The majority of Star Trek fans are everything that the philosophy of IDIC could possibly want. But every so often, the exact sort of intolerance that is antithetical to the world of Trek rears its head. Witness the following letter to author Andy Mangels, and Andy’s scathingly witty reply. Obviously, as the creator of the bi-sexed Burgoyne in “New Frontier,” I’ve found the letter particularly interesting. Although the letter is reprinted with Andy’s permission, I’ve taken the liberty of mercifully omitting the author’s name.
Dear Mr. Mangels,
> Thank you for writing stories that reside in the Star Trek Universe. I have
> enjoyed quite a few of your offerings in the past and am a very loyal fan of
> the series ever since it originally aired.
> While trying to catch up on a huge backlog of Star Trek reading, I finally
> got around to reading your Enterprise novel, ‘The Good That Men Do’. I
> really enjoyed the novel, as it very nicely intertwined various broadcasts of the
> series and added a few twists. However, I am very disappointed in your
> creation of a gay couple, Trip Tucker’s brother Albert, into the story near the
> very end. It soiled an ‘up to that point’ excellent read and was totally
> unnecessary.
> This is the first time that I have ever felt the need to comment on anything
> written in the Star Trek genre. But please keep your activism out of the
> Star Trek Universe.
> Sincerely,
(NAME WITHELD BY PAD)
>
>
(ANDY’S RESPONSE)
Thanks for your support in the past, and glad you’ve enjoyed some of our
writing. I suspect that will now change.
I’ve forwarded your email to my HETEROSEXUAL co-writer, Michael A. Martin,
who created and wrote the scenes with the gay couple in question, without ANY
prompting from me. I’ll let him respond to your bigotry.
Meanwhile, you can thank me – the fággøŧ with the agenda – for writing the
scene with Trip praying early on, and the scene where he discusses church and
faith in God with Phuong. Not the first faith-based scenes I’ve written for
Trek, and won’t be the last. I just don’t believe that God condones hatred.
It’s sad and pathetic that fans of a series based on the principal “Infinite
Diversity in Infinite Combinations” — and who regularly read and enjoy books
wherein characters of DIFFERENT SPECIES engage in romantic relationships — get
their bigotry hats on when faced with gay characters.
I don’t doubt that people who express ideas exactly like yours were similarly
objecting to Uhura and Kirk kissing, but thankfully, such anti-black bigotry
has been beaten back mostly. I look forward to the day when people who hate
others for loving are as unwelcome as a fart in church.
Best,
Andy Mangels
• 
I have little tolerance for intolerance.
I read the Corps books. While they include a gay character, and he makes frequent references to his partner back home, it’s not wedged into the story the way Mangels & Martin do it.
Eh, I was expecting something I could really be outraged by, but that’s just run of the mill homophobia, the kind I see every day. I’ve read much worse, including one on the letters page of Young Avengers, which incited me to write a rebuttal (which didn’t get published).
Firstly I wonder if the writer of the comment actually meant “soiled” or just mis-typed “spoiled”.
Secondly, if you support the right – for want of a better word – to be gay you kind of have to support the right to be a bigoted git. Hopefully evolution will catch up eventually.
Personally, there are only two circumstances in which I care AT ALL about a person’s gender preferences; if I fancy her or if he fancies me.
Been there, done that, survived, both cases.
Moving on now.
Cheers.
Thanks to all for the kind comments. I don’t want to distract from the thread subject, so I will just reply to Bill M.
As far as I know, the only thing that will stop this guy is death. A lot of time has passed, and I will always hope that whatever damage he may have done will be turned to the good someday, and that when he passes from the mortal plain, he will be able to review and fit how his actions defined him in this life, and how next he would like to proceed. I don’t want to sound all “New-Age”-y, but that is how I really feel. However, emotionally it is still something I struggle with. Thanks again, everyone.
Bryan
From roger Tang: “Given that anti-homosexual sentiment is frequently connected with religious motivations (and almost always so on the political level), no, I don’t think so.”
Of course the two often go hand-in-hand, but read the letter. There was no hint at all that the guy was religious. Yet Mr. Mangels and most of the posters on this thread are talking about religion. I’m not a big fan of gay-haters or bible-thumpers. But one does not necessarily follow the other and to assume that it does it most certainly prejudicial. Further, to see such a nice bunch of folks who so obviously value the IDIC principles allow themselves to, so easily, make prejudiced assumptions is fabulously ironic.
