The Scorecard

Mr. Abernathy,
I appreciate the thoughtfulness with which you have put together this article. I feel that while you make some good points, you weaken your argument by listing the trials that homosexuals and the whole GLBT community have faced. I feel this only makes encourages the reader to compare gay struggles to the struggles of other persecuted communities. You would make a stronger statement by explaining and fleshing out the argument behind Coretta Scott King’s quote, rather than saying in effect “There is no scorecard, but if there was, the GLBT deserves to be recognized as a plagued group.

Comment by Harvey Kay from Memphis, TN — May 17, 2007 @ 1:14 pm

Thank you.  For too long, groups of people have been told to wait their turn, as if they were not eligible for basic human rights.  Homophobia is finally being seen as the intolerance it is.  However, the root cause--misogyny--is becoming all the more prominent, eroding the basic human rights of women and girls the world over primarily due to its widespread validation via the global pop culture juggernaut that is rap.

PopMatters must address misogyny as the bigotry it is, refusing to confuse it with either rudeness ("disrespect") or sexual explicitness ("vulgar").  Euphemisms distort violent anti-female extremism in pop culture--no different that neo-Nazi music targeting Jews and ethnic minorities--to blur into no-holds-barred “truth” or “entertainment.” No other intolerance or hate is more casually extreme, violent--or celebrated.

Rap merely exploited our cultural assumptions regarding women and girls: that they are not human and inherently immoral, as tyranny requires both dehumanization and demonization to justify itself and succeed en masse.  Our society has always mistaken slurs (bitch, ho, trick, etc.) as common foul language or synonyms for “girl” or “woman” and accepted rape--a war crime--as an impolite sexual norm, at worst.  We have always refused to believe that rapists use sex as a medium express violent hate (think: a rope used during a lynching), as it requires the personal enjoyment of the physical and psychological torture of another person solely on the basis of gender (or suspected sexual orientation).  Hell, we have long lionized Jack the Ripper for committing a slew of hate crimes against the easiest of female prey: prostitutes.  Simply: misogynists always exploited sex to legitimize and glorify violent hate along the same lines as Christian fundamentalists exploited religion to legitimize and glorify violent anti-Semitism.

Not until we finally speak truth to power will we finally accept that women and girls are indeed human beings and, thus, deserving of basic rights.

Comment by Jonas from New York City — May 31, 2007 @ 4:06 pm