[Warning: There is some, ahem, language in this piece.]
This was making the rounds yesterday and I didn’t get to it. There was a post on Daily Kos the other day about how refreshing, and how different in tone, pro-gay messages are when they come from straight guys. Rather than making long, well-thought out arguments about why marriage equality is right, etc., the messages from straight guys — and I know this to be true with my own straight male friends — tend to be more along the lines of “who cares? And go to hell if you don’t like it!” The Kos piece used Clint Eastwood’s message of support as a springboard — if you don’t remember, it went like this:
“These people who are making a big deal about gay marriage? I don’t give a fuck about who wants to get married to anybody else! Why not?! We’re making a big deal out of things we shouldn’t be making a deal out of … Just give everybody the chance to have the life they want.”
Well, yesterday, Gawker posted an interview with Fat Joe, who, as writer Hamilton points out, “at least began his career as a no-joke hardcore New York gangster rapper.” Now’s he’s being all nice to gay people and stuff. Here’s how Fat Joe put it:
In response to a question about whether he think he’s ever done a song with a gay rapper, he responds “Yes,” and shrugs off the whole thing: “Niggas is gay. There’s millions of gay people in the world. Girls too… I’m a fan of ‘Yo, I’m gay. The fuck.’ Like, 2011 you gotta hide that you’re gay? Like, you know what I’m saying, like, be real, like ‘Yo I’m gay, what the fuck.’ If you gay you gay. Like that’s your preference, you know? Fuck it if the people don’t like it.”
Pretty much! Strangely enough, I find that my own attitude toward these questions, at least on a personal level [when I’m not writing for a gay rights blog, for instance], tend to be much more along the same lines. It just goes past the point of even pretending that the anti-gay bigots of our society have even one iota of a human adult argument. We have to do that once in a while, but more and more, I’m noticing that our society is skipping that part entirely and just sticking with, “yep, this is how it is, and if you don’t like it, get bent.”
Now, fundamentalist Christians will use that to prop up their own Woe Is Me victim stance, which is to be expected, but that falls flat for one simple reason: no one is trying to take any rights from them, except those which they seem to believe they enjoy, but actually are not Constitutionally guaranteed [like the right to bully children, or the right to lord their weird religious beliefs over normal people on a governmental level]. At the end of the day, when full equality is reached, Fundamentalist Christians will have the exact same rights they always did, and we’ll simply be bumped up to an even playing field with them.
That’s why they hate us, by the way. They think they actually deserve special status in our society. “What a joke,” you say. I know. But that’s what they believe.
Here’s the Fat Joe interview, which is duh, Not Safe For Work, if you want to watch it.
