Tag: Homosexuality

Gay Groups Should Adopt Anti-Israeli Positions

Reuters notes that gay and lesbian NGOs have a rather difficult time being credentialed by the United Nations which usually has almost no standards at all for such determinations (based on some of the odd groups that do have NGO status).

For example, Canada’s Coalition of Gays and Lesbians of Quebec was rejected as an NGO by an 8-6 vote. The vote in this case is extremely revealing.

Voting yes to credential the group — Colombia, Israel, Peru, Romania, Britain and the United States (hmm…and here I thought the U.S. was run by a fascist theocracy?)

Voting no — Burundi, China, Egypt, Guinea, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia and Sudan.

Given the tenor of the United Nations, the best bet for gay and lesbian groups would probably be to adopt anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic planks. Egypt, Pakistan and Qatar may not be thrilled by a gay and lesbian group, but if that group, say, argued that Jews were behind a worldwide plot against gays and lesbians, they’d probably win immediate approval.

Source:

Canadian and Swedish gay groups frowned on at UN. Evelyn Leopold, Reuters, February 2, 2007.

Blizzard Apologizes for Warning Over GBLT Guilds

Back in January, Blizzard got a bit of unwelcome publicity after one of its customer service representatives warned a GBLT-friendly guild for advertising itself as such. Of course, inevitably, Blizzard finally got around to apologizing for this boneheaded action.

According to InWeekly, which initially reported Blizzard’s warning against the GLBT guild,

Paul Sams, Blizzard Entertainment’s chief operating officer, contacted In Newsweekly and said, “What we’ve done is decided to add a guild recruitment channel to the game… providing players with a designated area where they can advertise their guilds in an appropriate fashion.”

This would mean that players who wish to find others to associate with will have a channel designated to finding those individuals and will not interfere with the general chat channel.

Blizzard has stated that the original incident with Andrews never should have happened and that they will be reviewing policies and procedures and having “sensitivity training” with their 1,000 GMs on staff in North America, Europe, and Korea in the hopes that something like this doesn’t happen again.

Sensitivity training? Ugh. Just train them to support their players rights to say whatever they want. After all, it is trivially easy to /ignore anyone you disagree with in WoW (I really need that command in real life).

One has to wonder, though, how far this openness in the guild recruiting channel will go. GBLT friendly will presumably be okay, what about a hetero-friendly guild? A Fred Phelps-friendly guild? An Asian-friendly guild? A whites-friendly guild?

Sources:

Blizzard apologizes for ‘GLBT’ policy problem. Alexander Sliwinski, In Newsweekly, February 8, 2006.

Blizzard’s Bizarrely Predictable Response to GLBT Guilds

This In Newsweekly article claims that Blizzard cracked down on a World of Warcraft player for advertising a GLBT-friendly guild,

Sara Andrews thought it was a big misunderstanding when she received an e-mail from a game master in Blizzard Entertainment’s popular online role playing game “World of Warcraft” citing her for “Harassment – Sexual Orientation.”

Andrews had posted that she was recruiting for a “GLBT friendly” guild in a general chat channel within the game.

Believing that her notice had been accidentally flagged, she e-mailed Blizzard to correct the problem. Blizzard, to Andrews’ surprise, upheld the decision.

. . .

The response from Blizzard was, “While we appreciate and understand your point of view, we do feel that the advertisement of a ‘GLBT friendly’ guild is very likely to result in harassment for players that may not have existed otherwise. If you will look at our policy, you will notice the suggested penalty for violating the Sexual Orientation Harassment Policy is to ‘be temporarily suspended from the game.’ However, as there was clearly no malicious intent on your part, this penalty was reduced to a warning.”

Blizzard’s stance was clear that recruiting for a guild using “GLBT” was inappropriate as, the company said, it may “incite certain responses in other players that will allow for discussion that we feel has no place in our game.”

Gamer John Blatzheim, who heard of Andrews’ situation, e-mailed Blizzard to express his concern of a double standard that game masters would send her a warning that she could not use “GLBT” as an advertisement to express a safe place for gay gamers after an incident a few months ago where a plague occurred within the game and players yelled in general chat, “Don’t get the AIDS!”

“Many people are insulted just at the word ‘homosexual’ or any other word referring to sexual orientation,” Blizzard responded to Blatzheim in an e-mail. “Also to discriminate against other players, such as not allowing any heterosexuals into the guild simply because of their sexual orientation, could cause extreme offense to a large percentage of our players and should be avoided.”

Ugh. This is all too typical of the idiocy that is Blizzard “support.” As Andrews notes later on in the article,

It seems to be OK for general chat to be flooded with, ‘That’s so gay!’ and ‘I just got ganked! What a fag!’ yet advertising for a GLBT friendly environment where we don’t have to deal with such language is deemed inappropriate.

This is just like their selective enforcement of their almost-impossible-to-comply-with naming policy. Blizzard support seems to spend a lot of time worrying about crap like whether CmdrTaco is a legitimate character name or whether “GLBT-friendly” is appropriate, but the general chat areas are flooded with childish antics, inappropriate sexual chat and, as Andrews notes, plenty of anti-gay slurs. Frankly, since you can ignore individual users and filter chat, I’d just create a laissez-faire approach to the in-game chat if I were Blizzard, but if you’re going to enforce content, don’t make the main focus of that policing character names or slamming individuals trying to create a more tolerant environment.

Source:

Author Brian CarnellPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , 2 Comments on Blizzard’s Bizarrely Predictable Response to GLBT Guilds

Stupidity, Thy Name Is Tom Barrett

So I open up the local rag, The Kalamazoo Gazette, today to the local section and there is a full-color photograph of some Western Michigan University students protesting outside the Kalamazoo Public Library. They’re part of a student group called Students for America, and in the photo they’re carrying signs that say things like, “Preserve American Culture,” “Stop Targeting Our Kids,” and “Promote the Gay Agenda on Your Own Time With Your Own Dime.”

It turns out they are protesting an appearance by author David Levithan who is the author of “Boy Meets Boy,” which, according to the newspaper, “portrays a town where a transgender character named ‘Infinite Darlene’ doubles as football team captain and homecoming queen and where GLBTQ teens — gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or questioning — don’t suffer the stigmas that arise in the real world.” Sure, whatever. My main question is how many more letters are they going to add to GLBT? Wait a few years and it will be GLBTQRSTUVWXYZ (for those are questioning their alphabetic orientation.)

Anyway, back to the main point. First, like most protests, the principal here is simply stupid. The author shows up to talk about how gays, etc. are marginalized, etc. and how do the local paleocons reply? They show up and protest that homosexuals are somehow undermining “American” culture. Way to go guys. You really helped make your opponents’ point.

Second, never ever show up to protest unless you’ve done some basic fact checking and understand what it is you’re going to be protesting against. Remember that sign urging people to promote the “gay agenda . . . on your own dime?” The leader of this collective of idiots elaborates on that point in the Gazette,

Tom Barrett, a founding member of the Western Michigan University group Students for America, a 15-member group that organized the protest, said the group wasn’t protesting the book itself, but was “promoting good, American values.”

“We think it’s wrong,” Barrett said. “We think they shouldn’t be pushing the homosexual agenda with taxpayer dollars. They should do it on their own time with their own dime.”

King said taxpayer dollars did not fund the event or the distribution of the free copies of “Boy Meets Boy” to interested teens.

“The Kalamazoo Community Foundation funded the donation of all the books we had given away beforehand and all the books we gave away tonight,” King said.

The author’s visit also was free, he said.

Damn. You’d think Barrett would have wanted to make sure taxpayer dollars were paying for this event before making that the theme of the protest. Or maybe he just thinks ignorance accompanies intolerance as a “good, American value.”

Source:

Gay-teen-romance author draws fans and protesters. Elizabeth Clark, Kalamazoo Gazette, October 21, 2005.

James Dobson on Raising Heterosexual Kids

This nutty article by James Dobson on how to ensure your son or daughter doesn’t grow up to be gay is making the rounds. Its not anything that Dobson himself says that is so nutty (though there is plenty of Dobson’s usual nuttiness in there), but rather an unpublished manuscript by Joseph Nicolosi that Dobson quotes from extensively in his article. Dobson describes Nicolosi’s as “the foremost authority on the prevention and treatment of homosexuality today. His book will offer practical advice and a clear-eyed perspective on the antecedents of homosexuality.” So what does Nicolosi recommend? Stuff like this,

Girls can continue to grow in their identification with their mothers. On the other hand, a boy has an additional developmental task—to disidentify from his mother and identify with his father. At this point [beginning at about eighteen months], a little boy will not only begin to observe the difference, he must now decide, “Which one am I going to be?” In making this shift in identity, the little boy begins to take his father as a model of masculinity. At this early stage, generally before the age of three, Ralph Greenson observed, the boy decides that he would like to grow up like his father.

This is a choice. Implicit in that choice is the decision that he would not like to grow up to be like his mother. According to Robert Stoller, “The first order of business in being a man is, ‘don’t be a woman.'”

Meanwhile, the boy’s father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son’s maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.

Who knew the cure for homosexuality was as simple as a game of catch and showers with Dad?

Gay Marriage Is Inevitable

Glenn Reynolds has some interesting thoughts about gay marriage as a campaign issue. Bottom line — there seems to be little substantive difference between Kerry and Bush on the topic. The main difference is that Bush supports a defense of marriage amendment to the Constitution which he can do because he knows it has no chance of coming to pass (much as he has endorsed re-upping the assault weapons ban largely because he knows it’s just not going to happen).

I’ve posted before about the inconsistency of gay marriage supporters, but whether you support or oppose it, it is clear that legalization of gay marraige is all but inevitable.

Reynolds quotes Julian Sanchez as writing,

I spot the one Ben Sherman in a solidly Brooks Brothers room (actually Benetton, I discover, but Benetton trying to look like Ben Sherman) and try to suss out how gay Republicans are feeling in light of the Federal Marriage Amendment push. And his answer’s a pretty good one: That the gay rights issue is largely a generational one, and that it’ll be won inside of 10 or 15 years as a result of demographic changes regardless of which party’s in power.

In the late 1980s I was sitting in a philosophy class in which the topic had turned to forms of government and balancing civil liberties with other interests. The topic of homosexuality came up, and the professor asked how many people in the class of about 50 thought there should be laws against homosexuality. Not a single person, even the conservative Christians in the class, thought these were a good idea. To me the question was almost incomprehensible, similar to asking whether or not there should be laws against blasphemy.

It seem to me all but inevitable that laws that define marriage as only between a man and a woman are destined to fall, though I’d pushed the timeline out further to 25 years.

BTW, this is unrelated, but I got my first glimpse at just how odd this sort of tolerance is in another philosophy class. The first day of the class there were a number of Muslim women in full conservative dress. They all got up and left about 15 minutes into the course and never came back. Why? According to the instructor, this philosophy of science course would consider the implications of Big Bang cosmology on theistic arguments for the creation of the universe, and these women did not want to sit in any class in which they might have to read or consider arguments that they believed went against the Koran.