Homosexual Panic Defense?
I think that homosexual panic is nothing more than a legal attempt to use a jury's prejudice against gay people to allow the murderer of a gay person to get a lighter sentence. In another city in my state, a gay men went missing and his mother told police she feared he had been harmed because he was gay. A week later two fishermen pulled a suitcase from a lake and found his body inside. He was identified by personal items found with the body and a tattoo. After a suspect was arrested and the case went to trial, it was shown that the suspect purchased the suitcase six days before the murder. The suspects aunt said that he had planned to kill him because he was gay, but that she did not believe him. The suspects cousin said that he had admitted to the crime. The suspect admitted to the murder, but said he did so to fight back to protect himself from being raped. The jury found the suspect not guilty of murder, but guilty of second degree manslaughter. The self-confessed murderer became eligible for parole 2½ years after the trial.
How can LGBTQ tolerance be further improved in the U.S.?
A2A “How can LGBTQ tolerance be further improved in the U.S.?”I don’t know quite how to do this, but I think a step in the right direction is not to have a segregated concept like “LGBTQ tolerance”. It creates an “othering” while talking about how to do the exact opposite. This is the same reason why “marriage equality” is an inherently superior phrase to discussions about “gay marriage”, because if the idea is that all people wishing to get married, all married people, and all marriages are equivalent, “why do you keep saying gay marriage?”Also, I don’t really like the word “tolerance”. That there’s a guy who I keep winding up next to on my commuter train who always STINKS of old cigarettes – seriously, being next to him is like inhaling directly from an ashtray, with no reprieve. I tolerate the experience (as best I can?) but I absolutely hate every minute of it. I’m sure he’s a nice enough guy, and in fact he has always been very polite to me when we’ve spoken, but I absolutely *loathe* being near him. Yet I tolerate it.Is this what you’re looking for? I desperately hope not. I mean, I suppose it’s a step better than “intolerance”, but that’s about as low of a bar as I can imagine.Think about what you’d like the world to look like. You know (or at least have to believe) that there’s a path to get there. What is the step before that? And the one before that? Trace backwards until you see a way from where we are now that can match up with one of the steps you’ve identified off in the distance. That’s the path. Since I don’t know exactly what you’d like as a long-term result, I can’t tell you how to get to it, but that’s the process…
How is there domestic violence against men by women, when men are stronger?
I’m going to tell a story in public I’ve only told one young boy who needed it more than I needed my dignity.Maybe someone else needs it.Here it goes.The first girl I dated once I started driving was tall, blonde, came from money, and was out of my league.Raggety ragtop Ford Mustang. Chick Magnet!She let me kiss her on our second date. I let her slap me on our third.This was not BDSM. She just didn’t like that I showed up late.She then proceeded to slap me three more times over the course of the night for various other infractions. Hard.There should not have been a fourth date.I was young, dumb, and she looked like Heather Locklear.I told her before our fourth date that there needed to be no more slaps. She agreed.Our fourth date featured two slaps. One split my lower lip.I didn’t see her again for two weeks. She promised through two friends that she wouldn’t slap me again if I would just give her another chance.She didn’t lie!Forty five minutes into our fifth “date”, which never went beyond her bedroom, she chipped my front tooth with a fairly competent right hook and her graduation ring. We were discussing her violent streak.But she didn’t slap me. So fair’s fair.I could say that she battered me. Legally speaking she did, but I didn’t really suffer any ill effects from it. I was in the Army about 20 months later.But I should have said something. I should have got her a criminal record. I should have made a judge send her to counseling.She is probably married now. She is probably abusing a man who didn’t have the sense to decline a sixth date.My mother taught me to never hit a girl. That lesson stuck.It stuck hard.So here is my definition of “Toxic Masculinity”:Healthy Traditional Masculinity is when a man says “I am too good a man to hit a woman under normal circumstances.”Toxic Masculinity is when a man says “I can’t hit a woman even to protect myself.”I’m trying to adjust my own behavior.When I have a young man who is listening to me, I try to teach him healthy behaviors.…but we gotta have this conversation guys.
I'm conservative. How would you convince me to be liberal (in terms of U.S. politics)?
There’s only a couple ways you can convince anyone of anything. And that depends on what you value. As Sam Harris said, if someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument are you going to present to convince them otherwise? It just isn’t going to work. They don’t buy into that system.I believe my logic is sound based on my values. Many conservatives I’ve spoken with also hold this to be true. The only difference I perceive is that I can hammer away at your values altogether, whereas mine have good defenses. American Conservatives don’t seem to believe in “do to others as you would like to be done to you.” The Golden Rule. They may think they do. But instead of how I choose to follow such a guideline, they will typically act in a totally different manner. They think “Oh, I don’t need help and I’ll never ask for it, so I’m never going to help my fellow man!” That is, until they are put into the shoes of a homeless man who lost his job, or a single mother drowning in financial issues, or a well-adjusted but decently well off person suddenly diagnosed with aggressive cancer. That’s the kind of thing that I seem to understand that conservatives do not.You can of course be persuaded emotionally. But I doubt you empathize with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised, or the nonbelievers, or the immigrants, or LGBT community, or apparently fucking anything but “the troops” and Christians and gun owners. So that’s out of the question.The only other option is to live it yourself. I suggest you try the Minimum Wage challenge. Start your life from scratch working on minimum wage and see how it works for you. See what it’s like to be hit with sickness or injury and how that decimates your finances. Try stepping into the shoes of ethnic Americans and nonChristians and see how their lives are different from what you are familiar with. Or how about spending time beneath the invisible drones in the Middle East, wishing for death over the anxiety of waiting for it to come.Conservatives would rather shed a tear for a flag that symbolizes a nation than the actual people who live and die by stupid, stupid policies that can easily be changed for the benefit of so many. If none of this fancies you, then I’m afraid my attempts would be futile.