bogar-chan said:
Well yeah that kind of stuff goes both ways. Just like a religious person shouldn’t intimidate or threaten a gay person because he’s gay, a gay person shouldn’t intimidate or threaten a religious person for being religious. Or am I missing something?
Oh, I don’t disagree that we shouldn’t intimidate or threaten people because of their religion. It’s just that I don’t see a huge rash of that happening at the moment, while I have seen some appallingly nasty things said about LGBTQ people. In that context, it feels like an attempt to perpetuate the “both sides” narrative when LGBTQ people are mostly just trying to defend themselves, and when we’ve been forced into the role of being the subjects that get discussed and debated over and therefore get a whole lot of judgment (good and bad) purely by virtue of being the subject under discussion.
That kinda goes doubly in a context where there are claims being thrown around that it’s somehow an issue of religious freedom to be allowed to discriminate against LGBTQ people. So, the mention of religious freedom made me a bit nervous straight away that people would claim that they were being vilified because of their religion if called a “homophobe” or “bigot”, even if they were called that in response to actually being homophobic and bigoted.
So, it’s less a matter of thinking it’s cool to intimidate or threaten religious people and more that I found it hard to trust that the same standards would be applied for what it means to “vilify” a religious person compared to “vilifying” an LGBTQ person, in the context of a debate where there aren’t any arguments against marriage equality which don’t imply that LGBTQ people aren’t lesser in some way. I feel like there are already people expecting us to deal with hate while judging us for defending ourselves, and I worry that the anti-vilification laws will be used as a weapon toward that end.
(That said, I do also think there’s a difference balance in free speech vs protection from discrimination with regard to protecting groups that have societal power compared to protecting groups which lack that power, so I don’t know that, for example, Christians need protection in the same way as LGBTQ people do, or in the same way that members of minority religious like Muslims or Jewish people do. That’s kinda a side point, as much as I’m happy to go on at length about issues of freedom of speech and hate speech.)
I hope that makes sense?
