[Mpls] Anti-GLBT Politics: Historic Artifact?

[Dyna]

Wizard noted:

	I suspect that, within not too long a time, there will be 
discoveries stemming from the Human Genome Project that show sexual 
identity to have genetic markers.

	Thanks, Wizard

	The more I study history the more convinced I am that anti 
gay bigotry had it roots in social mores that maybe made some sense a 
century or two ago, when taken with a few shaker fulls of salt. Let's 
go back to mid 19th century Minneapolis. Your family is trying to 
survive on 40 acres in what will become Minneapolis, having 
immigrated here from the old country where you're lucky to find an 
acre to till between the mountains. You have no birth control and no 
sex education either, but with half your children not even surviving 
to adulthood and 40 acres to till with a draft animal or two you need 
all the help you can procreate. Lord knows, with the weather turning 
cold at least one family member is kept busy just keeping the stove 
stoked, never mind milking the cow and gathering the eggs. So even 
though you weren't interested in the opposite sex the elders arranged 
a marriage, and though you'd been having sex with others of your sex 
for years, you went along. There weren't a whole lot of opposite sex 
partners in the township to choose from, and you didn't want to spend 
your declining years as a discarded old bachelor or maiden like the 
ones you'd made love with.

	A few decades pass, the civil war takes your spouse, and you 
have to sell the farm to survive. Just as well, as your surviving 
children can barely keep up with bringing in water, tending the 
stoves, and doing the wash. That's when your progeny isn't off 
working the standard 16 hour workday 6 days a week. So despite being 
queerer that a three dollar bill, you tell them to get married, 
knowing they'll probably follow the railroads west and leave you 
behind to age and die alone.

	You lose a grandchild to world war one, and another is 
disabled by syphilis. Then the flu epidemic of 1918 takes your only 
two great grandchildren. You busy yourself getting the remaining 
bachelors and bachelorettes among your offspring married off.  And 
you pass on these moral values that maybe made sense to your 
ancestors to those offspring.

	Comes the 21st century and the stove has a thermostat and you 
could ignore it for the whole winter if you want. The clothes and 
even dishes are washed by machine, and cooking is done with a 
keyboard on a microwave. Sex is optional, with more than enough 
children surviving to maintain the species and then some. With 
survival a given, any combination of genders can marry or not marry, 
and separate also if needed.

	But the bigots of the religious right are still playing by 
their ancestor's 18th century rules, and insisting by force of law 
that everyone else do likewise.

	studying history from a queer perspective in Hawthorne,

		Dyna Sluyter