My husband was out of town recently and I had plenty of spare time to look at the junk mail. Since he has donated to various causes in the past, he's been put on mailing lists and we get a lot of stuff (mostly very right wing). Have any of you ever looked at the sort of rhetoric being used out there? 'Militant homosexuals taking over the world', 'Our children are brutally sexualized every day in school', blah, blah, blah. It's nasty, terrible stuff. I can't imagine but that the writers of this stuff A) don't see the opposition as human beings worthy of basic respect and B) don't want anyone who reads this stuff to see them that way either.
I was upset at reading it. I considered shredding it and using it in my new composter (thanks to this list!), but thought that might pollute the heap. What ever happened to debate where people recognized each other's basic humanity and didn't try to lump the opposition into a bunch of aetheistic, homosexual, predatorial perverts out to rape children and take guns away from everyone?
Oh well. Recently I've been looking into the year 1960, when Illinois was the first state in the USA to pass legislation legalizing homosexual acts. (actually it was passed in 1962, but the debate started in 1960). Same stuff and tactics that we see today for and against gay marriage, except that the levels of violence then were higher. More people simply disappearing or being found dead for having the gall to speak out on one side or the other.
So maybe there's been progress after all.
Mary Baker East Side
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