> I agree, but the broader democratic process is not working too well
> right now
> for queers. Defense of Marriage Act anyone? Federal Marriage
> Amendment?
I don't think there's any chance DOMA will be upheld. It goes too far in undermining full faith and credence. The FMA isn't going to pass.
> Queers have had to turn to the courts since the democratic process has
> turned
> so poisonous. Maybe if the left could overcome its puritanical streak
> and unite
> behind sexual rights and put their defense at the front of its agenda
> this would
> not be so, but alas the left lacks such courage.
Where is the broad-based sex radical movement which puts the minimum wage and universal health care at the front of _its_ agenda? Alliances are a two-way street.
>> Yeah, corporate power in the name of sexual liberation.
>
> You make some really weird leaps Nathan. Sexual speech can come in
> two varieties -- commercial and non-commercial. Now, if you are
> arguing
> that all commercial speech should be banned -- okay. I may disagree,
> but at least you are not singling out sexual speech.
>
> However, if you are not making that argument, why do you have such
> hostility for the right of a person to engage in commercial sexual
> speech?
I don't think it's hostility. It's setting priorities. The right to engage in commercial sexual speech is not as important as the right to engage in consensual sexual activities, and the left has chosen, by and large, to support the latter but not the former. Equally, the right to engage in commercial speech generally is a lot less important than a whole range of activities, some involving speech, some involving economics, some involving sexual activities, and some others that don't come to mind right now.
> You say that leftists should work together as allies, but it is hard
> to be allied
> with someone who bears as great a sexual animus as you do.
Animus? I don't think so. I speak as someone who has given more than one woman her first vibrator (including a woman I dated while I lived in Alabama) and who spent a lot of time endangering his job in the late eighties by pushing hard in Arkansas for the textbook store where I worked to hand out the Alyson "What You Can Do About AIDS"--I think we gave away nearly a thousand of those in a town of fifty thousand, following a rather nasty argument with my boss which, after due thought on his part, he agreed I was right about (it was the owner with whom I really had the quarrel, and my boss went to bat for me on it, once I'd convinced him)--and to stock books and magazines on gay and lesbian issues. I can't prove that the little homophobe who blocked my financial aid for three semesters was doing so in payback for my having filibustered the Student Senate into overriding his attempt to defund the GLSA (okay, I only got them $200 of the $300 they'd asked for, but still), but I believe it to be true, since once I got the math department (I was a math major) focused on that question, that third semester aid finally came through. I spent a lot of time being gay-baited during that period, which I responded to not by denying it but by saying that there was nothing wrong with being gay and that it wasn't any of their business whether I was gay or not (which I think is the principled thing for a straight person to do when gay-baited).
I could go on and on with this, but what I'm saying is that, as someone who has both had a varied sex life and also has paid some dues for political stands on sexual issues, I don't see animus in what Nathan is saying. He's making an argument that freedom of commercial speech isn't an important legal issue for the left, that commercial speech should be subject to stricter limits generally than non-commercial speech, and that discrimination against commercial speech of a sort which we support should be fought politically rather than legally. All that makes perfect sense to me.
All the best,
John A