FOFA #330 – Can We All Just Get Along?
Premium Content
You need to be a Feast of Fun Plus+ member to access this.
Join now
or Log in – it's easy!
A heated conversation builds around a fan Timmy Gilmore’s letter about being hated because you look gay. I’ve always felt that the biggest obstacle gay people face is other gay people. This lead us to […]
Comments
Fausto sounds just like me when he does that southern accent while reading my letter on today’s classic show. Creepy.
That’s a first!
in honor of “honor amanda day” i just wanted to tell amanda my own special story about how much i love her.
my boyfriend and i are moving to dallas in august, and back in march we were looking for a house. he called realtor after realtor, and didn’t like any of them.
he finally called me with good news after hours of searching. when i asked him who he’d picked, he said “this lady that sounds just like amanda steinstein.” i was like, “who’s amanda steinstein.” he said, “this *hilarious* jewish lady from the feast of fools podcast.” long story short, we bought a house with the realtor in texas who he picked just because she sounded like amanda steinstein. turns out our realtor was a nice black girl from georgia. just imagine, here we are at the airport expecting this older jewish lady and we get this young black woman. (she said, “why are y’all looking at me like that?”)
she may not have been jewish after all, but her steinstein-like voice was the best choice no matter what! thanks amanda!
Amanda, I love you too, but sometimes you say things that make me wonder if you were raised by a pack of Log Cabin Republicans…
Hate crimes are distinguished from other criminal acts because they target an entire class of people.
“To put it simply, a hate crime strikes at the individual to terrorize the group.”
(quoted from a Reader article that just came out last week)
The Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Bill (see the FOF forums) would add gays, lesbians, and transgenders to the list of protected groups. Because “gay-bashing” has become part of our lexicon for a reason — there are sickos who will attack someone they don’t even know, for the sole reason that the person comes across as gay or lesbian or trans. It makes sense to me that this kind of crime would not be treated as a simple assault, but as an attack on the gay/les/trans community as a whole, making us ALL terrified to walk down the street holding hands after dark. Because that’s what the motive behind it is.
That said, a discriminatory motive must be proved in court for something to be treated as a hate crime.
“The ‘hate’ in ‘hate crime’ refers to discriminatory motive, not to whether a perpetrator hates a victim.” (lawyer Betsy Shuman-Moore, in that same article)
Otherwise, it’s just a crime, as Amanda says. But I don’t think hate crimes are like the tooth fairy — they do exist.