What makes the race analogy complicated is that gays, as demographic composites, do indeed "have it better" than blacks--and yet i...n many ways contemporary homophobia is more virulent than contemporary racism. According to one monitoring group, one in four gay men has been physically assaulted as a result of his perceived sexual orientation; about fifty percent have been threatened with violence. (For lesbians, the incidence is lower but still disturbing.) A moral consensus now exists in this country that discriminating against blacks as teachers, priests, or tenants is simply wrong. (That doesn't mean it doesn't happen.) For much of the country, however, the moral legitimacy of homosexuals, remains very much in question.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in reg...ard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Predictions that unit cohesion could not survive honesty about sexual orientation were simply wrong. What does threaten morale are... the prolonged investigations, the questioning of friends and co-workers, the searches of barracks for magazines and letters, the witch hunts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children's bodies aren't like automobiles with the assailant's fingerprints lingering on the wheel. The world of sexual abuse is q...uintessentially secret. It is the perfect crime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A commitment to sexual equality with males ... is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the... raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a ...human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Lesbianism" would appear to be so little a threat at the moment that it is hardly ever mentioned.... Whatever its potentiality in... sexual politics, female homosexuality is currently so dead an issue that while male homosexuality gains a grudging tolerance, in women the event is observed in scorn or in silence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only c...ircumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »