The White Peril 白禍

Ass kissers.

I would like to interrupt my recent streak of asexual commentary to make two pressing faggotry-related announcements:

(1) I normally don't go for Korean guys particularly, but the actor who just strolled into the subtitled drama I'm watching on TV totally needs to have my love child. If that's not going to happen, I'll settle for a plot development that has him taking off his shirt.

(2) Eric Scheie economically makes a point I've been gassing verbosely about ever since I began posting here:

If that's the case, I must disagree. Homosexuality is not heterosexuality. There are many differences between gay and straight relationships. The laws and social mores designed for the heterosexual scheme of things reflect these differences. I see no reason why homosexuals should feel the need to ape heterosexuals, and even less reason why they should be forced to do so. This is my biggest objection to same sex marriage. It would place undue pressure on what were once private relationships outside the sweep of society's radar. It would allow gay palimony, gay divorce, and bring the heavy hand of the state where it does not belong. Same sex marriage would not be limited to a "right" chosen voluntarily, because it would create new duties and causes of action which could be used even against homosexuals not wishing to marry. I realize that many do not share my concerns, but I think that to call people who neither need or want the state to enter their lives in such a manner lacking in self respect is a bit of a stretch.

However, the FMA is another issue, because it would, by making incidents of marriage a suspect category, bring the state into private relationships in another, horrendous, way. I vehemently oppose the FMA, and I disagree wholeheartedly with Bush's support of that ill-written amendment. Why, though, would Bush's support for the FMA make homosexuals who vote for Bush lacking in self respect? What about the many heterosexuals who don't support the FMA? Are they too lacking in self-respect if they vote for Bush? Or must "self respect" touch on important, personal, hot-button issues?

My only quibble is with the "outside society's radar" part, since the wording sounds as if it collapses together government and culture. I think having our relationships recognized by the circles we move in socially, with the attendant pressure to behave ourselves, is a good thing. But the more Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch and others use that reasoning to promote the legalization of same-sex marriage, the more they reinforce the idea that we just resent being different and want to force people to like us. Speak of lacking self-respect!

You know, most days I wake up and go about my business and come home and turn in and think, You know, the world has plenty of problems, and they take a while to sort out, but most people are really pretty decent and on the ball.

Days like today, however, I think, My, but people are stupid. Erin O'Connor reports that a student in a San Diego high school decided not to go along with the administrator-approved lesson in loving us fragile, downtrodden queers and was suspended. Her summary of the story she links to (As Joanne Jacobs is wont to say, Is your blood pressure too low?):

Chase Harper, a sophomore in the Poway Unified School district, was offended when his school recently participated in the "Day of Silence," a national event sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network. GLSEN describes Day of Silence as �an annual, national student-led effort in which participants take a vow of silence to peacefully protest the discrimination and harassment faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth in schools.� About 300,000 school kids participate in the event each year. According to Harper and his lawyers, the school sponsored the event and administrators worked with the Gay-Straight Alliance, a student group, to coordinate it.

To protest his school's promotion of a viewpoint he, as a Christian, finds immoral, Harper commemorated the Day of Silence by coming to school in a homemade t-shirt protesting homosexuality. The next day, he did so again, wearing a shirt bearing the words �Be Ashamed� and �Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned� on the front, and reading �Homosexuality is Shameful� and �Romans 1:27� on the back. That's when the trouble began.

Harper's Christian friends warned him to lose the shirt, but he wouldn't. When school administrators found out about it, they attempted to "counsel" him into taking it off. A vice principal advised him that, in Harper's words, �When I come to school, I leave my faith in the car, and you should leave your faith in the car when it might offend others.� The principal initially told Harper that the problem was that he wore a homemade t-shirt to school, but he quickly came clean about what the real issue was: "It wouldn�t have mattered whether it was homemade or not," Harper reports him saying. "It�s your viewpoint that you�re expressing on your T-shirt that is offensive and inflammatory.� When Harper refused to remove the shirt, he was suspended.

The problem was that the T-shirt was homemade? You know, it used to be that even if you couldn't depend on public school adminibots to see to the education of children, you could depend on them to dredge up half-plausible, ass-covering lies under pressure. Apparently, they can't even do that anymore.

And what on earth, can someone explain if you think it won't finish me off, is one supposed to do to make good on a vow to "peacefully protest the discrimination and harassment faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth"? Hold sit-ins where everyone sings "I Will Survive"? What about having a day on which students vow to treat everyone with civility, even if provoked to do otherwise, along with a few civics-type lessons about how our etiquette system evolved from its more stylized, formalized antecedents in England and Europe? It would be better at solving the problem, but of course, it wouldn't benefit any activist groups with federal pity grants and friends in the education bureaucracy.

In t - 5 hours, the boyfriend will be back within molesting distance. Tomorrow we leave for Bali (the mountains, not the beach). I don't think I've ever needed a vacation so much in my life. If anything interesting happens in Japan today, I might post something quick about it; otherwise, see you in a week!