I can't think of any period of time where "being black" was against the law

[Smith_3]

Sure. Blacks and other minorities were on a large scale treated like second class citizens and that is horrible.

"Being gay" however was and is, in many places of the world, against the law and punishable by death. Even in the "civilized world" of the nineteenth century.

Here just a few prominent examples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde#Trial.2C_imprisonment.2C_and_transfer_to_Reading_Gaol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Prosecution_and_death

The nazis also rounded up gays wherever the could find them and put them in the camps along with jews and other "inferiors".

So don't tell me that the struggle of gays is not comparable to the strugle of other minorities.

[Winnipegosis]

1. You must not be black.

[madrchsod]

2. interesting......

good luck with your idea that "the struggle of gays is`t comparable to the strugle of other minorities".

[Behind the Aegis]

3. That is not what s/he said.

S/he said: "So don't tell me that the struggle of gays is not comparable to the strugle of other minorities."

You wrote the complete opposite.

[Behind the Aegis]

4. "against the law and punishable by death"

"Even in the "civilized world" of the nineteenth century." Try the 21st century!

[Jamastiene]

5. Under Sharia Law, it is punishable by death.

In these countries:
Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.

I know at least one of those is our "ally." :eyes:

It's horrible.

[The Traveler]

6. Different but similar struggles

My people survived close to 700 years of occupation, servitude and genocide. Yeppirs I'm Irish.

What happened to black people was every bit as appalling.

What is happening to them NOW represents insufficient improvement.

My wife is part Cherokee ... a descendent of a Trail of Tears survivor. Need we elaborate further?

And what is happening to gay people, and what has happened for a long time, is completely unacceptable.

We ... the Irish, the Native Americans, the blacks, the gays and you can add a few dozen categorizations of folk similarly afflicted ... have taken more than enough shit over the course of history. We know what this smells like. As a straight male of Irish descent, I am relatively OK in today's society. But I remember when, as I child, I heard neighbors call for the death of John Kennedy because he was Irish Catholic and dared to become President.

It's all the same. Gay rights are human rights, and so long as they are not secured my rights are at risk. I remember. I know what it feels like.

And that is why advancement of people and extension of their rights is vitally important to me.

I think, at long last, we have a President elect who stands in the same place. He's black and Irish ... I'm just Black Irish ... but he knows. He remembers. He knows what it feels like.

My GLBT friends ... my black friends ... my Native friends ... my Asian friends ... my Latino friends ... and all y'all ... I'm with ya, buds. I don't forget.

Trav

[2dogs2queets]

8. Well said, The Traveler

We must continue the fight for human rights.

[Jamastiene]

10. Thank you.

:hug:

[H2O Man]

22. Very well said.

[JustAnotherGen]

26. Excellent

And I'm standing with our GLBT friends because I DO know what it's like to be "the other". :pals:

[malaise]

7. Then you should read the history of slavery in America

Black people were not second class citizens. They were property. Black people were considered 3/4 human. And what exactly did the US courts do about lynching, etc.
Remember it didn't exactly suit slave owners to kill people who were forced to work for free.

I support equal rights for every human being, but please don't distort history.

[mtnester]

12. Then let's make sure we include women

in the property list

also, I believe Irish slaves were also property..so anyone of slave classification during historical times were property.

Women until recent history, were also property from the time of their birth, first of their fathers, and then of their husbands, and if widowed, of her brothers or other male family members.

But, being first property is NOT a required step for discimination, nor is it required in order to pay some kind of dues BEFORE you get your rights.

[Princess Turandot]

17. Ditto...

Black folks were treated no different than animals before the Civil War (and they weren't treated much better for decades afterwards.) Millions of black Africans are believed to have perished in the 'Middle Passage', the sea journey between Africa and the Americas. Slavery appears to have existed throughout human history, largely as a result of conquest, but the Brits and a few other European countries turned it into a fecking industry of selling human beings. After Nazi Germany's efforts to annihilate entire classes of human beings, it is likely the most deplorable chapter in human history.

[Bicoastal]

9. Fun! We're going to play the always-exciting liberal game of "Who's Suffered Most?"

I'm an Eastern-European Jew--deal me in.

:eyes:

[Jamastiene]

11. It is not about who suffered the most.

It is about suffering, period. Some people will not even acknowledge that gay people suffer at all. :eyes:

[tavalon]

13. Who the hell said that!?!

Geez, that's stupid. Matthew Shepard was not an isolated incident. Of course gays have suffered and continue to suffer.

