Gay campaign to subvert the parent role

A campaign to re-educate parents -- good plan.

Sounds good.

It would get a lot better if all parents were as supportive as they should be.

Sounds good.

I think he's spot on. Parental support can make a huge difference.

It saddens me that parents would turn on their own child for being gay. I simply cannot fathom such a thing. I love mine through thick and thin,no matter what.

Excellent. Gotta love Savage.

I agree - you gotta love your kids. You gotta love them even more when they have difficulties to overcome or confusion about themselves or need help of any kind. There's no investment that pays off better than educating parents so that their children will be happy and productive members of our human society.


..

Sounds good, but I'm sick and tired of Dan Savage being the face of the queer movement. Can't we get someone who doesn't hate women, bisexuals, and trans people?

Wait, Dan Savage hates women, bi and transfolk?

BunnyMaz said:

Wait, Dan Savage hates women, bi and transfolk?

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there are a lot of his articles that seem to give this sense...at least that was my experience...

There is--and to some extent, always has been--a balance between the morals of home and the morals at large.

In a big, bustling, multi-cultural society, you can't send your kids out into the world safe in the knowledge that everything they encounter will agree with the world view you espouse at home. You do your best to instill your views, your ideas of right and wrong, but you have to realize that every society has its own taboos, it's own traditions, and most of them--these days--are a very mixed bag. So we prepare our kids. We teach them our values, prepare them for what they'll encounter, and hope they choose wisely.

The truth is, in many places (I'd even say most), society at large is inching toward tolerance. Women and other minorities are gaining more rights, more acceptance. It's the morals taught in the home (which tend to be based on tradition, handed down from parent to child, to their children, and so on) that are lagging behind.

So we have "home morals"--things that the parents or other members of the tight-knit circle might espouse--and "society morals"--what's okay (or not okay) to say in public.

We have the often denigrated term "Politically Correct".

We have a situation where parents know that their kids are going to encounter teh gays, and liberated women, and interracial couples, but many of them, because of the home morals passed down to them from their parents (who had theirs passed down from theirs) don't really approve. They teach tolerance only as it applies to getting along in society, but maintain a deep, ingrained feeling of the fundamental "wrongness" of it all. Their kids are taught this dichotomy...people do it, but it's not really okay. And if parents suspect that their kids have abandoned their "home morals" in favor of "society's morals", they feel betrayed, and worry for their kids who have clearly chosen the wrong set of morals to abide by.

No, not all the time. I don't mean any of this as blanket rules, of course--so far as I know, human nature doesn't have any of those.

All of this is my long-winded way of saying that "society morals" are often different from "home morals", but that doesn't make them subversive or wrong. Nor does it make them forthright or correct. They're in separate categories.

Invincibility said:

Sounds good, but I'm sick and tired of Dan Savage being the face of the queer movement. Can't we get someone who doesn't hate women, bisexuals, and trans people?

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Mod Note: Invincibility, Dandroid -

This would be one of those places were a couple of references, links to a primary source, would really help out the board, and support your claim.

Note: Not disagreeing with your point, or even questioning it. But, as was already indicated by another member, not everyone is aware that this might be the case.

Thanks,

Williebee

Williebee said:

Mod Note: Invincibility, Dandroid -

This would be one of those places were a couple of references, links to a primary source, would really help out the board, and support your claim.

Note: Not disagreeing with your point, or even questioning it. But, as was already indicated by another member, not everyone is aware that this might be the case.

Thanks,

Williebee

Click to expand...

i agree...he has a column called savage love...i will see if i can track something down...but am perfectly happy to leave it at unvalidated opinion...

While I admire the "It Gets Better" campaign, I've had problems with Savage in the past; for instance, in this post.

I do think he's misogynistic, both in terms of "cis-gendered," or women bearing XX chromosomes, and transwomen, who don't. And yes, he does tend to support the fallacies about bisexuals being incapable of fidelity, etc.

Here's another take on his attitudes towards women and bisexuals.

Going by the quotations in your two links, Medi, (having not read Savage's actual pieces) -- While fighting the hetero-normative box, but keeping on with the idea of norms, he can only end up making smaller boxes.

ETA: by trotting out conflicting research to counter his arguments, one confines oneself to the same box, yes?

He discusses the topic of the OP in his latest podcast:

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLovePodcast/Page/

I listen every week. He's not always politically correct and he says things occasionally even I don't agree with, but I enjoy his optimistic cynicism, that he had many of the same experiences I had as a gay man raising a child, that he’s very sex positive for an American, and that he doesn’t coddle the fools who are occasionally foolish enough to call in.

P.S. - He takes a trans-related call in the above-linked episode as well

ETA: And, Max, really, that thread title had me coming in here guns a'blazing! I was quite disappointed.

He makes some good arguments at times, but some very stupid arguments other times. And he kept referring to a (probably) cisgender male politician as a trans man, with the clear implication that being trans would be a shameful thing.

Thanks for the link, Medievalist. I didn't realize he'd called Ken Cuccinelli that word. (Random quibble, unrelated, not directed at Medievalist. That article incorrectly says that transgender is a noun. It's not. It's an adjective. But it is suppose to be "transgender," not "transgendered," so the article got that part right. Just clarifying for anyone who reads it.)