So, I guess my point is that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t call the kettle black no matter what universe they’re in.
All this talk of toleration, yet I don’t see a one of you tolerating the letters author’s bigotry….
That would work on the poor presumption that bigotry is acceptable.
Which, of course, it shouldn’t be.
No, I would still deny that.
At most, this is an assumption that will turn out not to be true, which is not the same as prejudice. Foolish, but hardly prejudice.
Mangels is not attacking religion, nor is he condemning religion as a whole or even a particular sect of religion. At most, he is criticizing a particular interpretation of religion, one which is not universally shared within the proponents. That hardly qualifies as prejudice.
This sort of distortion really weakens the language.
Moreover, consider that Mangels has most certainly been the target of anti-homosexual bigotry. He certainly has experience with it, and knows all too well what goes with it. Telling him that HE’s the one being prejudiced seems to be a bit too close to blaming the victim. He could very well be mistaken in his assumptions…but prejudiced? Meh.
“Remember that NextGen episode where Riker fell for the alien from a unisexual (?) species, played by the gal from “The A-Team”? “
In the episode, “she” decided her sexual identity was female after falling for Riker. I always thought it would be amusing to see Riker’s reaction if she had decided that she was male after being with Riker.
Hatred is ugly, not matter the form it takes; the shocking outburst of Michael Richards, the drunken ramblings of Mel Gibson or the response made by Andy Mangels.
My father, whenever he got cut off would yell “bìŧçh” at the other driver. He never bothered to check if the other driver was a man or a woman. He was simply a woman hating, wife beating áhølë, and everyone who upset him was instantly ‘as low as’ a woman. That is EXACTLY what Andy did in his response. He got pushed, then pushed back at the group that he wants the attacker to be a part of.
Now some of you might argue that Andy was justified in his reply because many, many people who are homophobes claim to be religious. Well, there was a 50/50 chance that the driver that cut off my dad was a woman. His occasionally being correct about the gender doesn’t make his outburst ‘right’ all of a sudden. It doesn’t make it fair either.
It is reasonable to believe that the author of the letter is homophobic (his use of ‘soiled’ convinced me of that), but Andy Mangels chose to display his own anti-religious bigotry. That’s OK though. Religious people are worthy of disdain because they choose their identity. That choice in lifestyle makes them ‘fair game’ to attack, on par with fat people, gun owners, or smokers (it must suck to be all four…). If contempt for religion was not so commonplace, then why did almost everyone who has called themselves religious on this page need to qualify it? Why did they need to say ‘I’m religious, but I’m one of the good ‘uns…’?
Maybe what anti-religious bigotry needs is a word like ‘homophobe’; a word that reflects the hate back on its source. That way it can be identified, and eventually shamed out of existence. The word atheist doesn’t work because it is a legitimate stance in the non-existence of a god, and is not by itself an attack on religion. Heretic and infidel are also inaccurate, archaic and corny. Theophobe? Religicist? Someone should work on that.
PAD, you said you found his response “interesting”, but didn’t spell out what you found interesting about it. Was that it? Was his counterassault on religious people the compelling part of this exchange? You attend religious services, so you are part of the group he is dumping into the homophobe camp. Is that why you mentioned Burgy at the beginning of your post? Did you feel a need to flash your ‘street cred’ in order to defend yourself?
You are assuming that Mangels himself is not religious. This is contradicted by his response.
NOW who’s being prejudiced?
So Mangels demonstrates his “anti-religious bigotry” by talking about his positive depiction of religious belief in the books, and invoking his view of God? Uh-huh.
Thomas E. Reed said “I don’t think the human race, as a whole, will ever get rid of prejudice. It is the cockroach of the human soul.”
Every living creature on the planet is prejudiced. It’s a survival instinct. Of course we won’t get rid of it. The key is to recognise and control it so that it doesn’t control you.
As a white hetero male raised as a liberal Democrat, I like to pride myself on the idea that I don’t hate anybody, or any group of people. But I know I have prejudices. If I see a group of young black males dressed in baggy “hip hop” style clothes walking towards me, I feel nervous. If the same group is dressed in suits, I don’t worry at all. Since all but one homosexual male I have ever met(that I know of) have been really cool and decent guys, I’ve never developed any negative feelings towards them.(and since I don’t have the best of luck with the ladies, I’m just as glad for less competition.)
