LGBTQ+ Rights and Religion

We also threw some gay people who weren't in the concentration camps into jail. For example, Alan Turing who broke the Enigma code.

I always figured Hitler's religion was Hitlerism.

I believe they are finally going to pardon Alan Turing, if I'm right it's before the Lords now.

edited 11th Mar '13 9:58:40 AM by Silasw

@Starship: But isn't initial prejudice something you cannot control? Like if your born into a neighborhood of all White Supremacists your probably going to get some of those beliefs. Hopefully you go forward and learn that it is wrong in life but you can't control what your parents, teachers, or neighbors think and some of that would probably rub off on people born there even if they come to regret it. A person controls the prejudice but it may not be all the people who have it.

Edit: Also no I'm not saying don't punish kids for shouting racial slurs even after they've been told to stop and why too. Obviously they are not learning and growing and should be taught to be better than that. I'm not saying that racism is something you can't ever control either. Just that you can't control what the first prejudices you'll get are.

Again Edit: Or did you just mean the idea that people don't control racism? Like the idea that people are just born racist without any "help" from others? Yeah I don't buy that either.

edited 11th Mar '13 12:37:26 PM by Wildcard

Yup.

edited 11th Mar '13 12:17:37 PM by pagad

Well actually Card, you listed off all the points I was thinking. Racism, in many ways, is not a choice.

But, to continue the parallel, what you do with it..IS.

Where children are concerned, I think, just like sexual behavior, the first step is to provide a safe space to discuss the disposition. I don't mean a safe space to be racist, but there really should be a conversation like "I know [insert name of racial group here] might look/act/talk/live funny in your opinion, but they are still people the same as us and you can't allow your personal feelings to allow you to treat them unfairly."

Reading that Wikipedia article on how gays were treated during the Reich, I find myself asking if this all took place on the planet Earth, or on some distant planet.

edited 11th Mar '13 11:44:06 AM by TheStarshipMaxima

It would be much easier for us to think it took places on some distant planet, that way we could rationalize it away. Plus you think the Nazi stuff is bad, look at what the good guys did, the British government practically murdered a brilliant scientist simply for being gay, and we were the good guys.

Dude, we're the ones who were fighting Nazis for shoving people into camps...but apparently the total irony of having a bunch of Americans locked up in camps for the crime of having Japanese parentage escaped everyone.

Actually, the extent of the Holocaust didn't become apparent until quite late in the war. Most countries' biggest beef with Hitler was simply that he wanted to Take Over the World, and they liked their stuff and wanted to hold onto it.

edited 11th Mar '13 12:11:35 PM by Iaculus

It's worth noting that concentration camp escapees who made it out of the Reich weren't believed. Allied countries fought the Nazi Germany because it was in their interest to do so, not to stop it killing certain groups of people. Nazism wasn't believed to be human evil distilled into one neat package until the Allied armies started to stumble upon the evidence of its crimes.

Concentration camps were certainly not a new concept at the time of the Second World War. They simply hadn't been used to overtly conduct campaigns of extermination until that point.

The list of crimes committed by the allies is long indeed (especially when you include the Soviet Union), the best we can do is make sure we don't allow ourselves to forget those crimes, just as we don't allow ourselves to forget the Nazi's crimes. Now we should probably get back to the topic of homosexuality and religion.

Maybe you meant that by "in many ways" but I do think racism is a choice. The adults decided with all the info available to them to hold onto or have their racist views. It is a choice just not necessarily their, (meaning the kid born in that place's) choice.

edited 11th Mar '13 1:50:55 PM by Wildcard

Plus, you know, extensively hunting down and exterminating the clergy of his own denomination. That's up there on the heresy-o-meter.

Preeeeetty much.

But not up there enough to warrant excommunication. The only Nazi actually excommunicated was Josef Goebbels for...marrying a Protestant. And That's Terrible.

edited 11th Mar '13 1:20:29 PM by Achaemenid

Mmm. Regardless of Hitler's actual religious beliefs or lack thereof, there's no question that many of those that followed him were deeply religious (Gott mit uns, german soldiers swearing loyalty to God and the fuhrer, etc), and he didn't invent antisemitism out of whole cloth.

Hitler's beliefs and actions aren't a pure atheism vs. religion issue.

Fun fact: atheists weren't allowed to serve in the SS. Members could be of any religion, just as long as they had a religion.

Jews weren't either, obviously, but I hope I don't have to point that out.

Edit - This isn't an attempt at cheap point-scoring. I just find the SS to be an...interesting organisation, the shining example of all the weird contradictions and hypocrisy that were the hallmarks of Nazism. Repellent, obviously, but morbidly intriguing all the same. For example, it was a far more multicultural entity than people generally think.

edited 11th Mar '13 1:46:07 PM by pagad

100% agreed with you Silasw. It is our duty to ensure that neither our children nor their children ever again are faced with such utter failure of common human decency. And the way to do that is to make sure the ugly truth is never forgotten.

As it relates to gay rights matters, I speak from experience when I say that if you show somebody only a handful of studies and articles about the true extent of shit LGBTQs have to deal with it, I guarantee you'll have a brand-new gay rights activist in under five full minutes.

They were???

Also, I agree with you in that there's something...fascinating....about those wacky Nazis. What they were able to accomplish what with being a defeated nation only some 20 years prior is astounding.

Consider what would have been accomplished if all that national pride, steadfast resolve, and military acumen had been directed toward noble ends.....

edited 11th Mar '13 2:00:41 PM by TheStarshipMaxima

Consider what would have been accomplished if all that national pride, steadfast resolve, and military acumen had been directed toward noble ends.....

Not necessarily as much as you might imagine. National Socialism was tremendously backstabby and inefficient, and sacrificed a great deal for big, impressive-looking, and not always terribly useful gains. The notion that Trains Run On Time under fascism is largely a myth, and always glosses over something.

edited 11th Mar '13 2:05:46 PM by Iaculus

Ouch.

But you can't deny, that country was a joke, and suddenly they took a ton of levels in badass and came this close to seizing all of Europe.

I'm as true an Eaglelander as they come, but even I shudder at the thought of what the Germans might've accomplished if they'd gotten all their lebensraum.

edited 11th Mar '13 2:06:15 PM by TheStarshipMaxima

I don't think this is the right thread for this. :P

Let's talk about how stupid that one guy is who said bad stuff about teh gayz.

Haha, he's stupid.

edited 11th Mar '13 2:11:29 PM by kay4today

It gives my universe a sense of order and balance to know I can count on you to rain on the parade, Kay.

Not everyone unfortunately. Even when you weren't a gay rights supporter I don't think you went around supporting or committing hate crimes. A lot of people who are causing this kind of shit can justify it to themselves even knowing what gay people have to go through with "Their gay so they deserve it."

Or was that just the unspoken exception? Sorry to take the air out of your statement but there are some people I don't think anyone could ever get to come around.

edited 11th Mar '13 2:12:06 PM by Wildcard

Maxima: I recommend giving this a read some time. It's fiction, but unlike most "Nazis win the war" alternate history, it's fiction based on what the Nazis actually planned for Europe if they won. High Octane Nightmare Fuel does not begin to cover it.

edited 11th Mar '13 2:14:16 PM by pagad

You really think so?? That some people could look at the literal dead bodies of gays that do nothing other than sleep with somebody and just.....not care?

edited 11th Mar '13 2:12:41 PM by TheStarshipMaxima

Well yeah. Some people don't care about dead people regardless of their race/orientation/whatever, simply because they didn't even know them. :C

@Starship: I don't think Fred Phelps would ever shed a single tear for Matthew Shepard no.