the best way to reduce crime do not actually like rape and I am sure you know that. If you actually thought they liked rape, then you wouldn’t think “which children do you want raped?” was an effective line of appeal. So it comes across as incredibly rude and destructive to common ground. If you say “here is why I think that taking immigrants from Angola instead of from Syria will reduce crime rates” and “many people from these countries are very anti-LGBT and I object to living in communities that are anti-LGBT, so we should only take LGBT people who want asylum”, then you’d find a lot more people willing to collaborate with you on the project of building communities that share our values.
If, instead, you go “you like child rape you like child rape immigrants rape children so if you don’t want your friends to be deported it’s because you like child rape name the children you want to be raped!!!! :O :O”, you will have a hard time finding people willing to collaborate with you.
So – which do you want, the option to yell “you like child rape you like child rape” or an honest, thorough, difficult effort to figure out which policies make safe communities, and pursue those policies? Because I will commit to this: if the result of that honest, thorough, difficult effort is that every single way of integrating immigrants fails and communities will always see more violence if they try to welcome more people, no matter how it’s planned or executed, then we stop doing that. Deal. But will you commit that if we find a way, then we do it, because people are dying and it is better that they get the chance to live? And will you commit that if, actually, the best way to reduce crime has nothing to do with immigration and is more rape kit testing or more training of police detectives or is public awareness campaigns about consent, then you will continue your campaign against rape by fighting for those things?
Or do you only care about rape if it can be blamed on immigrants? Are you only interested in crimes committed by brown people? Do you think that ‘deport all non-white people’ and ‘keep our communities safe’ are inherently the same thing? Is there a reason that me getting fed up with a literal Nazi who wants to literally deport 100million American citizens, regardless of their culture or their creed or their contributions, because of their skin color, is what prompted you to say ‘you like child rape you like child rape’?
Because if so, then I don’t know, maybe we actually don’t have common ground. Communities? I’ll fight for. Safety? I’ll fight for. But whiteness? No. Fuck that. If an honest commitment to figuring out how to build a stronger free Western liberal society is not enough, then – yeah, sorry, we’re enemies.
And, no, it is not true that everyone secretly agrees with you. Everyone always thinks that, and everyone is always wrong. You are going to have to work with people who disagree with you, and so you might want to reread the section about how to do that constructively instead of the way you did it here, because I am bending over backwards to be charitable here and it is still really fucking difficult to try to find the kernels of value in a perspective presented to me as “if you think that it should not be legal to deport all the brown people and Jews living and working in your country, it is because you want children to be raped”.
Mugshot of John Wojtowicz who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for robbing a bank in order to fund his partners sex change. August 23rd 1972, New York
also when they made dog day afternoon and bought the rights to his story he used the money to help fund edens surgery so he ended up able to help after all (after serving six years in prison for the heist)
Omphaloskeptomai 