Quote:
Originally posted by BrianR
They haven't heard "An armed society is a polite society."
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Actually, they probably have. The issue seems to be that they have queers stereotyped as people who want to disarm erverybody, and who seek special privileges (a special "hate crime" category, for example) rather than *equal* rights.
They have to actually *see* and experience out queer folks who believe in the individual right of armed self-defense for all people to break that stereotype. That's one thing that the Pink Pistols is about.
One of the early reactions we often hear when folks first hear about the Pistols is "Oh, you just support arming gay people?", and they have to think a minute when our answer is: "No, we support the right of armed individual self-defense for *all* people. We place special emphasis on the importance of it for queer folk, since we're usually stereotyped as hoplophobes, and we believe that stereotype is dangerous to us as a group."
That's a little bit easier for straight people to understand than issues like "gay marriage" or "gay adoption", which come across as "special interest" issues. The difference is, of course, that there's not much controversy about the rights of *straight* people to marry or adopt (although there's still racial issues about adoption in some areas) .
But the individual right to armed self-defense is still *not* universally respected, even within the US. So when the homophobes find out the homos aren't all hoplophobes, it's a real conciousness-raising expereience for them.
Rosie O'Donnell, for example, has done *enormous* damage to efforts to reverse that stereotype. And most of the anti-gay rants I've heard in the armed citizen community have started off with Rosie-bashing. Rosie hasn't exactly been a poster child for gay pride, either.
Again let me emphasize: most of the armed citizens I've met are content in general to let queer folks live their own lives, even if they still have doubts about gay marriage or gay adoption. But the level of acceptance for queer folks within, say, the NRA, hasn't risen to the level where someone engaging in queer bashing in the context of a panel discussion at the NRA convention (this did happen quite recently) would be frowned on openly by those present.