LGBTQ+ Rights and Religion

Camp and flamboyant are basically the same, but they are very different from effeminate. I mean, do you consider "girly girls" to be camp or flamboyant? I know I certainly don't.

Urgh — if it includes strappy shoes, strappy dress (with bits of feather or fluff... in pink), a head full of candy floss, a bag smaller than a postage-stamp with no way to fit anything more than a mobile phone in it and a tendency to bounce and squeak even when standing still... Yes. Too much girl.

edited 5th Nov '12 4:57:02 AM by Euodiachloris

I've met girls I'd consider 'flamboyant'. But 'camp' is a vague word, and I've mostly only heard it used to refer to flamboyant behaviour in gay men (or men who are supposed to evoke the image of gay men for the sake of a joke).

But you (generic you, male or female) can be traditionally feminine without being flamboyant. Demureness, quietness, kindness and passivity are traditionally feminine traits, after all.

edited 5th Nov '12 5:03:36 AM by LoniJay

...I never said extremely girly. Just girly. Feminine works too. You took girly, and went to the extreme.

Effeminate is definitely not a synonym of camp or flamboyant. It's a synonym of girly and feminine.

Also, .

edited 5th Nov '12 5:02:49 AM by deathpigeon

Camp isn't inherently masculine or feminine - it's deliberately bad taste, ridiculousness as an art form. It's a way of making the grandest, most overblown statement you can in a winking, self-aware manner.

Precisely. Effeminate isn't the same as camp, just as it isn't the same as gay.

I personally have no problems with people being a little camp, but there is definitely such a thing as going too far.

I mean, there's camp, and then there's CAMP

Barkey is annoyed by Super Valley Girl types, if I remember correctly. It's pretty damn obvious this transfers over to gay men with the same annoying ass personality.

Just to settle this record since y'all were talking about it while I was asleep...

It's not that I find something wrong with them as people at a fundamental level, it's that I find it obnoxious. The mannerisms of men who are camp/flamboyant/effeminate whatever are obnoxious to me. I'm sure everyone here knows of certain traits that other people can have that annoy them? Well those are mine. I don't look into it any deeper than that I find those people obnoxious. They also often tend to go beyond the mannerisms to the way they engage people being overbearing and more abrasive than I would like.

As to the example I gave of my roomates ex-boyfriend, what I meant by broadcasting is that he was just trying way too hard. He accentuated his mannerisms that were gay stereotypes more than he otherwise would of, I felt, as if to challenge people to say they were annoyed by them. Like he was trying as hard as he could to be as stereotypically "gay" as he could in an effort to get into an argument with anyone who told him it was annoying.

I don't like people who throw their issues into other peoples faces. I didn't care that he was gay, but he just kept throwing it in my goddamn face all the time. I've met a lot of gay people who act that way, so overall my experiences with gay people have been negative, because they have acted that way and I didn't like them.

Doesn't seem hard to understand to me. When you find someone to be obnoxious, you don't like them. When a specific set of traits that correlate to a specific group of people are obnoxious, you start to dislike that group of people and make judgements when you talk to those people. I know that not all gay folks act like that, because I have my roomate and a few others as an example, but what I'm saying is that a large amount, the majority, of gay men I've met act really campy/flamboyant, and campy/flamboyant mannerisms annoy the shit out of me.

As I already said, appeal to tradition is essential when defining a word for many legal purposes. I don't get to invent a novel connotation for the English word "contract" that I can then use to circumvent or subvert U.S. contract law. For legal purposes, relying on the prevailing traditional uses of the word isn't fallacious—in fact, it's decisive. Even if I believe that said "traditional" definitions have the effect of denying rights to a subset of Americans, that's too damned bad: I'll have to find some new word that covers the situation and get the relevant legislation passed on its own virtues, rather than free-riding on existing laws that don't cover it.

Now, one might have ulterior religious reasons for opposing such fast-and-loose monkeying with the language, but one needn't necessarily. And even if many people's reasons for opposition are religious, and even if those particular reasons aren't considered legally admissible, it doesn't make opposition per se one iota less valid.

Language changes and adapts to changing cultures and goals. Sometimes through natural evolution and sometimes all at once.

So then, you have a problem with how the words "wicked", web", "mouse", "queer", "nice", and "silly" are used today?

edited 5th Nov '12 9:54:27 AM by RadicalTaoist

@Jhimmibhob: So then you don't believe that we should allow marriage between just one man and one woman then because traditionally marriages were defined as one man and many women. We need to find a new word to define this modern newfangled monogamy thing right? And we can't have a black person marrying a white person either. That's not traditional marriage. Obviously they need their own word.

Your logic breaks down because that's not actually how the language has ever worked in it's history. We constantly apply the same words to new but similar situations as they arrive. Painting a car blue instead of black doesn't make it any less a car.

