So I was looking at something on FaceBook that a friend had posted. A friend from Belarus. Never met her, but I am beginning to think I don't want to. A lot of the problem is that she is from Belarus. Isolated little country nestled between Poland, Russia, the Ukraine and Lithuania. It is the last dictatorship in Europe, if you don't include Russia that is.
Last year Belarus had an election and opposition parties were banned and opposition members were arrested and 80% of the populous voted for the dictator, proving that if you ban and arrest everyone but one person, 20% of people will not vote for you. And there were protests and people were arrested and there was a bomb in the subway and people including my friend were being very careful about what they said and did not say on the Internet. Then last year she found a way out and fled to France.
Good news right? While she was in Belarus, she had these weird ideas, spurred on by state repression and state teachings and rural attitude and church teachings, that homosexuality is a sin and amoral. I chalked it up to, lack of exposure.
My sister was racist and she wanted to be a Cop, great combination. I don't know how she got that way, her parents did not teach racism, I know because I have the same parents, but she was. Then she left the North, dreams of Cophood shattered and she went to school in the south, in Cartown. Then she got a job and her boss was a Jamaican woman and suddenly after a year out of the north she was no longer racist. Surprise, black people are just like white people, only they have more skin pigment. Asians, Indians, Americans and the rest are all human, well maybe not Americans, they did reelect Bush after all. So the best way to end racism is exposure in an everyday sense.
So I figure, a year outside of Belarus would expose her to new ideas, new people. Their are black people in France. Their are Muslim people in France. There are black Muslim people in France. Their are gay people in France, their are gay black people in France, there are probably gay black Muslims in France. She goes to university in France, and I can't think of a better place to interact with gay people in France, than in a university. But then I see her post something. Her Belarusian president for life has just stated it is more moral to be a dictator than queer.
And she and her friend are discussing it and how he is right. And I am thinking I am not understanding what they are saying correctly. Google translate and bing translate are not perfect and require some mental jumps and leaps so it is easy to misunderstand, especially when one persons words are untranslatable because a language that uses cyrillic letters is not going to get translated when they use the latin alphabet. But what I was understanding from the conversation was that they still did not understand. That gay people are just people. Neither more or less moral than anyone else.
But, that because a dictator says something, a person who has questionable morality, then it should be treated as suspect. Hitler had Jewish people murdered, he had the Roma murdered, he murdered Russian soldiers (prisoners of war) and he had gay people murdered in concentration camps. Should one not question therefore the morality of homophobia?
I have been propositioned before. A coworker wanted to give me a blowjob. He also confided in me that there was only one man in the company that turned him on. I of course never had a clue until he propositioned me on my last day there. I declined the offer. He had coffee and cigarette breath, but I bare him no animosity, I treated the offer like it was, a compliment and moved on. I know some lovely gay couples, some I consider friends. Single gay people too. But seriously I know straight people, some lovely straight couples, some single straight people too. I know bisexual people too, I am trying to date one, and a former girlfriend is bi too. Bisexual people are people too.
There are people who hate gay people, homophobic people, or as I call them gay people who hate themselves. But this is not true for all people, some homophobic people have never met a gay person before and don't know that they are just people. There are people who think that gay people are people, but that bisexual people are confused and they need to pick a side. Pick a side? They have picked a side, it is called both. The people who say bisexual people need to pick a side, are homophobic too. The third set of straight people are bi-minded they think people are people. I am bi-minded, I am not Polyamorous, but I have no problem with that type of person, hell as long as anyone I feel is a significant other tells me I am okay with it.
I am not okay with people who hate people because they are different from them, genetically or sexually.
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