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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Johannes Pilch who wrote (10869)	10/23/1998 10:48:00 AM
From: Borzou Daragahi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

I'll put the question to you again, Johannes: How can you be so sure homosexuality is a "non-passive characteristic"? Is it something the Bible tells you? A gut feeling? How can you be so sure that you'd condemn up to 10 percent (though probably less than) of the population? How can you be so certain that someone has decided to be gay rather than inherited some genetic trait? I have gay friends who denied and denied and denied to themselves that they were different until the pain got so unbearable that they nearly exploded. Then and only then, did they finally admitted they were gay. I know other gays who knew they were gay as soon as they hit puberty. I know another man who got married, had 3 kids, and only when he was 62 and had a nervous breakdown did he admit he was gay--that he'd been living a lie. I am not at all certain that homosexuality--like someone's religion or political affiliation--is a non-passive characteristic.

To: Johannes Pilch who wrote (10869)	10/24/1998 3:45:00 AM
From: Borzou Daragahi	Respond to of 67261

I do not think our country's purchase of a bomb normally consists in a direct assault upon the identity of its own subjects (evidently you do, and this is but more liberal stupidity). Indeed, such purchases typically are made with an effort to preserve the identity of the subjects. You take offense on this issue merely because it is convenient to do so. My saying this should come to you as another compliment, as I here trust you are not yet so corrupt in your mind as to not realize it to be true. Johannes, I thought about your argument throughout the day. First off, I don't see how paying for a painting by some mediocre artist can assault your identity except in the figurative/symbolic sense, in which case you choose to interpret the work as an insult. Serrano himself is a devout Catholic who was trying to make a comment about the degradation of Jesus in contemporary America. I'm sure there are Christians who look at "Piss Christ" and react as I did when I first saw it: YAWN! I'd take a provocative Cindy Sherman self-portrait over that piece any day. It's not as if you're paying to have Christians thrown to the lions. Now, that would be a direct assault on your identity. I view the massive and gratuitous stockpiles of weapons and the corrupt and brutal regimes of the Third World (that I help bankroll) as a direct, quite concrete, and non-symbolic assault upon and insult to all of humanity (I am not a nationalist) including you. The manufacture and use of weapons of mass destruction endanger the lives not only of countries they can be used against but the natural environment we all share. Once again, I'll give you a better example: take the Palestinian shop owner on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. His tax money has supported a government, Israel, that very literally assaults his identity, refuses to some extent to recognize it (hence the term Arab Israelis) and acts upon it with state violence. My point is only that many of us help pay for things our government does which are an affront to us. I hope you have a lovely weekend.