Posted on 10/24/2002 2:35:46 PM PDT by MindBender26
Would they then be cured?
Who knows, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least. ...And it also wouldn't surprise me that if true, the media will brush this under the carpet so fast it'll make your head spin .....just like they did with the Rat Boy Lindh/Homo Dad story.
"homo" can be either "mankind" or "same" If it is taken to be "same" then it refers to "same sex" in the word "homophobe" and is inappropriately applied for political reasons. Very few people fear homosexuals ("same" sex affinity). Those that do or who have an uncontrollable violent reaction to the presence of a homosexual are "homophobic".
at least the facts/story went national/international
Homo in Latin means "man" in the general sense (mankind) . . . "vir" is for man in the sense of a male human being. In Greek the same distinction is made between "anthropos" (human being) and "anir" (male human being).
OK, etymology lesson over. (See, my minor in Classics wasn't wasted after all!)
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Sex as Power; Denial as Safety
Sexual relations in Middle Eastern societies have historically articulated social hierarchies, that is, dominant and subordinate social positions: adult men on top; women, boys and slaves below. The distinction made by modern Western "sexuality" between sexual and gender identity, that is, between kinds of sexual predilections [and] degrees of masculinity and femininity, has, until recently, had little resonance in the Middle East. Both dominant/subordinate and heterosexual/homosexual categorizations are structures of power. They position people as powerful or powerless, "normal" or "deviant." The contemporary concept of "queerness" resists all such categorizing in favor of recognizing more complex realities of multiple and shifting positions of sexuality, identity and power.
In early 1993, news of President Clinton's proposal to end the US military's ban on service by homosexuals prompted a young Egyptian man in Cairo, eager to practice his English, to ask me why the president wanted "to ruin the American army" by admitting "those who are not men or women." When asked if "those" would include a married man who also liked to have sex with adolescent boys, he unhesitatingly answered "no." For this Egyptian, a Western "homosexual" was not readily comprehensible as a man or a woman, while a man who had sex with both women and boys was simply doing what men do. It is not the existence of same-sex sexual relations that is new but their association with essentialist sexual identities rather than hierarchies of age, class or status.
A recent study of family and urban politics in Cairo suggests that social taboos and silences relating to sexual behavior provide a space of negotiability.1 They accommodate discreet incidents of otherwise publicly condemned illicit sexual behavior--adultery, homosexuality, premarital sex--provided that paramount values of family maintenance and reproduction and supporting social networks are not threatened. Such silences, however, leave normative constructions of licit and illicit sexual behavior unchallenged, sustain patriarchal family values, and legitimize patterns of sexual violence such as honor crimes, female circumcision and gay bashing.2
Also in 1993, an Egyptian physician affiliated with Cairo's Qasr al-'Aini Hospital informed me that AIDS and venereal diseases were not problems in Egypt because neither prostitution nor homosexuality exist in an Islamic country. While this statement may express conventions deemed appropriate for conversations with foreigners, it is profoundly ahistorical. Over the centuries, Islamic societies have accorded prostitution much the same levels of intermittent toleration, regulation and repression as their Christian counterparts and, until recently, have been more tolerant of same-sex sexual practices.3
Denying the existence of transgressive sexual practices helps obscure the ideological nature of "transgression," making it difficult, for example, to see prostitutes as workers who support themselves or their families by performing services for which there is a social demand. Such denials also legitimize failures to respond effectively to public health concerns such as AIDS.4
Not by the pre-schoolers who are the show's intended audience, and who Falwell's newsletter claimed were being corrupted by it. They're STUFFED ANIMALS for crying out loud! None of them ever had their gender indicated by the show, much less their sexual orientation. If any little kid ever got the idea that one of these stuffed animals was homosexual, they could only have gotten it from a nutty parent who'd been reading Falwell's newsletter -- not from the show.
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