One Million Moms Fights Gay Superheroes

Samantha Burt

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Jan 30, 2012
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Pearwood said:
I think I just stepped into the 1960s.
I find your picture particularly poignant. Harry Potter is the third best selling book of all time and the most prolific character (after the eponymous one, of course) is gay. I don't really see how one million mums is going up against 65 million readers (450 million copies sold of the series).
 

samaugsch

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Oct 13, 2010
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Were gay people complaining about there not being any gay characters in marvel comics? If not, why even bother including gay characters?
 

awesomcarter

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Mar 25, 2011
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so wait. . . what was the point here again?
also I don't see any gay people against straight super heroes. for a final note it's called freedom of speech LOOK IT UP
 

Pearwood

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Samantha Burt said:
Harry Potter is the third best selling book of all time and the most prolific character (after the eponymous one, of course) is gay.
Voldemort was gay?! ;)
 

Random Fella

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Wolfram23 said:
Apparently gay kids don't need superhero rolemodels, but hetero ones do. Is it because they are already super (and they know it)?
Wait...
You might be on to something
Quick! Get me a man!
 

powerneed

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May 31, 2012
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will they just go away . I really kind of wonder who will be the gay superhero i dont see it being flash he was married i think. I just hope they dont shoehorn it in in a way that makes no since
 

Jun_Jun

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Sep 21, 2009
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I wonder why they think telling their children about the existence of homosexuals suddenly means they're opening the floodgates to kids engaging in homosexual acts and knowing about sex before they're old enough. I mean what do they tell their kids if they ask 'Why do Men and Women get married?' most people would answer 'it's because they love each other'. But ohh no if they ask about 'Why do two Men want to get married?' 'It's because they love getting it in the pooper!', I mean seriously being a homosexual doesn't suddenly make you a sexual deviant that should be court ordered to stay away from all children and straight people of the same gender. :/
Seriously I don't know why they're trying to shield their children from homosexual role models, it's not like children one day will be like 'I want to be gay like Batman and marry a guy like Robin!', no they will probably gush about all the gadgets and crap Batman keeps on his Bat-belt. (or whatever he calls it, I'm willing to bet Batman's coming out is what I'm saying :p )
 

I.N.producer

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May 26, 2011
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The funniest thing about this: "Can you imagine little boys saying, 'I want a boyfriend or husband like X-Men?'"

Silly moms, X-Men isn't a person. Plus little kids say weirder and worse stuff than that all the time. I'm just an uncle and apparently I understand kids better than these "million moms". The worst thing that could possibly happen in this gay nightmare scenario is people being more tolerant of homosexuals. And that's just terrible.
 

ReiverCorrupter

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theultimateend said:
ReiverCorrupter said:
It certainly is not limited to faiths, it is the same destructive force that stands behind political parties.

But yes, for the most part the larger a group gets the less likely that group is real.

In that, two people likely share tons of similarities, four people maybe less than that by a factor of 2, and so on.

So you start with say 1:1 similarities, then you have 2:1, and 4:1 and so on. With the first number being the amount of things the group says it believes in, and the amount you actually identify with.

Once you get to the size of a major global religion the average person has probably not even read the rulebook. They just hear a couple things out of thousands of things that they like and put in their support.

That's where lots of fighting breaks out, people get attached to those few things they like and when it is challenged they either break off and establish their own version of that group or they defend the whole even when it doesn't actually benefit them in any way.
I think we're pretty much in agreement. Though I think there are two other factors (aside from false-size bias) that have made certain organized religions dangerous throughout history: Authoritarianism and Non-objectively verifiable convictions.

Authoritarianism

The authoritarian nature of certain organized religions adds a particular danger that goes well beyond the false size bias, and that it is these types of religions that actually present the most danger. The whole false size bias theory is predicated on the assumption that people have a relative amount of self-determination in what views/values they ascribe and that this means that different people will value things differently given their circumstances. A dogmatic authoritarian system eliminates a significant portion of this self determination.

To put it in more concrete terms: what made the Catholic Church so dangerous during the Dark Ages was the fact that it was the authority that determined what was right and wrong and had the power to excommunicate those who disagreed. That is, it was supported by a monistic value system where there was only one thing of value (i.e. salvation) and everything else as judged as only having value in relation to that one thing. Since the church supposedly had power over salvation this allowed it to use that power to determine the value of everything else such that people couldn't disagree without risking the thing they held to be most important.