Not at all. Those, after all, are bottom-up changes where native usage was decisive, with certain political/legal effects. But if I & my buddies try to impose a top-down connotation for legal/political reasons, the courts would be right to consider it a disingenuous attempt to accomplish through rewriting the dictionary something I couldn't by actual legal, rhetorical, or social means. It's the difference between the authors of the Oxford English Dictionary and the creators of Newspeak.

edited 5th Nov '12 10:10:09 AM by Jhimmibhob

Except you're not appealing to tradition. You're basically saying damn tradition which has polygamy and gay marriage as part of the historical record. Damn tradition where marriage wasn't allowed between races or different classes. Damn tradition where you could just sell your daughter and call it marriage. Damn tradition, we like the way we do things right now.

There is no tradition in your Appeal to Tradition. That means you're really not appealing to anything.

The tradition is for this to change in the courts first and then be followed by law. Right now you're basically just whining that the rules are changing in traditional patterns and trying to hold on to the right to be a bigot.

edited 5th Nov '12 10:14:59 AM by shimaspawn

Okay.

So if gay couples are entering lifelong monogamous relationships with the intent to maintain families, and many people don't see why it shouldn't be called marriage, how is that not bottom-up? Do you think bottom-up language change cannot happen as long as there's a group of people defending a* traditional definition? That's not how "queer" was reclaimed - there are still plenty today who think of it as a pejorative.

*Note that I don't use "the", I use "a". As pointed out , that word/tradition hasn't been set in stone for its entire history.

edited 5th Nov '12 10:15:48 AM by RadicalTaoist

I don't want to veer too far away from the religious aspect, Shima, but you raise the question of which connotations we can strip from a word and still preserve the word's "meaning" (philosophically and legally, a thornier concept than commonly assumed). Need "marriage" apply strictly to 2+ people? Could we treat the "interpersonal relationship" aspect as inessential, and use the word "marriage" to refer to the status or viewpoint of a single individual, without necessarily implying a partner in marriage, or reference to any other individuals at all? If not, what's essential & defining about that aspect that isn't essential or defining about, say, the physical and metaphysical complementariness between man and woman? Such a question is surprisingly hard to answer.

Let's consider the English word "voter." Now obviously, at one time only white guys with property could vote. The question is: could one make a reasonable argument that "white guy with property" had nearly always been a defining or essentially limiting quality of the word "voter," rather than an incidental or non-limiting connotation of the word? If so, I'd object to using the words "vote" or "voter" in their modern contexts, and I'd propose some new word that described the present situation adequately ... and I'd want brand-new legislation passed to cover it.

Our current voting law rests on legal and linguistic arguments that establish "white guy with property" to be a non-limiting connotation of the word "voter." No such heavy lifting has yet been conducted about the "male/female" connotations of the word "marriage" ... and we can't blithely dismiss the argument that it's a limiting quality, with all the legal implications that has.

So determining which connotations of "marriage" are essential, and which represent what logicians would call a "fallacy of accident," are crucial to conducting any jurisprudence that relies on such connotations–or the lack thereof. And as I've already said, the term's semantic history is an entirely valid consideration (though not the only one) when making such determinations.

You raise another good question: how tendentious, self-conscious, or forced must a usage be before it becomes an intolerable imposition on the language and upon agreed meaning? What if a non-trivial number of, say, Ron Paul fans decided that "taxes" were something that, by definition, are only paid by willing citizens who 100% agree with the potential uses of that tax money? What if a booming subculture of them insisted upon using that word with their pet connotation tacked onto it? Would that be a valid political method of freeing taxpayers of their big-government burdens? At what point would Congress or U.S. courts be bound to take the word's new "definition" into account when creating or interpreting legislation? Must earlier legislation be enforced as if the word "tax" carried its new alternative connotation? You tell me.

Legal language and common language are two entirely different beasts. Words in a legal context mean whatever courts and laws define them as. Common vernacular has no bearing on them one way or another.

Given that marriage is also a term in engineering, I think we left the idea of it being exclusively being defined as between a man and a woman behind a long time ago.

edited 5th Nov '12 10:41:42 AM by Iaculus

Said courts and laws don't make up their definitions out of whole cloth. There's a considerable respect for usage ... even usage that might not strike the bien pensants as the most enlightened.

If this is coming down to an argument over semantics, I can see why we introduced Civil Partnerships over here. It's not a marriage, it's just legally identical. That way we basically legalised gay marriage (because that's what everyone calls civil partnerships anyway) behind the dissenter's backs.

If we let them call it something else, what's to stop them from treating it like something else? Especially considering their reasons for it amount to either religious fanaticism or "just because".