>getting rid of capitalism will not stop racism, either, and that is a
>far bigger problem, though thousands of blacks - oops, african americans
>- are also doing quite well economically, though on a per capita basis,
>not as well as gays...the most important part of that wall street
>journal excerpt seems to have escaped the consciousness of sufferering:
>
>"The driver, of course, is that advertisers are increasingly attracted
>to gays
>who spend nearly $500 billion a year."
>
>that spending is not done by persecuted people - mentally maybe,
>economically, gimme a break! - and that is the point ...
>
>of course there is bigotry and hate and madness, but stop thinking it is
>all the curse of one group...especially when so many of that group are
>doing quite well, thank you...
Not exactly. There's a myth, going back to Roman times, that gay men are affluent. There are two varieties of this today - the bigoted one, that homosex is a disease of affluence, and the cliched one, that gay men have lots of money, which they can spend on clothes and home furnishings rather than children. (The latter myth is promoted by gay mags and ad agencies.) But it's not really true. The UMass economist Lee Badgett <http://www.iglss.org/media/files/income.pdf> has done quite a bit of empirical work on this showing that gay men have lower incomes than their demographic would otherwise suggest - the econometric way of proving discrimination. Lesbians don't suffer any particular income hit, aside from the "normal" one of their just being women. So put that one on the shelf.
$500 billion isn't all that much, you know - it's about 6% of total U.S. consumption, which isn't far out of line with the 5% estimate of the prevalance of same-sexers.
Doug