Hi, I'm Zinnia. I make videos for the internet. You can also find me at my blog, on Twitter, and on Facebook.
Kidist Paulos Asrat watches Jeopardy, not knowing she’s about to be assaulted by homosexuality:
One of the contestants last night said something with “my husband” in his commentary. This contestant happens to be a man. It threw us all for a loop. Trebeck didn’t (couldn’t) react, since there is no time to ask detailed questions, and to do so would be “homophobic” in our brave new modern world. The TV crew couldn’t bleep it out since, like Trebek, they have to be as PC as possible. The audience, like me, was given unsolicited information about a controversial social arrangement during a normally pleasant evening show.
Because “my BEEEEEEEEEEEEEP” in the middle of a Jeopardy contestant’s introduction wouldn’t be disruptive or startling at all. That is not the kind of thing the seven-second delay is meant for, so it would give the impression that he had said something far worse than the mere fact that he’s married. It would leave everyone wondering what he said that was so terrible, it had to be bleeped out during Jeopardy of all things.
He’s just married, you ignorant wretch. So what if that’s a “controversial social arrangement” to you? Some people would say the same about single mothers and divorce. The rest of the world isn’t obliged to accommodate your prejudice. That’s your problem, and we don’t have to give your opinions any consideration when we simply go about our married, loving, normal lives.
Bonus! Asrat informs a hapless waiter about the need for an army to fight the gay menace:
“We need to set up an army. We’re going to have to fight them sooner or later. Better get used to that idea.”
Not to mention the hazards of interracial relationships:
For example, a large majority of Asian women are marrying white men and their children invariably end up associating more with their Asian background rather than their European one.
I said as much to another waitress at Fran’s. A group of white men and their Asian girlfriends were at the table next to me. I said to my white waitress: “Doesn’t it bother you when you see so many white men with Asian women? They are taking away your chances of having a husband and children.” The poor girl looked bewildered, but didn’t disagree with me.
I’m pretty damn bewildered right now.
- Answer questions about how I fuck.
- Be “tolerant” of all their dipshit opinons, including but not limited to: acceptance of pedophilia, acceptance of incest, and dismantling of the institution of marriage entirely because that would be better than my wanting a piece.
- Stop looking so gay.
- Never…
It quickly became known as the “neutrality” policy. No one could figure out what it meant. “What is ‘neutral’?” asks instructor Merrick-Lockett. “Teachers are constantly asking, ‘Do you think I could get in trouble for this? Could I get fired for that?’ So a lot of teachers sidestep it. They don’t want to deal with district backlash.”
English teachers worried they’d get in trouble for teaching books by gay authors, or books with gay characters. Social-studies teachers wondered what to do if a student wrote a term paper on gay rights, or how to address current events like “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Health teachers were faced with the impossible task of teaching about AIDS awareness and safe sex without mentioning homosexuality. Many teachers decided once again to keep gay issues from the curriculum altogether, rather than chance saying something that could be interpreted as anything other than neutral.
Without even the pretense of an excuse for their bigotry
Why shouldn’t Ellen DeGeneres be the new spokesperson of J. C. Penney? The American Family Association’s “One Million Moms” project explains:
Funny that JC Penney thinks hiring an open homosexual spokesperson will help their business when most of their customers are traditional families. More sales will be lost than gained unless they replace their spokesperson quickly. Unless JC Penney decides to be neutral in the culture war then their brand transformation will be unsuccessful.
And that’s it. No further reason is provided - simply being “an open homosexual” is intolerably offensive to “traditional families”, who apparently cannot abide by the presence of anyone who isn’t straight. Since when did being “neutral” mean the total exclusion of non-heterosexuals from jobs and public life in general?
“You testified that hotels, motels, and restaurants should be required to serve gay individuals, but you think we should write into the law they should not be required to serve gay married individuals?” Maryland Senator Jamie Raskin questions Brian Raum of the Alliance Defense Fund.
Lying is still probably a bad idea
After my last post about how lying for political gain is actually a massive risk that often goes completely unrecognized by those who naively propose it, some people pointed out a number of related issues. One common reply was that deception in the political arena is actually par for the course, and not an abnormal state of affairs - people largely either don’t care what’s true, won’t take the effort to verify claims, or can’t get the word out even if they do uncover lies.
Even if that is the case, consciously deciding to lie in order to effect a certain goal still means betting that your willful deception won’t be revealed. It means hoping that a critical mass of people simply won’t notice or won’t care that you’ve lied to them. In politics, that is far from guaranteed, especially in the long run.
Sometimes, it may work for a while:
But not necessarily forever:
Even taking an especially cynical stance, one must acknowledge that lies (such as the purported inferiority of racial minorities, women, sexual and gender minorities, the disabled, and so on) are sometimes noticed, including large and widespread lies. With this realization, action may be taken. Political apathy, common and infinitely renewable as it may seem, is not a constant, and not all lies can be passed off without consequence.
In choosing to lie, you’re taking the risk that your deception will come to light, and potentially backfire. Further, you do not have an accurate sense of the likelihood of this happening, or of what the consequences of its revelation may be. You’re aiming for a certain outcome, but with no idea of what might happen if you were to fail, or how probable your loss is. This can scarcely be considered an informed decision on your part. As a strategy for success, it’s essentially just recklessness, worse even than a blind bet: you do not even know how much you stand to lose. And being so confident that your lie will be accepted that any possibility of loss can be ignored is not warranted by historical trends.
Others posed the familiar problem of the inquiring murderers: If you are concealing Jewish refugees in your home, and Nazis come to your door to ask if you’re hiding any Jews, would it be wrong to lie? The simplicity of this scenario makes the answer both easy and useless for any wider purpose. This is the entirety of the question: Action A (not lying) will result in the unjust deaths of innocent people (negative outcome). Action B (lying) will result in their survival (positive outcome). You pick one, the scenario is concluded, and you’re left with the results of your decision.
In an unrealistically simple hypothetical situation like this, the answer is obvious assuming you value the lives of innocent people over their deaths. You pick Action B, lie to the Nazis, and your guests survive. The simulation ends and there is nothing more to it than that. There are no wider consequences. There is nothing unanticipated.
And what happens if your lie is discovered? If the Nazis find out, the results would be no worse than if you had told them the truth in the first place. (Even with this possibility added into the mix, lying is still the superior choice, as the probability of the deaths of your refugees is only 1 times the chance that the Nazis will catch you lying, as opposed to a probability of 1 altogether if you had not lied.) And if, after the war and the fall of Nazi Germany, others find out that you lied and call you to account for this? Then you tell them you were placed in a hypothetical scenario where lying was 100% certain to save innocent lives, and not lying was 100% certain to result in their deaths, with no consequences beyond that. And they tell you “Oh, okay, we understand. We would have done the same thing.”
If every ethical question involving honesty or dishonesty were as uncomplicated, limited in scope and consequences, and absolute in the certainty that given outcomes will result from specified actions, then the answers would always be this easy. In reality, they rarely are this simple, and neither are the answers. Some people posited scenarios such as “There are people who want to kill gay people because they think it’s a (wrong) choice”. Such hypotheticals fall under the same category as the inquiring murderers problem: unrealistically simple and useless for any practical purpose.
People make the same mistake when they envision the question at hand as actually being this basic: “If we tell people Statement A, they will hold Belief A, and this will be good for us. If we tell people Statement B, they will hold Belief B, and this will be bad for us.” With this reasoning, they conclude that we should tell people Statement A, and that’s that. No consideration is given to whether a certain belief is indeed reliably induced by exposure to a particular statement, or what other beliefs might result instead, or what precisely those “good” and “bad” results for us truly consist of, or even the actual truth of any of these statements and the possible consequences of willful dishonesty.
This oversimplified model thus fails to reflect reality in any way whatsoever, and those who use it as a guideline for how to act are neglecting to take the complexities of reality into account. I could just as well say that telling people that gay people choose their orientation gives them hope that gay people can change, and makes them less inclined to kill gay people than they otherwise would be. But have I provided any evidence that their current beliefs are leading to the alleged result, or that their holding of the proposed belief would lead to the desired result, or that they would even hold the belief we want them to if we told them this? No, and my claim would not be persuasive. Similarly unjustified claims are similarly unpersuasive.
Obviously, the same criticism applies equally whether you’ve poorly thought out the potential results of lying or telling the truth. There can be risks and uncertainties in either case. This is not as easy as a straightforward calculation of utility - it is a complex calculation of utility. But when you choose to lie, one thing is assured: You have made it the truth that you aimed to deceive people. It’s now an aspect of reality that is there for people to discover. It creates a vulnerability that telling the truth does not. Don’t forget to factor that in.
