misc. comments I've posted

[redbird]

These are a few things I've posted elsewhere recently, and want in my own journal. I'll probably make posts like this periodically, now that I've thought of this approach.

In suggestions:

If I wanted random people to know my gender, I could include it explicitly in my userinfo (as I could my age, where I went to high school, how many teeth I have, and any number of other facts that some people consider important).

Anyone to whom it matters is free to ask. I'll probably answer (on all of those points) if it seems that they have a reason to want to know. (If we have no relationship, online or otherwise, you almost certainly don't have a reason I'd recognize as valid.)

But one of the things I like about LiveJournal is that it doesn't treat gender as being the key variable. I don't go as far as the friend of mine whose userinfo includes the explicit request that those of us who know them in real life not out their biological gender. I just think of random users as "she" when I have no evidence (userpics, handles) otherwise--and I know that I sometimes guess wrong, even when I do have what seems like plausible evidence.

What I've discovered is that it usually doesn't matter: not when we're interacting online, through the written word.

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In yonmei's journal, in response to someone who was waving a dictionary around as an argument against the Massachusetts court ruling on same-sex marriage:

Fine, I walked into the next room and got the dictionary down. It defines marriage first as the institution, then as a union of that sort between a man and a woman, and then several other things, including "homosexual marriage", corporate mergers, and on to pinochle. The actual useful information is at "marry", which uses the terms "husband" and "wife", but nowhere specifies "husband and wife".

Besides, modern dictionaries are descriptive and draw almost entirely on published written English. That is, all your stack of books [assuming they all agree] proves is that, as of whenever they were published, that's how the word "marriage" was being used in print in whatever part of the English-speaking world they were trying to cover. (I'd guess the US, UK, or Canada, rather than New Zealand, Kenya, India, Jamaica....)

Further, I believe your argument forces the conclusion that the noun "marriage" means something different in Toronto--where authorities have declared such marriages to be as legal as those between people of different sexes--than it does in New York. Alas, I don't remember which box I put my copy of Chambers in.

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In yonmei's journal, where she's dissecting Orson Scott Card's anti-gay-marriage screed; this is tangential to anything Yonmei wrote, but a bit of the Card piece caught my eye there:

Ah, yes, Clintonesque. The right-wing's bogeyman, a heterosexual woman who has her own life, career, and opinions, and who stuck by her husband and child when they and their buddies told the world that he'd had an affair.

That's a rhetorical as well as logical hole in the argument: the Clintons are still together, both seem happy, and raised a child well. Furthermore, Senator Clinton answers constituent email (she wrote back yesterday to assure me that she "does not support" that homophobic constitutional amendment), which is one of those boring but necessary structural and communication things that help keep a civilization together.

Comments

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

God damn Card talks a lot of Sh*t.

What gets me is the desperate desire not to link this stuff to the civil rights movement. Just how many of those same god damn arguements do you think were made at the time by arseholes trying to support segregation... "It will destroy civillisation".

And segregation was destoyed in the end, at least in the past, becuase of legal decisions made by judges!

And of course his idea that "gays can marry", they can marry women and be unhappy is just the biggest pile of w*nk. I'll grant you I'm not being articulate on this but some of the time I just get so annoyed about this.

I'm not a 100% sure that this is the right time, or the right way to win this battle. However with

[stealthpup.livejournal.com]

I'm still amused that Republicans cry that Democrats should get over Gore and the USA 2000 Presidential election when they still haven't gotten over Clinton.

For the life of me, I cannot understand the anti-gay-marriage mindset. How those with it can maintain that marriage as an institution is somehow a zero-sum game, and that they must hang onto their Heterosexual Privilege as a dog lockjaws a bone, is just simply beyond me.