“I realize that there are those people who do not love their fellow man, and I HATE people like that!” – Tom Lehrer
PAD, you said you found his response “interesting”, but didn’t spell out what you found interesting about it. Was that it? Was his counterassault on religious people the compelling part of this exchange? You attend religious services, so you are part of the group he is dumping into the homophobe camp. Is that why you mentioned Burgy at the beginning of your post? Did you feel a need to flash your ‘street cred’ in order to defend yourself?
Uh…no. To even ask that question, you literally rewrote–at least in your own head–my initial post. I in fact did NOT mention Burgy at the beginning of the post. I mentioned hir toward the latter part of the post, specifically in conjunction with my saying I found the letter “interesting.” For you to make the associations that you have, you had to take apart my post and put it back together in a random order so as to ascribe meaning other than what was blindingly obvious: Because I created a character who had sexual liaisons with both genders set in the Trek universe–a character that has been, I should mention, embraced by the gay community–I found a letter laced with homophobia to be interesting. Anything else you’re ascribing to it indicates an almost aggressive attempt to misunderstand what I wrote. Frankly whenever I see such aggressive misunderstanding, typically there’s some other agenda at work. Usually it becomes evident in subsequent posts, so I’ll wait and see.
PAD
roger Tang: “At most, this is an assumption that will turn out not to be true, which is not the same as prejudice. Foolish, but hardly prejudice.
Mangels is not attacking religion, nor is he condemning religion as a whole or even a particular sect of religion. At most, he is criticizing a particular interpretation of religion, one which is not universally shared within the proponents. That hardly qualifies as prejudice.
This sort of distortion really weakens the language.”
My friend, let’s not overcomplicate this. I never implied that he was attacking religion. I said that I found it “ironic” that Mangel’s response and the subsequent posts on this thread turned towards the topic of religion when the original letter made absolutely no mention of any religion of any variety.
It’s ironic because the community of posters on this thread seem to be very pro-diversity. Yet it didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the dope who wrote about not enjoying the gay stuff in the book might not care one lick about religion. He wrote a couple of idiotic sentences (idiotic because if he can’t accept gays in a Trek universe, then he just doesn’t get Trek,) and a pretty big group of folks who don’t want to pre-judge folks based on minimal information did exactly that. I don’t think any less of anyone for it. It’s just kind of funny how easily we can slip into that sort of behavior. So let’s have a little chuckle at ourselves, okay?
Just to be abundantly clear, I do not begrudge Mr. Mangel one word of his response. That was between him and the letter-writer.
Late to the game…
Blue Spider: “and yet it doesn’t sound very warm, tolerant and understanding when one confronts a very honest difference in belief regarding sex, or a discomfort regarding a sexual topic, with an accusation of “bigotry”. Generally I find such labellings as acts of bigotry in and of themselves.”
Spider, I’m not sure you can honestly say that here or about the objections being raised to the letter writer. This wasn’t an objection to a plotline, a subplot or a major story device that was used in any way, shape or form to push an agenda” or some such nonsense. This was a couple of characters just showing up and someone taking the time to write and complain that “It soiled an ‘up to that point’ excellent read” for the simple reason that a gay couple was described in the book to have existed at all in the Trek universe.
Anyone who would write in and complain that a heterosexual couple being written into a story “soiled” a novel for them would be rightly called an idiot and a crank. Anyone writing in, and for the first time if the letter writer is to be believed, to complain that the mere existence of a gay couple in the tail end of a book “soiled” the entire reading experience is also rightly called an idiot, a crank or a bigot.
Sean: “Guess I’ll have to wait a couple more years.”
That’s optimistic. Maybe a couple more decades is the unfortunate reality.
Andy: “Secondly, perhaps Mangels filtered the letter with an apparent (perhaps slight) hyper-sensitivity to gay culture. The initial response was relatively benign (while the “keep your activism out of my Star Trek” is certainly presumptuous I don’t know that you can necessarily assume that it is bigotry).”
The letter writer’s comment…
” However, I am very disappointed in your creation of a gay couple, Trip Tucker’s brother Albert, into the story near the very end.”
