Peterson Toscano writes It’s About Heterosexism, Silly on the International Day Against Homophobia, and Alan Chambers’ post on the Exodus blog about how he is all in agreement that violence against gay people shouldn’t be tolerated.  Chambers writes…

Today is the International Day Against Homophobia. And, you might be surprised to learn that I support this effort. Homophobia does exist. Irrational fear of those who are gay or lesbian is a real problem in our culture. While I believe we have come a long way, I still see true homophobia at work each and every day.

What a swell guy, eh?  Almost makes you wonder why they’re all so uptight about hate crime laws over at Exodus.  Peterson responds that the lives of gay people are less impacted directly from violence, so much as the premise of heterosexual superiority…

While homophobic attacks happen daily, heterosexism happens by the nano second. A young child gets the message over and over again in books, TV ads, teacher’s examples and even heterosexually paired salt & pepper shakers, that anything other than heterosexual pairing is just not right. Growing up in such a world, with virtually no positive examples of same-sex couples, queer and questioning young people begin to develope a negative sense of self and can even grow quite isolated and suicidal within a society where they do not see themselves reflected or accepted.

Just so.  I’ve often wondered of late, how different my own life might have been had I the chance to grow up in a culture as accepting of same sex pairings as opposite sex ones.  Maybe I’d have found my soul mate by now.  Maybe I did find him long ago, once upon a time, only to loose him due to that relentless hostility toward same sex pairings. 

Once while I was working as a stock clerk at a catalog retailer, I met this really nice guy from one of the branch stores who’d come to the warehouse on an errand.  I think my jaw dropped a little when I caught sight of him, he was so drop dead beautiful.  He saw me looking and flashed a wonderful smile at me.  Some weeks later I had a chance to go to the store he worked at on an errand of my own and the look he gave me when he saw it was me was thrilling.  We didn’t have any time to talk that day, we were both so busy with work related chores.  But I vowed to get his name and phone number the next time we met.  Which should have been the following week.  But his supervisor caught us sharing a smile and I guess she didn’t like the look of it because the next day we were both fired, me ostensibly because my hair was too long.  I never learned why exactly they’d canned him.  I only found out when I tried visiting his store afterwords and was coldly told he wasn’t working there anymore. 

I never saw him again.  I don’t even know his name.  It is one of many junctions in my life that I’ve always wondered about since, wondered about what might have been had they left us alone.  He was real nice.  And that is not the only time something like that has happened to me.

Not one to let a suggestion that gay people be given a measure of human dignity go by without spitting on it, Mike Ensley commented on Chamber’s blog thusly:

The fact is, heterosexuality is innately superior. Only heterosexual partners enjoy the complimentary aspect of their physiology, and only they can produce children.

Ensley is a jackass.  Dr. John Corvino in this lecture on the morality of homosexuality , hilariously addresses that The Parts Don’t Fit argument, with the simple retort that, yes the parts Do fit, and that ought to be obvious since if they didn’t, people wouldn’t do that.  This isn’t rocket science.  It shouldn’t take a micro-watt of brain power to figure that if sex wasn’t gratifying and fulfilling for same sex couples then they wouldn’t do it, let alone take all the risks that same sex couples often have to take, even in this day and age, let alone back when sodomy could still land you in prison, in order to do it.  The trick is…well…you have to be gay in order to find it fulfilling.  If you’re heterosexual, then you won’t.

Because heterosexuals mate to the opposite sex, it’s easy for them to mistake the complementary nature of their relationship for gender.  But the complement isn’t the gender, it’s the person.  What people like Ensley are doing in reality, is denying gay people that intimate, body and soul complementary relationship with another person.  Then they point to how miserable gay people often are as proof of the innate superiority of heterosexuality.  It’s called, building yourself up, by putting other people down.  Ensley is doing a little dance there, over corpses of gay people’s dreams and hopes, as a way of demonstrating the superiority of heterosexuality.  And he has no idea how ugly it looks to anyone with a conscience.

And thus prejudice, eventually, destroys the destroyer.