This could degenerate into a flame and I have no desire to get into that. But some hard things need to be said. Before he left Tibet the Dalai Lama gathered a huge amount of gold together and headed off to India with it.
But if Buddhism is your cup of tea and all that mystical bull shit that goes with it gives you some joy well then go for it I say. But do not expect the rest of us to go around thinking that the Dalai Lama represents goodness and light. He stands for the brutal exploitation in the name of religion of a down trodden people.
But you said it all actually when you describe the Dalai as a "deposed king." Believe it or not Frances, I think kings are scum. To talk of ad hominem attacks in such a context is nonsense. Of course you attack them. Bring back the tumbrels I say.
Now as for the Cuban example, you are wrong again. I am for Fidel. I am also for the dictatorship of the proletariat and Trotsky's _Their Morals and Ours_ contains a reasonable statement of my ethical position.
But let me try and make my statement about gays clear and I speak as a gay male. The idea that somehow or other the Dalai Lama was a nice man because he agreed to talk over *his* backward crap with gay people and that somehow or other gays should be grateful for this makes me very angry. This is where the bloody insult is. The problem is not with gays, Frances. The problem is the Dalai's Lama's. We gays should not be asked to own the problem in any way.
Let me try and use an analogy. When I went to school in Ireland long years ago, for Senior history we had to study the "Irish Problem". I remember reading about how ungrateful the Irish were and how they had destroyed the Gladstone administration. There was a problem, but according to my school book the Irish owned it.
Similarly there is a problem here with the Buddhist attitude towards gays, but it is not we who own it.
Get it?
And let me repeat my original point that the Buddhist gays who went to the Lama should be ashamed of themselves. Now the "deeply insulting" point I was making was not that the gays Buddhists were being political. No it was the Old Faker who agreed to meet them who was playing the political game. And he has played it for decades now with a truly Machiavellian cunning. Or maybe it is divine inspiration at work?
regards
Gary