Exclusive groups for minorities exist because the public space is dominated by the majority. You cannot “discriminate” against a majority.
I’m not saying that gay people can’t hold prejudices against straight people. I’m saying there’s a very good reason why we have black history month - because the other 11 are white history months, by default.
Look at the difference in argument.
The gay group is using well documented slurs against gays as a rationale for remaining exclusively gay.
Now look at some of the groups that specificallly exclude gays. You’ll find that a common theme is bigotry, or at the very least a desire to reinforce the heteronormative viewpoint.
The first group is dedicated to expanding the safe space for their members without completely excluding other folks. Pro majority groups are generally interested in eliminating or reducing the societal safe space of minorities, generally through bigotry and hate speech.
These are two very different goals, and most people intuitively recognize that one is an unfortunate necessity given the existence of bigotry, and the other is often a vile engine for spreading bigotry. Simple reason being that a member of the majority doesn’t typically feel the need to exclude minorities from activities, so the ones that do are generally bigots even if the stated intention of the club isnt bigotry.
So while you could probably get away with starting a perfectly innocent straight or white only club, don’t expect the people who sign up to be the kind of people you’d want to hang out with.
I think you have a fair point, but I must demur. I take a broader view of discrimination, and I think that gays discriminating against straight guys is just as wrong as a majority discriminating against them.
Also, I would submit that the determination of minority or majority may be true across a wide geography, but may not be true in a very specific environment. For example, gays living in Gaytown USA would form the majority, and I think excluding the local straight guys would be discriminatory. It’s hard to draw the line on such issues, and as such I favour simply not allowing discrimination, reverse or otherwise.
If the straight teams are hurling insulting remarks, this should be handled from a disciplinary basis, not by the gays “taking the ball and going home” so to speak.
I wonder if you need to be bisexual to be a switch hitter in this league?
It’s not hard to draw the line, but it is inconvenient when drawn because simply pretending that fair rules equal fair play for everyone is what the revised majority defense mechanism in America is built on. Admittedly, that’s far preferable to the previous approach of “separate but equal”, but similarly convenient for minimizing how much privilege must be yielded.
Minorities can be prejudiced, but they must benefit systemically from that prejudice in order to be genuinely discriminatory against another group. You can create micro-slices where one minority discriminates against another group, and you can create hypotheticals where a minority could discriminate broadly such as your all-gay town, but those aren’t counter-arguments so much as illustrations of just how irrational arguing against discrimination in stories like this really is.
At most, it’s an example of a private organization with standards that I don’t agree with and goals that I think are a petty approach to mixing civil rights and sports. But it’s so far into A BLOO BLOO BLOO territory to mourn the firing of straight people off a gay softball team that I can’t even chart a route to it.
I used to agree with you, less than a decade ago and all over this board. I’ve tried to explain why, since then, a number of times, at various stages in my change in opinions, but I don’t know that I’ll ever figure out a way to defuse the various landmines that it seems only personal experience can bridge, and then only erratically.
Reading the article and hearing the barrage of questions on sexuality which the board subjected the bisexual/straight players to really affirmed my position. Gay or otherwise, it is thoroughly unpleasant for strangers to question your sexual orientation and to determine your rights depending on your answer.
While I agree that minorities must be protected, but I do not believe that one of the ways to do so is to allow reverse discrimination.
That said, this is not easily made consistent with the right of private organisations to adopt their own rules.
I guess there’s no neat solution to this, and I won’t come out to call anyone taking a different position out and out wrong, but I do feel that there’s still merit to taking a clear position against discrimination - I feel that having a clear position makes reduces the amount of grey that prejudice can hide behind. Prejudice works both ways.
Thoroughly unpleasant, sure. But only if the answer is “gay or otherwise” rather than straight does it have material consequences at a systemic level. That distinction matters, and while it is certainly your prerogative as a member of a majority to assume that the rules that give inherent advantage to your position are also the best ones overall, it
While I agree that minorities must be protected, but I do not believe that one of the ways to do so is to allow reverse discrimination.
I don’t think, as you go on to note, that most forms of prejudice are against the law or even desirable to prevent; the unintended consequences of such intervention in terms of personal liberty are often worse than the problem they attempt to solve. It’s not within your purview as a citizen or even as a hypothetical rational lawmaker to allow or object through legal action to prejudice or discrimination outside of a few egregiously problematic examples that have been written into constitutions and gradually had precedent crafted around them.
You can be personally offended and critical, just as you would presumably be of crude hetero-normative behavior in the locker room (I know, as if that existed!). But it’s not the same thing to be the minority recipient of prejudice as it is to be the majority recipient, as evidenced by the fact that you and I are talking about the recruiting practices of a goddamned amateur softball team in a place I’ve never been.
