So now that I can get married, the next step is finding someone to marry...and that is proving to be quite a difficult task.
Haha, poor fellow!
As for Tweed, he has a point in that people have a strange obsession over this issue as if it were the most important issue facing the nation today. It can become a bit tiring.
As a black person, I must say, I consider the endless comparison with the civil rights movement to be a bit grating at times. When gay people move into a neighborhood, property values went up. When black people moved into a neighborhood, property values went down.That was a myth. Black people paid higher rents than white people for the same amount of floor space because of segregation. Houses that had once housed one white family were subdivided into apartments. Landlords literally rushed the depreciation of housing to get maximum income.
Shoehorning more people into a house made the house deteriorate rapidly -- which explains how some once-impressive mansions became slums. That has nothing to do with race.
...Housing prices did not plummet unless white people panicked. There were hucksters who did block-busting who might do the white home-owner an alleged great favor by buying a house worth $40K recently for $15K before the value really went down. The hustle was that the house would be quickly sold to a slumlord for $30K, only accelerating the decline of the neighborhood.
A basic rule for anyone: nobody is in business of any kind to lose money. Anyone who pretends to do charity in real estate is likely a swindler.
Gays are still beaten for being gay. Race-based beatings are much rarer now. So far as I am concerned I see little difference between Michael Shepard (a gay young man beaten to death for being gay in Wyoming) and Michael Donald (a young black man beaten to death by a Klan group in Alabama). In Nazi camps, Nazi guards have been known to set dogs upon prisoners for being gay.
I don't have to be gay to be beaten and badly injured for being gay. I have run from the threat. You are unlikely to be beaten by white racists for being black. But you could be beaten and badly injured by some fool who thinks that you are gay. Gay-bashers, like most criminals, are simply stupid and angry.
The problem isn't that the bigot thinks that I am gay; the problem is that anyone believes that homosexuality is a pretext for a ferocious beating. Homophobia and racism are opposite sides of the same counterfeit coin of violent bigotry.
