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. . . the struggle for racial minority rights is rooted in superiority/inferiority struggles. Whites have justified their "superiority" for millenia, through all sorts of means - religion being one of the most common. Throw slavery in there, along with centuries of Christian biblical "justification", and you've got a whole mess of problems to try to sort out.
With gays, it's . . . different. Very different. We don't have slavery and its impact on racial psyche to deal with. In fact, we have no institutional memory at all, to speak of. We usually come from people UNlike us. They have no memory to impart to us, so we gather it on our own. That makes our coming together as a "people" very difficult, as people's gathered "memories" may be wildly disparate.
The biblical crap is still there, of course, but it's used in a way that's different from the way it was used to subjugate blacks. The Bible was used to justify the treatment of blacks as slaves, but it didn't treat them as abominations, as it does for gays. According to the Bible, gays have no purpose. They are to be executed as creatures abhorrent to God. Their very existence is an abomination, and the tolerance of abomination leads to national judgment. It's THIS tenet, common throughout many religions, that justifies the persecution and murder of gays around the world.
And finally, there's the idea that gays just "choose" to "live a lifestyle." Racial minorities often distance themselves from the gay community's struggle for rights recognition because of this idea, again spread primarily by churches and religion. This is what I was hearing from the woman who spoke first in the video. "Don't try to equate your attempt at getting people to accept your "lifestyle" with our struggle for equal rights as human beings." Ugh.
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