… would seem to lean heavily towards a bigoted nature. We can’t know for sure, but how likely is it that this guy has ever written any letters to the Trek writers for creating straight couples in any part of their stories? Throw in the “activism” comment and you’re likely looking at someone who hates the idea of having gay couples even acknowledged to even exist in whatever fiction that he’s reading. Despite what you feel was a benign nature; I get a lot of this kind of thing around my work environment all the time. We get protesters and groups all the time who use the exact same language and phrasing. If those relatively “benign” individuals could get their way, there would be no acknowledgements or references to gays anywhere for any reason other then to condemn them for “their sins” and whatnot.
Christine: “That’s an interesting question. I’ve talked with folks who are totally skeeved by male partners, but had absolutely no problem with lesbians. Odd, but true…”
Ditto. And, just hazarding a guess here, most of the people you know who hate gays but express no real problems with lesbians are male? Can’t figure out why I think that may be the case…
Kyle: “All this talk of toleration, yet I don’t see a one of you tolerating the letters author’s bigotry…. IDIC indeed, for shame…for shame”
And would you feel the same if the letter writer was complaining that the existence of an interracial couple or a non-Christian couple “soiled” the entire reading experience for them? Besides, there is a difference between intolerance itself and responding to intolerance. Not feeling comfortable about gays, not allowing gays in your home or flat believing that gays will all burn in hëll is basically ok. Tour beliefs are your beliefs and you have every right to hold them. However, the minute you choose to express those views in a public venue and in a challenging/chastising/intolerant manner, you open yourself open to counter arguments. If you write a creator and complain that they “soiled” their creation by including something that you disapprove of, you then open yourself up to rebuttal.
It would be no different if someone with a pro-gay stance were to start loudly and repeatedly declaring that they were gay and that the rest of us had to live with it. I don’t care if you’re gay or not, but the minute you start trying to make a public spectacle or debate of it, then you open yourself up to rebuttal about either your stance or your actions and have no room to complain.
As for my opinion of this:
I’m not surprised. I’ve always found that Trek fans, sci-fi fans, fantasy fans and comic fans have always had the odd group of bigots and hypocrites amongst them. I used to work with a guy back in Florida who was a major Trek fan, loved Klingons, wrote the odd fan fiction where a character that was a thinly disguised version of himself was involved romantically with the half Klingon female brought into ST:TNG as Worf’s old flame and was adamantly anti-black. He got himself arrested along with a group of friends of his for trashing an interracial couple’s car and yard late one night. Back when Falwell died, I posted about how odd it was that people here, people who criticized the voices of the right for taking glee in or desiring the death of a political opponent, would express glee at his passing rather then taking the higher road that the fictional characters that they claim to admire or be inspired by.
Admittedly, it’s the minority of fans that express this type of hypocrisy, but it’s still a rather amusing thing to look at. I’ve always found the odd fan that seems to love the diversity of fictional worlds but espouses absolute intolerance for such diversity in the real world to be an interesting phenomenon. How you can find the idea of having a Wookie as a best friend, a lover who’s another species entirely or an entire galaxy of diverse religions cool, exciting, desirable and admirable, but then turn around and spew hatred at someone because the tint of their skin is different then your own is beyond me.
Jerry wrote:
How you can find the idea of having a Wookie as a best friend, a lover who’s another species entirely or an entire galaxy of diverse religions cool, exciting, desirable and admirable, but then turn around and spew hatred at someone because the tint of their skin is different then your own is beyond me.
One is regarded as fantasy and the other is sadly a reality.
Peter David: Uh…no. To even ask that question, you literally rewrote–at least in your own head–my initial post. I in fact did NOT mention Burgy at the beginning of the post. I mentioned hir toward the latter part of the post, specifically in conjunction with my saying I found the letter “interesting.” For you to make the associations that you have, you had to take apart my post and put it back together in a random order so as to ascribe meaning other than what was blindingly obvious: Because I created a character who had sexual liaisons with both genders set in the Trek universe–a character that has been, I should mention, embraced by the gay community–I found a letter laced with homophobia to be interesting. Anything else you’re ascribing to it indicates an almost aggressive attempt to misunderstand what I wrote. Frankly whenever I see such aggressive misunderstanding, typically there’s some other agenda at work. Usually it becomes evident in subsequent posts, so I’ll wait and see.
Luigi Novi: Well, he may have misunderstood what you said, and perhaps didn’t look closely enough at your post when composing his response, but I really don’t see anything “aggressive” in it, much less rewriting it or taking it apart, etc. Yeah, such responses can indicate an agenda, but only after a pattern of behavior emerges over a period of time. You could’ve waited for such a pattern to emerge, rather than ripping him a new one for this one post, in which he seemed to me to have merely asked a question. 🙂
To those who think tolerance should extend to the intolerant, I have this to say: comparing what two consenting adults do to attacking, verbally or physically, a non-nconsenting adult is simply ridiculous.
That said, I think Mr. Margols response was excessive.
I also want to add that I think not having a gay character says more than the inclusion of one does. Now if he were to right a book where every character was gay, then you might have an argument.
Bryan, I’m sorry to hear about your experiences. I fully understand where you are coming from, and I think you should talk to your gay family members about this. Giving what you went through, they will probably mucg more understanding than you think.
Coming in rather late to this…
Andy’s response was definitely strongly worded, but I don’t think it shows a particular anti-religious bias. He did make the assumption that the letter-writer adhered to a certain set of beliefs, but (as others have said) at worst that’s a faulty assumption based on previous evidence. It’s not, IMO, remotely the same as the man calling every bad driver “bìŧçh” — the latter is assuming all bad drivers are women (not supported by evidence generally, though maybe it was for him anecdotally) AND that all women are bìŧçhëš, which is the real problem. Andy assumed this particular letter writer belonged to a particular branch of Christianity, but did not make the assumption that that was automatically negative.
Was Andy’s response somewhat over-the-top? Yeah, I’d say so, but I’d also guess that he’s gotten a lot of things like this before, so he’s probably just sick of dealing with it. Remembering some of the stuff I saw on Usenet after my reviews of “The Outcast” (the TNG episode people have referenced already) and “The Chase” (which started a major evolution flamefest), I can readily see how he’d react badly.
It’s funny for a lefty to condemn someone as a bigot for holding to their religious dogma… when that condemnation comes from holding to lefty dogma religiously.
Chris, my lad … you stop calling us “lefties” as if it’s the most witty put-down of all time and I’ll have more respect for the other things you write. (Not to mention that any statements you make about bigotry would be more convincing if you’d even once written a post that wasn’t dripping with contempt for anybody left of the John Birch Society.)
That said … I don’t condemn anyone as a bigot for simply holding true to their religious principles. If I did, my mother’s memorial service last month would not have been held in a church, and her cousin (a minister) would not have been among those who spoke.
It’s when people decide that anyone who doesn’t share those exact same principles in every detail is a bad person worthy of condemnation that I call it a form of bigotry.
And please, O Enlightened One, share with us all what “lefty dogma” is. I’m left-handed myself, so I’m really curious — apparently I didn’t get the memos. Ðámņ change-of-address forms…
TWL
Tim, I’m so sorry about your mom. Your absence here lately made me afraid that you were being preoccupied with more serious matters.
My deepest condolences. Please take care.
Thanks, Bill. Things were great in April-June, but then around the start of July her cancer came back, and was in pretty serious take-no-prisoners mode. She went into hospice during the last week of September, and died two and a half weeks later. There was no pain to speak of, which was a great relief to us all.
She faced everything on her own terms: once we got the “there’s nothing more we can do” speech, she said basically “then I want to be at this hospice for this reason, and here’s everything and everyone I want to do and see once I get there.” We have three letters from her for my daughter, for example, to be read on Katherine’s 5th, 10th, and 18th birthdays respectively.
She was pretty amazing.
TWL
Great response to a jerk.
Martin and Mangels write some darn fine Trek books. But I still remember a couple of preposterous scenes in their Section 31 novel of a few years ago.
Riker and Data are rushing to an important meeting with Picard that will advance the plot, and they bump into Hawk’s partner in the corridor. They actually stop to chat. On their way to an important meeting they stop and chat! They discuss the couple’s upcoming anniversary and how they met. This multi-page conversation is cut short by Picard calling to remind Riker and Data that there’s a meeting going on and they’re holding up the plot.