[Jamastiene]

16. Thank you.

Some people have said it, believe it or not. Not here in this thread yet, but they'll be along shortly, I'm sure. They ALWAYS show up. It never fails.

[tavalon]

14. I'm a polyamorous pagan

I think I can probably play. Well, maybe not, since I don't do the victim thing well. Oh, never mind.

[TheKentuckian]

15. Being black has been at least equal to a felony until the last 45 years

the only lower caste have been natives.

We all have our priorities I think being able to live where you wish and owning property, ability to receive a first class education, being employable, and voting are more primary rights but that's me.

I sympathize and support but I think the insistence on acting like you are being driven to the reservation or extinction is overreaching. This marriage hurdle is exactly that, a hurdle. It sucks miserably and its totally irrational but the movement is making excellent progress considering society was actively pretending you didn't exist less than a generation ago. Do not underestimate trails blazed by others. Keep moving and it won't be long till you get to where you want to go but the point is made by making its self clear. The dramatics put up walls. It doesn't matter how strongly one feels but if their audience feels they are overstating you get shut down.

Increased visibility while toning down the rhetoric and outrage is the way to thread the needle. The older minority minds that you need to change, in general terms will tend to go tone deaf on this line of logic.

Talk to your audience and give your self somewhere to escalate to. If you start out on frantic and it doesn't work all you have left is shocking displays.

You'll win on substance as soon as you get people to just listen and you'll get them to listen in more reserved tones, in my opinion.

[HamdenRice]

18. What a dumb post -- on so many levels

For one thing, "being black" is for all intents and purposes "against the law" right now in Darfur, Sudan. It is the only place on earth right now where the international community recognizes genocide is taking place. While most Americans might consider the perpetrators to be "black" they themselves do not, and consider themselves to be ethnically cleansing parts of southern Sudan of "Africans." This has recurred over centuries in various parts of the Sudan.

But the real reason this is an astoundingly stupid post, is that the debates over the last few days have not been about being gay in, say Iran; it's about being gay in California today after passage of Prop 8, and being gay in the wake of Prop 8 in California is not comparable to any of the horrible historical episodes of oppression.

You don't get to suffer vicariously through the oppression of people on the other side of the globe. By doing so you trivialize their oppression by comparing it to your own. Please don't try to piggy back on the suffering of gays in Saudi Arabia.

[silverojo]

19. One big difference:

You can hide being gay. It's kinda hard to hide being black. So no matter what, blacks have always had a target painted on their backs (figuratively speaking).

Were gays brought here on boats to be slaves?
Were gays hanged in this country?
Were gays tied to posts and flogged with whips?
Did gays ever have to use separate facilities?
Did gays have to go to separate schools?
...and so on, and so on.

If you're going to go by what Hitler did, he was pretty much rounding up every group he could think of. But again, you could hide being gay...it was a lot harder to hide being Jewish from the Nazis.

Gay marriage is an issue close to our hearts, but it is NOT comparable to the incredible struggle that African-Americans had to fight, to win freedom.

[cali]

20. your post makes me ill. truly ill.

that you don't grasp how fucked up it is ,indicates how sick you are.

[retread]

21. Strange Fruit -- Billie Holiday

"Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and
blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in
the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from
the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and
the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell
of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for
the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for
the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop."

[alphafemale]

23. "a black man has no rights that a white man has to respect" nt

[Syrinx]

24. Let's enslave the gays!

:shrug:

[JI7]

25. this is one of the most ignorant threads i have seen on here

[HamdenRice]

27. Do you know the life expectancy of a slave on arrival? About 3 years

According to the eminent historian of Africa, Philip Curtin, about 20 million Africans left the continent and the mortality rate on the middle passage was about 50%.

According to historians of the New World, such as African American historian Franklin K. Knight, the life expectancy of a slave arriving in the New World was about 3-5 years, it being cheaper to wear out slaves and buy new ones than treat them humanely enough to live. In almost no part of the Americas except the upper south (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee) was there a reproducing slave population.

So they didn't pass a law outlawing being African in America, but they wiped out tens of millions, anyway.

The more I think about the stupidity of this post, the more I wonder about the sanity of some people.

[Lumpsum]

28. I'm sorry, but this thread is ridiculous.

How dare you minimalize the centuries of HELL that blacks went through and to a degree still go through today just to further YOUR agenda.

Yes, the struggle of gays in America IS a long and terrible one. But that DOESN'T MEAN that other minority's struggles are less than yours!

And you know what? Blacks WERE persecuted during the holocaust - NOT JUST GAYS AND JEWS.