Saturday, March 17, 2012

The #ToMyUnbornChild Twitter Trend.


I've said it in multiple posts and I'll say it again: there is nothing wrong with being gay.  As my loyal readers know, I am pro gay marriage and pro gay rights.  Sexual orientation is like skin color - unimportant when it comes to the law.  If a law is passed, is should either apply to all humans or no humans.  That seems like basic common sense to me.

Every single day, I am on the brink of either having hope for our species or wishing we would all do planet Earth a favor and suddenly die out.  I would have thought that, as we creep ever so cautiously towards the future, the hope inside of me would begin to outweigh the utter despair.  2012 is proving that little hypothesis of mine to be wrong.

#

Above is a symbol used for many things.  Sometimes it's shorthand for "number."  When found as a button on a phone, we refer to it as the pound sign.  And when used on Twitter, it's known as a "hashtag."  The social media site uses hashtags of phrases to show other people what is trending.  For example, if I were to tweet something like "I wish Rush Limbaugh's black soul would collapse in on itself like a dying star," only people actively following me would see the tweet.  However, if I were to write "I wish #RushLimbaugh 's black soul (etc)...", the hashtagged word would become a link of sorts.  Anyone talking about Rush Limbaugh and his (as Jon Stewart put it) "daily afternoon mouth dumps" would be able to click on said link and see a giant list of tweets talking about the same topic.  When a topic becomes popular enough, it is "trending."  People in Siberia tweeting about Limbaugh could, for whatever reason, see similar tweets from people in Buenos Aires.  

That ability to connect people that are thousands of miles away is one of the reasons that sites like Twitter and Facebook are so popular.  Unfortunately, the mathematical equation for ignorance and anonymous vulgarity is "Person + Internet = ". 

Okay, allow me to stop rambling here and get to the meat of this post:  I am so fucking sick of homophobes.  How does Twitter factor in to that, you ask?  

As of March 12th, #ToMyUnbornChild became a trending topic.  Many of these tweets were pleasant and, as you can imagine, loving.  But, because humans were operating behind keyboards, there were a handful of tweets that can only be described as vile.  

Vile and aimed at the gay community, of course.  Because, really, who else?  Here are some of the worst, as retweeted by @Homophobes (an account that basically retweets homophobic tweets for the world to see):

1.) @_KidCodie_  said, "#ToMyUnbornChild if you so much as think about being homosexual I'll put a bullet in your damn skull"

2.) @StormBeast50 said, "#ToMyUnbornChild if you're gay... You will sleep in the oven." 

3.) @Nickystix018 said, "#ToMyUnbornChild If you end up gay, I'll stab you 357 times with a butter knife."

Here's a a link to a more comprehensive list if you want to see more.  It'll either piss you off or make you want to vomit.  These are real people, by the way, saying this ignorant garbage.  I didn't make any of those three up, and I'm pretty sure the other 97 on this list check out too. 

One more thing I want to point out:  if you go to that link and scroll down the list, you'll instantly notice that the majority of the tweets come from men.  Sorry, not men.  Boys.  Because only little snot-nosed boys say stupid shit like this.  

I also had a good laugh at their Twitter pictures too.  They followed the generic "wear a tank top and baseball hat (incorrectly) while striking a badass pose in front of a motha-fuckin' mirror" picture directions.  This is also known as "The Douchebag."

We put such an emphasis on how awful racism is in this country, while no such emphasis on homophobia exists.  Why?  In both cases, you are expressing hatred towards another human being simply because of an immutable trait.  Some Christians (for one example) might say that to not allow them to hate gay people is an attack on their religious freedoms.  Well, you let go of the whole slavery issue despite the Bible giving it a thumbs-up.  I think you can let this go too.  



At any rate, I'm going to wrap this up.  My doctor told me I'm too angry and cynical for my age.  But hey, what does he know?  He's a prick, and we're all dying. 




If you liked this post, I urge you to read the others I have on gay rights by clicking on the "gay marriage" or "gay rights" labels linked below. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Oh my god, some people are just heartless! I completely agree with you this needs to stop. Some people in this world are complete and utter idiots!



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