While this kind of authoritarianism certainly isn't restricted to organized religions, the specific doctrines of certain religious traditions make it more likely. Worldly life offers all sorts of things that people can value differently, and often times these things conflict. For instance: traditional family values might make a woman feel that she has a duty to her children to be a stay-at-home mom, while this same woman might also have conflicting career ambitions. Only someone who is incredibly arrogant would acknowledge only one of these values as valid (yes, this means that I think that both male chauvinists and extreme neo-feminists are arrogant in that they think that they have the objective moral truth and that everyone else is wrong). Both of these values have their own draw such that not everyone is going to acknowledge one over the other.

In contrast, many organized religions tend to offer things that are so fantastic that they completely outweigh things of worldly value. Let's face it, worldly life is impermanent and all of its pleasures are fleeting. A lot of atheists might not like this idea, but it's true nonetheless: all they can argue against is that the promises these religions make are empty. Even then a lot of people are already religious are likely to reason according to Pascal's wager, which although not very convincing to someone who isn't religious, does nicely sum up the fact that religious people don't have much to gain by renouncing their religion.

The point being that a group can only be as powerful as the thing of value that it offers is important. If some group tried to offer people family values at the expense of other things that they value (like personal freedom), they aren't very likely to join up. But if it offers something that eclipses every other good and claims to be the sole means of attaining that good, then the potential for authoritarianism increases greatly.

Non-objectively verifiable convictions

Another thing that is more dangerous than simple false size bias on an individual level is absolute or fanatical conviction. When people have that kind of conviction they simply don't care whether or not they have a large portion of society on their side. While organized religions by no means ensure that people have this kind of conviction, they do often provide a basis for it in that many religions openly favor supernatural (subjective/not objectively verifiable) revelation or faith as the basis for conviction rather than rational argumentation and group consensus. Of course this is also a problem for morality in general, as there really aren't any universally accessible natural facts in the world that one can point to demonstrate that something is objectively right/wrong (vis-a-vis G.E. Moore's "Open Question" argument).

Some religions do this a lot more than others. Hinduism and Buddhism, while both containing revelatory/irrational strains of thought, tend to gravitate towards rational argumentation on the whole, and both traditions have allowed for multiple schools of thought to coexist and interact with each other through philosophical discourse. In contrast, Christianity and Islam have historically been very intolerant of divergent doctrinal views. Most Christian doctrinal disputes were ultimately settled either by compromise in order to consolidate power in a central body, or by warfare. The protestant schism was not a happy or congenial affair, nor was the Shi'a/Sunni divide in Islam.

Of course there are always exceptions: Sri Lankan Buddhists are pretty radical. (For instance, the Dalai Llama is considered a heretic and not allowed into the country, and they have a long history of oppressing Hindus and Muslims.) But this is largely due to the fact that Buddhism is seen as part of their ethnic, cultural and national identity, (e.g. the Hindus are typically Tamils; a minority ethnic group) and their actions are really done for the sake of the latter, rather than as an appeal to Buddhist doctrine. The vast majority of Buddhists outside of Sri Lanka would likely tell you that they are acting out of attachment rather than compassion and that what they do goes against not only the doctrines, but the very spirit of Buddhism.

But I'm sure you're well aware of this and that you were just talking about what makes organized religion dangerous in modern society. So I'm not really disagreeing with you so much as pointing out a couple caveats. You're probably right in that the false size bias poses a particular kind of threat in the context of modern democracy.
 

ReiverCorrupter

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defskyoen said:
Apparently I'm as "conservative" as these moms as a mid twenties non-religious person.
Now don't take me wrong, homosexual people can do whatever they want in private and should have the same rights as everyone else, but this entire "political propaganda" bullshit is seriously pissing me off every single time.

Apparently every single story, TV show, movie and increasingly more even game and comic has to have a "gay person" in it.

Take for example "Star Wars: The Old Republic", in 2009 Bioware said there are no gay people in Star Wars: http://www.pcworld.com/article/163962/homosexuality_does_not_exist_in_star_wars.html
After a torrential fire from certain people and CALLS FOR BOYCOTT for NOT including "gay characters", which was apparently fine because that's somehow evil, and a 2 year campaign towards the "inclusion" Bioware gave in:
http://popwatch.ew.com/2012/01/31/star-wars-gay-old-republic/
After that apparently the people that campaigned for the game NOT to be changed were portraited as the "bad guys" everywhere...
http://www.gamespot.com/news/star-wars-the-old-republic-denounced-for-gay-relationships-6349403

And there's increasingly people loudmouthedly shouting and demanding everyone cater to them and their whims with everything...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LGBT_characters_in_film,_radio,_and_TV_fiction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LGBT_characters_in_comics

I hate every kind of manipulative political propaganda, be it christian, conservative or even gay and at the moment the "gay" propaganda machine is spewing out about as much of it as FOX News...
And the worst of that is when they CHANGE already existing characters and heroes for example to now suddenly be black or gay instead of CREATING new ones.
I'd be surprised as to the amount of butthurt in people if they started changing black or gay characters to be white or straight and how "accepting" they'd be then.
Well, what I find strange is that the fuss is always over some capitalist organization is doing (on both sides). It's like people don't realize that these companies are in it to make money, and are only very rarely interested in promoting some sort of agenda. (The exception being the major news agencies which are now all biased one way or the other, even CNN has become more and more liberal, whereas MSNBC and Fox News are both nothing more than the mouthpieces for the DNC and GOP respectively.)

You're fooling yourself if you think video game companies or comic book companies give a crap one way or the other: they just want to make a profit. Bioware didn't do it because they were homophobic, they did it because they didn't want conservative parents to boycott their product. They changed their policy because it started hurt their bottom line.

For anyone who thinks they're making a difference by pressuring companies to be more inclusive, you probably aren't. The companies themselves don't care, and frankly as long as a game or what-have-you isn't openly anti-gay, you're probably not improving anything for gay people outside of giving them the option to play as a gay character. That is to say, they probably aren't going to feel more accepted by society because there are gay characters in a fictional universe because it is the actual universe that they live in that contains homophobes. In many of these RPGs you can also play as an evil character, but surely that doesn't make it more acceptable for people to be murderers.

The fact of the matter is that business follows morality: it cannot determine people's values any more than you can legislate morality. Nor should it.

People will inevitably view what progressives are doing as putting forth an agenda, because they ARE putting forth an agenda. Of course the agenda isn't to make people gay, that's just stupid. The agenda is to change society's values so as to eliminate homophobia. Like it or not, that's still an agenda. Sure, those who put forward the agenda think that they are objectively morally right, but then again, so do the the Christians. And sure, the Christians might be factually incorrect about a lot of things, but I frankly haven't seen any sort of definitive scientific evidence that sexual orientation is determined at birth either, and frankly it isn't very likely that it has a genetic basis. As far as I know, the evidence is still out as to whether exposure to homosexuality in development might increase the probability that a person turns out homosexual, though it is pretty much undoubtedly the case that sexuality is not a deliberate choice.

My point is this: both sides are trying to control what other people use their own money to buy. In doing so both sides see the other side as trying to force them into their own value system. I'm a social libertarian, and, as far as limiting the content of what businesses produce according to particular value systems, a fiscal libertarian. (Though I do believe in taxation and regulation for other reasons.) It seems clear to me that both sides should simply let the free market operate as it is supposed to by using their inherent power as a consumer. In other words, protest with your money, not with angry demonstrations. If DC, Bioware or any other company is forced to choose between demographics, they will choose the most profitable demographic. And, since this would leave another potential demographic there will likely arise a company that appeals to this demographic. Now, if either side objects to the existence of a product that they don't even buy, this will be a sufficient demonstration that their viewpoint is tyrannical in nature.
 

TheTurtleMan

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Mar 2, 2010
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GloatingSwine said:
TheTurtleMan said:
If I was a really high level executive at Marvel who knew the company was going to shut down very soon, I would order the writers and artists to make a comic featuring a gay gang bang of all the superheroes to burn as many bridges as possible. Oh, it would also be a nazi themed orgy with Hitler as the DJ.
I'm pretty sure that actually happens in The Boys...
Well I have never heard of that, therefore it does not exist in my plane of consciousness.
 

Webb5432

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Jul 21, 2009
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All I read was the title and the first two lines of your post before I reacted. My thought process went like this:

Processing stimuli....
Selecting reaction....
Preparing action....
Executing....
FACEPALM has been executed.
 

Gatx

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Jul 7, 2011
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Kids shouldn't even be reading comic books, seriously. Some of the shit that goes down in those pages is messed up.
 

Li Mu

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Oct 17, 2011
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Wait...is anyone else seeing potential in this?

One Million Mom's VS Batman?

Can Batman take out several hundred intolerant and angry middle aged women?
FIND OUT NEXT WEEK IN A NEW BATMAN ADVENTURE! SAME BAT TIME! SAME BAT CHANNEL!