Then, later in the novel, I began to think Martin and Magels were homophobes. Hawk and his partner are talking, and Hawk can’t mention any of the current happenings, since it’s classified. Hawk’s partner basically said, “If you loved me you would tell me classified information,” and is portrayed as stereotypically insecure and whiney. I’m not gay and even I thought that was offensive. I know the scene was to give the character some emotional baggage because he never got to tell Hawk he was sorry before the Borg killed him, but it was so trite!
I haven’t read anything like that in their other books, which I have always enjoyed. Now, when I read their latest book, I try to guess how soon the gay couple will show up. Again, they produce well written books. They’re just not too subtle in their social commentary.
I have to agree with the letter writer on this. I wish they would leave this preachy stuff out.
I saw this modern western a few years ago. It was a good, gritty story about the struggles of modern day cowboys, but they added this whole gay thing to the story and it really ruined it for me.
Tim Lynch: …the latter is assuming all bad drivers are women (not supported by evidence generally, though maybe it was for him anecdotally)…
Luigi Novi: Statistically speaking, women are better drivers than men. According to a 2002 report from the Social Issues Resource Center, men speed, drive drunk, run stop signs, and crash twice as often as women do, even when the proportion of male drivers to female drivers is accounted for, as reported on Page 42 of John Stossel’s book Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity.
………
Tim, it’s good to hear from you again, though it’s unfortunate that it comes following such a sad time for your family. I’m deeply sorry for your loss.
Tim, not yet having lost a parent, I can only imagine the pain you are in. You obviously loved her, and she loved you in return. Just remember: pain eventually heals, while love endures.
I realize words can ring hollow at a time like this. All I can offer are my sincerest condolences to you and your family in your time of mourning.
I am not as avid a fan of Star Trek as others on this post, but it seems to me that “Live and let live” is one of the basic tenets of Starfleet. If one is unhappy about the contents of a story, then, well, no one is forced to read anything, and one would be hard pressed to show that any harm was caused. One might claim to be emotionally scarred, but my advice to such a person would be to suck it up, and don’t be so thin-skinned, or, if that’s just too much, go read something else. Far worse things could happen to a person than simply being offended over a fictional account of a future event. Really, some people sound like third graders, regardless of how precise their grammar and spelling may be.
Ah yes. Bigotry. The sound of the unyieldingly stupid railing against unavoidable reality.
Tim, I’ve had that experience, so I remember what I was feeling. Just know that your family is in my thoughts, my friend.
Tim, my sincerest condolences.
Thanks to all (Jerry, Sean, Luigi, and the Bills). We’re all doing okay. We’d known subconsciously for a few months that this was likely, and we all had enough time to say and do all the things we really needed to. My brother and I are both sad that Mom won’t get to see her grandchildren grow up (and she and Katherine were pretty close), but we’re more or less at peace with everything. (Not that it doesn’t SUCK, mind you — but as these things go, it at least all happened well.)
I’ll tell you, though — if someone had told me five years ago that my dad would outlive my mom, I’d have laughed in their face. (Nothing against my dad — a great guy — but both in terms of their respective physical conditions over the years and their family histories, I’d have given very long odds.)
TWL
***Posted by: Derek at November 30, 2007 05:05 PM
“Remember that NextGen episode where Riker fell for the alien from a unisexual (?) species, played by the gal from “The A-Team”? “
In the episode, “she” decided her sexual identity was female after falling for Riker. I always thought it would be amusing to see Riker’s reaction if she had decided that she was male after being with Riker.***
Uhm, not quite. As I recall it, “she” knew for years before meeting Riker what “she” was. It was even mentioned that “she” had had several previous relationships with others who knew they were “male”. So, no, Riker didn’t use his potent powers of maleness to make an otherwise dyed-in-the-wool unisex character turn female just to please him. 😉 Even though that’s a powerful fantasy many men hold about themselves. . . 😉 😉
Chris
Just when did this guy notice LGBT characters and storylines in the Trek Universe. Besides, the previous examples,
1.there’s the relationship between Hawk ( the guy who gets killed by the Borg
while walikng outside the Enterprise saucer section) and, Trill officer Keru
2. Seven of Nine’s bisexuality in the Mirror Universe Obsidian Alliances
3. Ezri Dax’ lesbian relatioship, also in Glass Empires
4. Bert Faulwell’s love letters to Anthony, his partner, as part of the narrative in SCE
5. The very EXISTENCE of the transgendered Trill- The fact that Dax was one a man does not at all deter Worf,
Bashir, Quark or even Leonard McCoy or any of the other fellows smitten with her
6. Mirror Universe Kira’s bisexual flirtations
7. Mentions of Tom Paris’ uncle and his partner
in The Lost Years
8. Picard remembrances of a gay Security officer
killed by the Borg in Q&A
9. Vina’s gay relatives in Burning Drams
10. The affair between T’Prynn and the female Klingon agent in the Vanguard series
11. Selar’s discussions of her gay brother, and her parents mild disappointment
12. Andorians mating in polyamorous groups of four, as mentioned in Data’s Day, and later as an element of DS9 Science Officer Shar’s storyline
and in the Andor story of Worlds of DS9
I’m sure there’s lots more examples. The Trek Universe is based on diversity. If you’re worried about some kind of liberal agenda coming across,
you just don’t get it.
