| |
|
RE: Larry Craig - while the whole "police sting" aspect is horrific, I think enjoying the disaster his political career has turned into can be put down to more than just schadenfreude (not that that's not a valid response). That is to say, an aspect of the outing of a homophobic public figure (ideally) could be a reinforcing of the stereotype (backed up by certain studies, if I could find the bastard link) that homophobic (especially, and prominently) men are merely repressed and almost certainly miserable closeted queer men. Which could certainly feed into far more negative stereotypes, but nevertheless makes the homophobic lobby look less like a coherent and valid force of opinion, and more like a bunch of sexually uncomfortable, miserable, self-loathing people without the courage to stand behind their rights to their own sexualities. While I think anyone has the right to remain closeted at their own disgression (fuckit, I've exercised it enough times), the point where they start actively campaigning to make life worse for other people who are queer is the point where their exposure as such stops being such a terrible thing in a sort of Utilitarian calculation of misery. Because, often, it stops them being terrible to a large number of people, and as this particular set of events* is only going to happen to people with a degree of wealth/influence, they're hardly going to be risking the full consequences of aggressive outing to a regualar citizen. Something along the lines of "If you lie down with lions, and then get the lions to go around eating people, and then someone points out that you're not really a lion at all, but in fact a bloke wearing a sort of tatty lion costume and in fact secretly attending human tea parties, then it's not really anyone's fault but your own that you then get horribly torn limb from limb". Possibly this is a moral scope problem on my own part, and possibly one should pay more attention to queer-phobic pressure to remain closeted, but then again, there isn't that much pressure to become an outspoken homophobic public figure.
Again, apologies if this is gibberish.
(As a sidenote, while being decidedly ambivalent (hah) about the idea of "real" men, I do quite like the idea that in order to be a "real" (gender identity) one must recognise and support the rights of people to love people of the same (gender identity). If the concept has to exist (and I don't think it does), organising it along ideological egalitarian lines seems like quite a nice way to go about it - "John can't go about calling himself a 'real man' because he doesn't recognise the rights of men to do naughty things with other men" sounds like the sort of thing that I'd be quite pleased to hear down the pub. Rather than the usual. Or something.)
*specifically, outing to discredit anti-queer action on grounds of hypocrisy. |
|
|
.