I suppose it's a fair question, and one that has come up before. You haven't been involved in other discussions on the subject so I haven't spoken much about my opinions in general or backround. Please note however I'm not going to argue or discuss this here to avoid derailing the thread.HolyMoogle said:
My opinion on gays in general is based off of a lifetime of experience, and a great number of incidents, many with personal involvement. To be honest I tend to feel that most of the people I argue with take a very tolerant approach due to overall moral principles without any real experiences that go beyond "well I have some gay friends" or the like.
To clear the biggest elephant out first, I was sexually assaulted when I was six by a homosexual. "lukily" I don't remember the experience because it was apparently that traumatic but I've spent enough time in counseling where it's been discussed that it's doubtfully influanced me greatly even without conscious recollection. On a lot of levels not remembering it is worse I think. I bring this up largely because a lot of people figure "oh well, as a victim of what I think is a tiny minority of gay men, I guess I can tolerate what you have to say, but at the same time it invalidates it".
Going beyond that however, over the years I've waffled when it's come to my attitude on gay rights in general. I have as many people had gay friends, and numerous people who have attempted to change my opinion. I even sat in on a few ABIGAYLES (American Bi, Gay, and Lesbian) meetings to learn more about the subject and give tolerance a chance. I will say however that without exception every single gay man I have dealt with has been interested in young children. Some conceal it very well, and many won't tell their friends, but let's just say while sitting around for nights of PnP RPG gaming you'd be surprised what some people will go on about after 48 hours without sleep and a bunch of beer, or if you stomp around in their house how often your going to run into their porn stash. Please note I am also not talking about "jailbait" here with teenagers, but really little kids.
On top of this I've dealt with groups like NAMBLA (North American Man-By Love Association) in a more straightforward fashion than many people do. NAMBLA is believed by many people to represent a tiny, radical fringe of the gay community. In reality they happen to be very large, and incredibly well funded. Well funded enough where while working security for the world's biggest casino, which happens to be located on an indian reservation (where when push comes to shove, they can really mess with the fundementals of civil liberties and the law unless the Federal Goverment wants to get involved), my employers were scared enough of them where we were treating obvious pervs with kid gloves.
Understand that a casino is an enviroment where a lot of parents, especially asian ones coming in from Chinatown (though all ethnicities are represented, I think it's a cultural thing to be honest) bring their kids, but don't want to pay money for the daycare services, or if the kids are older but not self sufficient, do not want to pay for a baby sitter. This leads to a situation where kids are dropped off at the Arcade (even if it's not supposed to happen) sometimes for 24 hours or more straight (even missing school) while the gambling addicted parents stare at their slot machines, or zone out at a gaming table. In other cases the parents will just tell their kids to go hide in a bathroom stall and not open the door until they come back.
What this means is that the casino enviroment is absolutly overflowing with unattended little children, and since the bottom line is for the Casino to make money, the casino (which employs security) doesn't do much to stop it, but does try and keep the number of missing children "last seen at Foxwoods/Mohegan Sun" to a minumum. However when you actually catch a perv doing the "Aqualung" thing (which is usually a dude with little boys) even if he attempted an actual abduction (taking a kid by the hand and trying to lead him out to their car or whatever) little or no action is actually taken in part because of fear of NAMBLA which was stated straight out during training with a few cases passed around. The basic issue being that even if the guy goes down for doing wrong, NAMBLA will crawl over every single aspect of the situation and find some reason to go after the casino (or whomever), two wrongs don't make a right and if something wasn't handled correctly due to the subject matter or whatever they can give the casino a headache... and most importantly they can cost the casino so much money just playing "tag" that they would rather not bother.
The overall point being that not only have I dealt with situations like this, but that even if it was years ago groups like NAMBLA are actually wielding more demonstratable power than the more legitimate seeming organizations like ABIGAYLES.
Then of course you just have to look at things like the general run of gay porn. I mean in my email spam I used to get it all the time before I got better with filters, and it seems like 90% of the stuff directed at gay men was either child porn, or trying to lure people in with promises of child porn even if they don't have any.
I generally draw a line between gay men and lesbians, and not because "I'm a straight guy and I think two hot girls going at it is awesome to watch" truthfully I wouldn't find that "hawt" or anything if I had the same associations. In general this attitude comes down to the simple fact that I just don't see many cases of lesbians attacking young children, the few exceptions I've seen have been works of pure fantasy and oddly enough directed at men. I'm sure it HAS happened (everything has) but not on the same level to the point where I'm as judgemental.
At any rate this is long enough, and I'm not going to argue this because I already know where it will go. Typically such debates usually degenerate into semantics, accusations of "straw man" arguements on both sides, and of course the insinuation that I am somehow inherantly evil, hate gay men for the sake of hate, and am thus of course constructing lies out of nothing for simple "joy" of picking on a poor, oppressed minority. There is literally nothing anyone can say to me on the subject at this point that I haven't already heard, including flames about my ignorance and so on.
I am merely giving a re-cap, simply to point out that my opinion is neither based on 'cable news' rants (which are actually pro-gay for the most part, you really have to dig to find something that isn't), or any kind of religious principles, but rather on actual, direct experience. Whether people want to believe it or not, I have in the past been convinced I was wrong, but at some point something happens usually related to those involved, that snaps me right back.
None of this is paticularly relevent to the discussion at hand, because it has nothing to do with the issue of tax money and the fact that I feel the tax benefits intended for people to help people have kids and raise families, should not be going to people that will never do this. The same as inappropriate people trying to claim tax breaks that were never intended for them to begin with. Despite my generally "neutral" stance on Lesbians, please note that I don't think they should be getting it either.
As I said, even if I was pro-gay, I would oppose the legal recognition of gay marriage, private recognition is something else entirely however, and to the best of my knowlege has never really been forbidden. Even various anti-sodomy laws didn't address the subject of marriage vows (if you could find someone to perform them) as long as nobody had sex. Simply put I feel the issue of "gay marriage" hasn't really ever been an issue once you found churches and such willing to perform the ceremonies. Gay tax breaks... well that's what this issue should be titled.
