<<Did you bother to google Human Rights Campaign?>>
I did now. It's an impressive and worthy organization, and I certainly meant no disrespect to it, but I stand by my earlier comment that it's relatively obscure and relatively insignificant in terms of the size of its membership, taking nothing away from the loftiness of its goals. (725,000 claimed members, for example, as against MoveOn's claimed 5 million)
Oh, OK. Then you admit that MoveOn is relatively obscure, when compared to Mormons who have some 14 million members? Or maybe ridiculously obscure, when compared with the number of eligible voters in America. I would guess that more than 95% of eligible American voters are NOT members of MoveOn. They are statistically insignificant. Come to think of it, since Gay people - by their own estimate - make up about 10% of the population, 90 percent are not gay. That small fringe of gays can be safely relegated to obscurity. Membership is almost irrelevent to the notion of "obscurity." Congress comprises less than .000002% of the population, but they are the most powerful organization in the nation by far. HRC is a huge force in the gay community and in politics in general.
No defintition of "obscure" except an MT-centric one, is accurate when describing HRC. You were just wrong, misinformed and jumped to a conclusion. This inability to admit an error and correct it seems quite Bush-like.
For Kramer to take its lonely protest as an indication of the "Gay World" coming unglued would be like someone taking the latest temper tantrum of B'Nai B'rith as an indication that "the Jews" were becoming unglued.
No. The HRC is a sufficiently well-known and large organization to speak for "the gay world" though no organization speaks for everyone in any commmunity. Kramer's remark may have been exaggerated, but it is not invalid.
PS - just read this comment - - <<But just for the record, there is no "relative" or otherwise obscurity to this group. Seriously, it is not only very well-known, but the largest gay and lesbian advocate group in the country. It is like saying NORML or NARAL or the NAACP is relatively obscure. Not everyone knows them, but pretty much anybody up on the subject matter does.>> - -
to which my response is, (a) everything's relative and (b) while I've heard of NORML, NARAL and the NAACP, and could tell you what each of the acronyms stands for, I had not heard of the Human Rights Campaign, although I have heard of PFLAG, Gay-Straight Alliance and other gay or gay-friendly organizations. Since I consider myself reasonably well-read, reasonably experienced and reasonably worldly, my not having heard of a particular organization is one of the criteria I use to determine its obscurity or lack thereof.
But that logic is arrogant and self-serving. Applied to the world in general, that simply means that anyone who has not heard of the United Nations may consider it a "relatively obscure" organization. You consider yourself well-read, wordly, etc. Well so do a lot of people who are ignorant concerning things that do not appeal to them or to which they have not had exposure. This is simply a situation in which you are misinformed, and rather surprisingly so. If you wanted to describe my religion as "relatively obscure" that would be a reasonable claim, though it is becoming less so. But if you wanted to describe the Shiites as a relative obscure branch of Islam, because most westerners had never heard of it until Ayatollah Khomeni came along, that would be a gross misrepresentation. Oscurity is not a function of what YOU know, it is a function of what most of the population knowns within the affected community.
Also - - sorry you didn't stay for the rest of Slumdog. Great film, although I agree that early scene with the kid was hard to take. Others that came later were much, much worse. Really horrible, in fact. It was a tale of good and evil, man's inhumanity to man, on a really staggering level, but I'm still glad I saw it. If we never know that kind of evil exists, we're somehow functioning at a lower level of our humanity. Acknowledging it, knowing it, is a first step. Being revulsed by evil is a step up from not knowing about it. Where you go from there is up to you. Most of us never take that second step.
Your logic is sound (forgive me, I just finished watching the new "Star Trek" movie again) but there is also another side. When I first joined the army, my brother gave me some "light reading" for on the plane. When I opened it on the plane (it was gift-wrapped as a going-away present) it turned out to be a copy of Hustler magazine! I had recently converted to the church and the gift was inappropriate, but given our upbringing (another issue entirely) he didn't know. I was simply going to throw it away, but a cover tease on the Hustler magazine caught my attention. It read "The most obscene photos ever published - inside!"
Now, I had to look. It wasn't that I was all hot and bothered about it, I just wanted to figure out what could possibly justify the claim of "most obscene."
BREAKING NEWS: Here's a thing not to do: open a twelve pack of thin soda cans by poking a pocketknife into it. We'll return you to your regularly scheduled rant after this message from "Bounty."
Where was I? OK, so I open the Hustler to find out what is so "obscene." It turns out to be actual photographs of war dead. Seriously, decapitated bodies and things of that nature. Now even then, I understood the point that publisher Larry Flynt was trying to make. It was a valid social commentary. But I didn't need to see that. It was ironic (and incidentally unintentional on my brother's part) that I got this little message from Larry as I was literally on the plan headed for Basic Training. That's an irony that you would appreciate, I'm sure. But if I go and shell out four bucks or so for a dirty mag, I'm looking for a different kind of obscenity. The point is, I don't watch a lot of movies. I enjoy a well-made documentary from time-to-time for educational purposes, but usually if I plop my fat butt down on the couch and actually fire up the DVD player, I need some down time. This is why, in spite of the hype, I will most certainly NOT be plunking down the bucks to see "Avatar." I'll take my preaching on Sundays, thanks.
So while I'm sure that SM is a great movie - I mean it was roundly applauded as a great movie, by many people whose opinions I respect - I'll pass on the poo.
