Orekoya said:
Therumancer said:
Your taking a shotgun to the subject in hopes of hitting something. I'll start out in being blunt in saying (as I've said before) that I myself was raped by a gay man when I was six. In my cause though I blocked it out, which doesn't make it any easier when you know it happened.
Your name is familiar; I've seen you do alot of arguing typically against gay rights in many different threads. Seeing your name in a gay thread usually just pissed me off to the point of simply not reading your posts anymore but now I'm just expressing genuine curiosity. I just spent the past couple of hours debating if I should even bring this up but I just have to know: how do you know the man who raped you was a gay man? I mean was he someone you knew or was it something you found out later? Because reading that statement by itself and knowing your post history, I can't help but feel you might be projecting your feelings on pedophiles, rape and your personal experience onto homosexuals.
I don't paticularly want to de-rail this thread, but I'll say this much:
The gist of what your saying is pretty much loaded. The basic idea being that if someone like me has been victimized, we're effectively too biased to take a rational stance on the subject. If we haven't been victimized we're ignorant and "how could we know" based simply on rhetoric.
I will say this much. What happened to me has lead to me putting a lot of effort into learning about the subject, the gay community, and how things actually are. I know more about homosexuals, the gay rights movement, and the gay community, culture, and subcultures than most gay people within that culture do. It's kind of funny but in the past I've shocked people with some of the things I know, due to the assumption that someone who wasn't gay couldn't possibly know those things the way I did (and no, I won't go into details here). You'd be surprised at what you can do when properly motivated.
A point many people who argue gay rights with me miss is that I'm not talking bunk when I say that my position on the subject has waffled over the years before settling on my current point of view. Something based on what information I've had, and looking at the big picture, as well as the people I've known. It shocks some people think that I might have actually supported the rights of gay men at one time, and that I have to be lying about it, but it happens to be true. When I was in college I probably sat in on more ABIGAYLES meetings than most gay people did. My interests also caused me to look into certain trends and patterns of behavior more closely than most people have done when given a brief.
Despite what people might want to think, the reason why an arguement with me on this subject can't be "won" is because I happen to be right. They miss the point that I was sitting where a lot of the people argueing with me are decades ago, and I know what they think they know, and also realize that if they ever really looked into the subject with any kind of actual interest and effort, they would become me. Hence the constant prodding for people to do their own research, and do their own digging and such. It's the kind of situation where someone can't just tell you the truth, it has to be gained from experience. Of course it takes a decent amount of effort and without a motivating force like mine a lot of people are just going to take things at face value, and let's face it, tolerance is the easier path since it doesn't involve actually having to do anything, especially nowadays when there is already inertia for it.
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