Tolerance is not Acceptance

Edit
2/10/2009

India's Gay Prince

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1127537

I got a comment saying we should get married to suppress our desires, and that is an understandable idea to have but this man did that and it ruined a girls life, and who knows how many others lives are ruined because people are trying to suppress their desires. View the article :-) It's quite intriguing.

Again thank you for reading!



End Edit
In my last post I asked everyone what their view of homosexuality was and I got the response I expected to get.

Most people have just embraced homosexuality in context of the American culture, and might not accept it but they tend to tolerate it

Well tolerance and acceptance are not the same things, and I cannot make anyone accept any principle/ideology/cause they do not support. I do understand that homosexuality is a very touchy topic, especially for those of us who are religious. Almost all religions I know of do not approve of homosexuality and therefore we grew up thinking it was wrong and so today we tolerate it but cannot wholeheartedly accept it.

I really will not even dip my hands into the religious aspect of homosexuality because it will just be a cyclical argument and no one will have the answer.

So in order to avoid arguments I will just say that we are NOT born gay, because if God condones it he won't make his people gay. But how can we control a persons desire? Just like God did not make war, aids, crime humans have socially constructed many different things and perhaps homosexuality and the desires that go along with were socially (most likely) constructed.

South Asians have a much harder time accepting homosexuality because often we think this is an "American problem" and people in our culture seldom experience it. Well there are two flaws with that thinking
One is that it is in fact NOT an American problem but homosexuality is experience in the world over, and second of all even labelling it as a problem shows our attitudes towards it.

Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, you can name it and do your research and you will find a gay community. Now why do I even care if people accept or understand homosexuality? Well because the lens I see it through is as such, homosexual desires do not always translate to a person BEING a homosexual (doing is not same as being) and even if a person did identify their urges and claim to be gay, why should I have a problem with that?

Does anyone tell me my heterosexual urges are not right, that I should suppress my thoughts and desires. Most often people do not have problem with people being homosexual but they have problem accepting the homosexual desires people experience. We see them as perverse experiences and attitudes.

If we allow ourselves to weed out and segregate people based on desires we think are perverse then slowly the government, and society will start segregating people based on other criteria as well, for example if you wear a turban or hijab you cannot work in any government jobs. The connection might seem bizarre but with rational think it really is not very bizarre

I encourage you all to do more research and find out more and see why it is that you can only tolerate the homosexual community but not accept it