homophobia | Cryptic Philosopher

Julea Ward and Jennifer Keeton want to be therapists, but they don’t want to help icky gay people because Jesus.

State legislators, purporting to know more about the ethics of these professions than the professionals themselves, want to make it legal to discriminate based on “sincerely-held religious beliefs.” One suspects that it has not occurred to most of them that this could apply to people who don’t think just like them.

If someone who wants to enter into a profession with a duty to help people, but just can’t seem to let go of certain Bronze Age superstitions, I hardly see how that is their patients’ problem, but that is exactly what they want to do. Some of them want to foist their ideology onto patients, but I rather doubt they’d entertain attempts by those patients to present their side of things.

Now, being a good American, I support the right of people to believe whatever crazy crap they want, so long as they don’t hurt other people. And that’s the problem here.

This hurts people.

This really, really hurts people.

So I have a compromise.

If a doctor, therapist, dentist, etc. just can’t get over the fact that the patient in front of them has a sexual orientation that is different from theirs (or some other perfectly-legal activity they just can’t keep from meddling in), they don’t have to treat them.

But the patient doesn’t have to pay them.

And because this rejection is highly likely to hurt the patient, the devout professional has to recommend an alternate professional that they know will treat the patient.

One more thing: in consideration of the fact that the devout professional has clearly wasted the patient’s time, the professional has to pay for the first session with the new professional. Because you have the right to believe what you want, but you cannot foist that upon a person in need who is relying on your professional skill–and if you just have to try anyway, it will cost you. Your professional license is a privilege, not a right.

(Preferably, devout professionals should disclose their prejudices in their marketing materials, but let’s see how you handle this responsibility first.)

If everyone can agree on that, then the Juleas and Jennifers of the world can let their freak flags fly, and the rest of us won’t be quite as bothered.

Oreos, those eminently awesome chocolate and cream cookies, burst onto the national stage yesterday due to an act of basic human decency. Of course, some people simply cannot let that sort of thing go unpunished. In a fit of diversity and inclusiveness, Oreo posted a rainbow cookie to its Facebook page, garnering hundreds of thousands of “likes” and more than twenty thousand comments. Some comments are supportive, and some are a permanent part of the internet, whose comments will hopefully come back to haunt the authors some day.

Now we know it’s getting real, because Fox Nation’s readers have the story, and they are offended!!!

I was hoping to collect a few choice quotes, but (a) Fox Nation commenters are cowards who don’t use their real names; and (b) I made it through one page and got sick to my stomach, in part because of the unabashed bigotry, but also because of the sheer number of people who think “lol u r stupd” is a good response to someone raising cogent, albeit “librul” points of contention.

Anyway, it only took about two seconds before I came across a racist jab at the president, courtesy of woodsman1st:

After four years of obummer, I believe I want nothing but vanilla cookies with white frosting.

This guy probably takes immense pride at being able to type out “obummer” correctly. If you don’t think this comment is racist to the core, then I have now identified an argument to which “lol u r stupd” is the best response, except that it might have too many big words for you.

Next (and this is as far as I made it), we have libssukkalot, whose handle doesn’t even merit ridicule:

First time in my life that I’ve ever seen a gay cookie, but then again it has been three and a half years of a lot of firsts too! I’ve never seen this many stupid people in charge of a country, and I’ve also never seen a “Dictator” for president of the United States until Obama!

With no way of knowing how old this person is, or anything else about the person’s background, it is impossible to say exactly how dumb this comment is above a baseline level of dumb.

That’s as far as I got. I don’t get why people think what others do in their own private romantic lives is any concern of theirs. As for the argument that gay people rub their sexuality in people’s faces, maybe you should stop thinking about penises so much whenever you see two dudes holding hands. Just sayin’.

Maybe it’s just that you haven’t had the proper introduction. Here’s a link to some excellent gay porn. Maybe you’ll end up liking it…

…Click the link…….I dare you…..

Cryptic Philosopher

Musings and Mental Meanderings

Tag Archives: homophobia

When therapists don’t want to do their jobs