My other comment to the fellow who wrote the letter complaining would just be this-
“HERBERT! HERBERT! HERBERT! HERBERT! HERBERT!
Luigi said:
“…as reported on Page 42 of John Stossel’s book…”
=====
.
I’m sorry. I honestly thought you had more…ummm… something…ummm…more substantial to bring to the discussion than a book supposedly written by that…ummm…person. Why not just quote Ann Poultry-neck?
.
I’m amazed anyone would willingly admit to being so tone deaf as to miss the blatant inferences in the original letter. Maybe such innatentive readers would be better off sticking to Ðìçk and Jane and leave the grown-ups to discuss everything else.
That is, unless the inability to detect tone is simply a pose to allow you to defend bigotry.
Actually, the last stats that I saw showed that while male and female drivers have roughly equal numbers of car crashes per mile driven, men are somewhere between 60 or 70 percent more likely to be driving in a crash when someone is killed. If I can find the paperwork from my last class, I’ll post the full sources and the actual %.
I also remember Johns Hopkins releasing a study in the early 2000s that showed that, while men were more likely to be killed in accidents caused from their driving, women had a slightly higher % of accidents. Alcohol is also a greater factor in young male drivers then young female drivers. In 2005, 24% of the young male drivers involved in fatal crashes had been drinking at the time of the crash, compared with 12% of the young female drivers.
One thing to keep in mind when arguing this or checking out stories on this is that the numbers tell a different story then the percentages. Up until recently, men outnumbered women as drivers by a margin that was enough to make it easy to twist a story without actually having to lie about the numbers. Even if both sexes’s had 10% of all drivers get in fender benders, the smaller group would have fewer fender benders in actual numbers. There’s also the bit I mentioned above. I’ve seen a lot of pro-female driver stories that point out that women are in far less fatal accidents in such a way as to give the impression that they’re discussing the numbers for all accidents combined.
All of this is going to become a moot point within the next ten years though. Both the numbers and the percentages are beginning to reach an equal level with each other in the number of drivers per sex and the stupid actions that contribute to the poor driving. Besides that, they’re barely teaching proper driving techniques anymore in most areas that I know of. Hëll, I helped a Richmond unit at an accident a few months back where a teenage girl nailed another car at a turn. She had just gotten the temporary paperwork for her license at the DMV that day and was going out to celebrate. She was really ticked off with the Richmond officer because she was getting a ticket and the other driver was getting nothing. After something like six or seven attempts, we quit trying to explain to her that the vehicle turning left on a green at an intersection (her) has to yield the right-of-way to the vehicle going straight (the other guy) through the intersection. And let me point out what I just mentioned before that sentence. She had just, THAT VERY DAY, passed her DMV driving test.
Friends of mine in other states have said much the same. Can anyone blame me for driving with my eyes shut in fear of the other drivers these days?
Does Ann Poultry-neck even bother to cite statistics? My understanding is that she tries to be a gonzo-mirror-image to Hunter Thompson for republican values.
Is the divergence in interpretation of the offending letter severe enough to call defense of bigotry on it?
Is the divergence in interpretation of the offending letter severe enough to call defense of bigotry on it?
Anyone who claims to be unable to tell that saying the presence of gay characters “soiled” something is bigotry is either lying because they choose to defend bigotry or an idiot.
