> If by social practices you mean acts like your example of the one-drop rule
> or Joanna's of the yellow stars of david, turning over those practices would
> end the discrimination built on top of those symbols but it would hardly end
> the discrimination directed at these stigmatized groups. These people would
> still be marked by an array of cultural and traditional signifiers, the same
> ones that originally distinguished them in the minds of their community, the
> ones bigots wanted codified into single symbols for escalating their
> persecution. You'd end the convenient means of their discrimination, not
> the discrimination itself.
No, I'm saying eliminate all the signifiers, so that discrimination on the basis of sexual behavior would be as silly as discrimination on the basis of eye color.
Say we had a society
> where the vast majority engaged openly in a potpourri of sexual behavior,
> individuals could still be discriminated for their behavior leaning toward
> one end of the spectrum, e.g. "too gay," "too kinky." A bigot can do just
> as well with clines and fuzzy boundaries as he does with discrete
> categories.
No, the bigot will not know who to stigmatize and condemn unless there is a stable category of sexual "perverts". Note that you fall back on our stable sexual categories in describing who bigots would target: kinks, gays. Without that taxonomy, the bigot has no way to identify the sexual deviants and punish them. Delinking sexual behavior from sexual categories makes it impossible for people to be discriminated against for being "kinky" or "gay".
> Your solution certainly doesn't stand for just "getting along," it actually
> asks us to accommodate the world of view of bigots by blurring out the
> distinctiveness of the groups they want to persecute so they're unable to
> act on their prejudice. What kind of non-politics is this, getting society
> to accept diversity by making diversity imperceptible?
No, the world view of bigots is that there are sexual deviants who engage in immoral sexual behavior. My proposed solution completely undermines their world view, because it refuses to connect sexual behavior to stable sexual categories. --I also want to stress that I'm embracing the diversity and creativity of sexual behavior here; I just see no psychological or social need to pigeonhole people into distinct social groups because of their sexual behaviors or desires. In fact, reducing the amazing diversity of sexual behavior to a few basic sexual "types" is what's really making sexual diversity imperceptible in our society today.
I think this all comes down to the identity politics debate. I agree with Joanna that identity politics is a dead end; it splits us up when we should be working together for our mutual benefit.
Miles