That said, this is not easily made consistent with the right of private organisations to adopt their own rules.
I guess there’s no neat solution to this, and I won’t come out to call anyone taking a different position out and out wrong, but I do feel that there’s still merit to taking a clear position against discrimination - I feel that having a clear position makes reduces the amount of grey that prejudice can hide behind. Prejudice works both ways.
It does, but not with the same consequences.
I think Boy Scouts vs. Dale is probably applicable here. The baseball team has the right to freedom of association.
If the BSA can still kick gays out, then this softball team is well within it’s rights.
How do they prove they are gay or not gay?
Same way the Boy Scouts exclude atheists and other undesirables: asking uncomfortable, arguably inappropriate questions and then giving you the boot when evidence arises that you were not truthful.
Seems a little unreliable. I mean if you really wanted to play you could probably bluff your way through.
Sure, but you’d have to find straight men that want to play softball that badly but somehow don’t have access to a regular team in their area.
Look, I only have access to what’s in the news story wrt softball, and I’m about 20 years out of date on Boy Scout screening rituals. You’re just going to have to find out for yourself.
If you read the link in the Supreme Court decision, Dale was kicked out of the BSA because he was publicly a member of various gay groups.
If gays grouped together in your ridiculous town example and started preventing other people from getting jobs and just generally hating on not gay folks, that would be wrong for exactly the same reason as any other majority club forcing its viewpoint down the throats of others and using a position of dominance to exclude others.
The whole point of clubs that exclude the majority is that the majority tends to be the group spewing the hate speech against the minority, be it a sexual or ethnic or religious minority. Not every member of the majority does it, but a non-trivial number do indeed engage in that sort of close minded thought. And if a minority wants to exclude most members of the majority so as to preserve their right to not be hated on, that seems fair.
Reinforcing that alienation by forming majority only groups defended by hate speech is not the same thing at all.
In an ideal world, there’d be no need for discrimination of any kind. Unfortunately this is still a world where gays are prevented from marrying, and where it is considered acceptable to say hateful things about them and use words like gay as an insult. So, in that case, it seems like it’s justified.
This kind of stuff varies hugely from troop to troop.
Some are run by scouting obsessed religious douchebags who enforce it.
And others are run by overachieving parents who don’t give a flying fuck what the kids say, they’re all getting merit badges and stuff to put on their college apps.
I was pretty open about being an atheist, and told to just keep quiet during the god parts and that I could skip church stuff. Considering the kind of shit other kids in the troop got up to (teenage males sharing tents, use your imagination), I’m pretty certain I’d have had to buttfuck someone on stage at a Jamboree (which we never attended, because we weren’t that kind of troop) to get the boot.
So, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I’m pretty sure that it shouldn’t be necessary, and gay kids and atheists should be allowed to join Scouts if they want to. Not sure why you’d want to join that weird ass institution, but whatever.
But it’s a World Series, how often do bar league guys get to play in one of them! Plus they are probably friends with their teammates and want to win. I could see guys bullshitting in order to get to play in it.
Are you posting from the fictional Bosom Buddies universe?
The Scouts taught me lots of stuff, including how to tie knots and rig a shelter, navigate terrain and so forth. Lots of outdoor activity.
I suspect different scout troops in different countries may focus on different things, so maybe your perception is coloured by what you’ve seen personally.
If you enjoyed it, more power to you. I have a feeling your experiences were a decade or so before mine, which might explain some of the big difference in what we feel towards, and what we learned from, the institution.
I will say that I put up with a lot of crap to pick up some stupid awards. Like the Order of the Arrow thing, a local award from a small Carolina camp.
They basically had us clean the camp up, refused to let us talk and fed us a cracker and half a hot dog over a two day period. That food amount is not an exaggeration, that was literally our entire personal ration. And all of it occurred during a Carolina summer which, you might imagine, isn’t a pleasant thing to work outdoors during. Especially when you’re not allowed to bathe that night, and are forced to sleep on the ground.
They sold it as an initiation thing, but it was really just another exploitative business practice shoehorned into the mix of generally fubared stuff camps like that regularly pulled.
The first troop I joined fell apart due to financial malfeasance – basically the troop leader was scamming everyone out of the dues. The second one, as I’ve probably mentioned before, was led by a drug abusing alcoholic with manic depression. He never got up to anything really crazy as the parents kept him on a short leash, but it was clear he was only doing it because no one else wanted the job.
But, hey, at least they weren’t gay.