Reply #39: I don't blame the 'German politicians' as much as... [View All]

[Sapphocrat]

...the "German people." Oh, yours is more than an apt comparison, IG -- but politicians get away with only as much as the people allow them to. There's strength in numbers, but the "numbers" are too sluggish or scared to force the politicians to do what is right and just (or maybe they're just not-so-secretly happy to see us queers finally get payback for flying in the face of their many outmoded "traditions").

I once knew a man who, at five years old, escaped Nazi Germany with his mother. Why they had to "escape," he never made clear -- which was no surprise, as he was a WWII revisionist who still pledged his allegiance to a country he hadn't seen in 40 years -- and who refused to believe that the Nazis gassed even one Jew, let alone six million.

Of course we argued, constantly. His argument invariably boiled down to this:

1. There was no Holocaust.

2. If there was a Holocaust, the German people knew nothing about it.

3. If the German people did know about it, well, then, they must have had a very good reason for letting it happen.

I think that is the the sort of "argument" we are going to hear down the road, when somebody asks, "Why did the American people allow the government to confer permanent second-class citizenship on gay people back in 200x?"