Yes, but who has made such a claim? What place does your scapegoating have on what’s been said in this thread?
The letter writer said it. The letter you referenced in “Is the divergence in interpretation of the offending letter severe enough to call defense of bigotry on it?”
So, yes, it does have something to bear on what was said.
Patrick, please review the relationship to the bolded text to what is being said.
We are referring to the reaction to the letter, not the letter itself. Thank you, Patrick, for helping confirm there is no example that lives up to your and Grendel72’s scapegoating.
You are referring to the reaction to the letter being an overreaction for calling bigotry what it is. The original letter was an expression of bigotry, and it is entirely correct to call such bigotry whenever it shows it’s ugly face.
On the side issue of whining about the reference to religion, logic would suggest that when the only arguments against something are religious in nature, we can presume wil a high likelihood that anyone opposed to said thing has a religious bias.
Plenty of religious people are not homophobes, but it is disingenuous to suggest that the vast majority of homophobes don’t base their bigotry on religion.
Homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder by the secular American Psychiatric Association until the 1970s. You are wrong.
You don’t seem to have contradicted my reply to Patrick. Thank you also for helping confirm there is no example that lives up to your scapegoating.
Well you have just demonstrated your bigotry by clinging to outdated science in the face of reason.
I guess there is no point in continuing.
I clung to nothing.
You said there were Only™ religious justifications for anti-gay bigotry, and I found an non-religious justification for anti-gay bigotry. Thank you for not denying you were wrong.
A “non-religious” justification that was rejected under scrutiny. A “non-religious” justification that was wholely based on cultural assumptions brought about by religious control of society.
See, people examine prejudices and they reject them. The fact that they of course had those prejudices before they could be rejected does not justify the prejudices.
That doesn’t need to be false for anything I’ve said to be true.
How convenient is it for you that Freud and the other atheists who established psychiatry and classified homosexuality as a mental disorder weren’t real atheists?
You speak as if intent is all that’s needed to divest ourselves of prejudice. As if any one person can have the whole of reality in his single field of vision. I don’t mean to propagate prejudice against Our Oppressors™ therefor it doesn’t happen — as if freed slaves weren’t portrayed as the predators in Birth of a Nation.
The root of prejudice is our inability to observe all of reality in our field of vision — but you are so disconnected from reality you don’t even seem to understand that observing all of reality in a single field of vision is impossible. For you, it’s all about deniability.
Grendel72, I think that what Mike is pointing out is that some people may cling to that information, he didn’t imply that he did. He was merely pointing out that your assumption that homophobia correlates to religous belief was not completley accurate as there is another correlation with older secularists.
I would also agree that calling out bigotry can be done without resort to bigotry, thus its use does not justify it counteruse. That said, I don’t think that Mangles was being bigoted, but simply overreacting. To me the term bigot indicates an intentional hatred based on misinformation. I don’t see Mangles doing that, nor do I see the original writer doing that. Both are stating opinion that differs and it isn’t bigotry to state that you disagree with someones sexual choices, whether it is for religious or secular reasons, as long as such discussions are kept at a reasonable level of discussion and don’t fall into emotional hatemongering (which with sexual choice discussions does seem to happen frequently unfortunately).
The term homophobia is bandied about as a way to squash any discussions about sexual choice rather than to allow for disagreement. We are a county of free speach at heart. And yes, I do agree that there are many people who “discuss” sexual choice with an attitude of bigotry and then it isn’t free speach, but hate speach. That some do so should preclude everyone from doing so.
Couple of other thoughts…
when I read the first letter I apparently misread the “soiled” as “spoiled” as well. If the writer’s intent was to use the word soiled which we basically have to assume given that he or she isn’t participating in this discussion, then I stand corrected regarding the more prejudiced attitude of the original writer.
As a favor from anyone who has read the story. What are your thoughts as to the addition of the couple in the story? Was it included to advance the story or was it just incidental? Would it have mattered to the story if the couple were hetrosexual? Would it have mattered if they weren’t there at all? Did it relate somehow to Tripp’s relationship with T’Pol and the social stigma that that evoked at the time (in story)?
PAD regarding your initial posting. I’m not sure that I’d call either of the letters “intolerant,” the initial letter writer did say, “please.” 🙂