It's nice to know that even gay people can be fucking morons.

April 1 would be an appropriate day for such a thing, ya think?

OK, I can totally understand if gays might feel that things like marriage equality and DADT aren't really high on their priority list. That makes sense to me. What is totally beyond me is that they could possibly be "against equality". How could these ignorant fucks pass out pins that say "Just say no to marriage" and "marriage = death"? If they're against their own equality what exactly are they for? If they're traveling the country insisting that they absolutely do not want gays to be able to marry and hate crime legislation should be overturned are they suggesting that something else that's more important should be pushed before we worry about this whole "equality" thing?

@3- Perhaps they are Queer Supremacists?

Go to the link. These folks are not anti-gay marriage, they're anti-marriage. They're not anti-gays in the militrary, they're anti-military. Hell, they're further left than you folks!!

No, anti-marriage is when electeds sleep around on their mistress with their male lovers.

@5 word.

It's amazing how reactionary people who think they are liberal are.

@8 These folks aren't liberals, d00d. They appear to be some sort of self-hating anarchist clusterfuck.

The same kinds of arguments took place among feminists in 1970s Paris. Julia Kristeva was part of this group, who criticized "feminism" as a movement of women who wanted power within the patriarchal system. Her own group wanted nothing less than a gender revolution, that would propose an alternative to bourgeois structures of power.

A similar split happened in America with Audre Lorde's essay, "The master's tools will never destroy the master's house", although she was talking about a status quo that privileged white women and kept black women down. As a black American feminist, she saw bourgeois white feminism as yet another formulation of the old system of oppression. I'd say her argument was on more solid moral ground because black women as a group did suffer more discrimination, i.e., this wasn't a bunch of privileged white intellectuals arguing about obscure linguistic and psychoanalytic theories (not that there's anything wrong with that!).

I don't think there's any reason to feel threatened by Against Equality, because Americans as a group are far too practical to ever recognize them as anything but the fringe of the far left. In today's economic climate, I doubt anyone but college students has much interest in them.

@8: Irony.

They're a group of people who've let their idealism get the best of them.

It's nice to desire an ideal world, it's a waste of time trying to actually make it so.

@9 dood I was talking about the lame commenters I'm this thread

*in this thread
(I hate typing from a cell phone)

Ha! This whole thing is an amazing elaborate April fools joke, and everybody's falling for it!

Is it really so hard to fathom that there are people who are critical of the institutions of marriage and the US military?

Gahhh!!!

This whole April Fools thing is making me crazy. I can no longer tell if stories are real or just the joke of the day. I'll come back to Slog tomorrow after recovering from the hangover I'm about to induce.

@16 -- no, we're just making fun of people cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Let's start with the fact that people form long-term, socially sanctioned romantic pair bonds, i.e. marriages, in large numbers just about everywhere.

It's amusing how many of their articles are focused on political conditions five or ten years ago that no longer obtain. Marriage equality has become a wedge issue that splits the fiscal conservatives off from the social conservatives in the Republican base.

The thing that's great about Anarchists is that at least they'll never get any shit done.

#18 Yeah, people practice religion in large numbers everywhere too. I guess we better not be critical of it then!
And you don't mention the military...is that off-limits too?

@12: I'm so sick of everyone who actually thinks radically and acts on those thoughts being blown off as an idealist! The "idealists" are the ones who are actually out there having real conversations with their communities and affecting change.

@everyone else: I think it's more about thinking BEYOND marriage than being necessarily anti-marriage. I don't give a fuck that people get married, I just wish that folks would recognize the history of marriage and what it's historically been in place to do (transfer property of capital and women).

And that queer folks would think more outside of the box of gay marriage as a means of getting state recognized "rights" (healthcare, immigration, child custody, etc) when we should be fighting to get those "rights" for everyone whether or not we're married.

I'd be cool with it if I thought they actually believed their bullshit, but it's all just pretentious and hypocritical crowing and attention whoring that riles against privilege from their ivory tower.

Yeah, i said it. Go ahead and call me a a cog in the wheel of oppression and assign me a reading list of books to read. I'll just keep wallowing in my white privilege, so suck it mother fuckers!

@21,
The idealists are affecting change? Are you sure about that? They make lots of noise, but I'm not sure they actually make anything lasting happen.

The realists, the ones who compromise, those are the ones making lasting change. Humanity moves slowly, really slowly. I'm not against the idealists, but they're getting ahead of themselves. There's a fine line between idealists and radicals.

@23: "The realists, the ones who compromise, those are the ones making lasting change."

I agree. But no one pays attention.

I was thinking about that this afternoon - in many ways, I consider myself to be a moderate. I believe in compromise, incremental improvements. I believe that if you try to change the system overnight, no one will listen - you need to accept that real change is a slow process.

But moderation isn't flashy. It doesn't get attention. So, the radicals and reactionaries get all the press. After all, what's a really catchy moderate slogan? What can we chant at rallies? "We want change! And we want it... at a pace that won't overly disrupt the social order. Or make anyone too uncomfortable. Take a few years. We understand. Really we do!"

Not catchy enough for the six o'clock news, sadly.

These people aren't idealists, they're just assholes.

That's like if as an atheist, I decide I'm going to oppose the construction of a Mosque in my neighborhood because I think we need less temples, not more. Never mind that there's already a Catholic and Protestant churches and a Buddist temple near my home. I take the end result I want, more freedom because of less religion, bypassing freedom itself and the result is you get less freedom. Their motivation really is irrelevant.

I think marriage is stupid too. But people have the right to be stupid. It's pretty fucking simple.

I wonder how many people here actually looked into the website, or the suggested literature on said website before posting their opinions. After reading some of these comments, my guess is not too many.

@27 (LumosDeFortuno): Amen! Social change ALWAYS requires radical thinkers who are willing to say things that mainstream society finds laughable or dangerous. Every radical idea may not be adopted, but there are good reasons to be reminded that we should be dubious of the way the family is elevated in our culture, and serves to keep poor people poor and rich people rich. We should be dubious of the military. I'm glad there are radicals out there opposing these ideas and maybe offering some counterweight that might help push the "center" back toward the left, from its current extreme right position.

Hi all, I am reading this and what strikes me most is the utter ignorance and petty expletives used to describe "them." To those who have written such misguided comments here:

Why don't you read the book and/ or my interview with Ryan Conrad in the April 1st issue of Seattle Gay News? Make a judgment as an informed reader rather than a perpetuator of ignorance and bigotry. Because if you are a Seattlite whose anthem is "Born This Way," you a cog in the machinery of oppression that buttresses your own self-righteousness at the expense of poor people, women, and/ or people of color. In short: get your heads out of your asses, please.

Oh, and it might be helpful to distinguish "queer" from "gay" from the outset. If you don't know the difference, you probably don't know what you are talking about.

Questioning the idea of marriage as equality has been part of queer politics for ages (with the nod to radical 70s feminism as detailed by Irena. I'm thrilled that people are still out there reminding people that marriage does not mean equality. On a technical/legal level allowing gay people to use the word "marry" affords something like 1,100 federal rights and responsibilities, without having to rewrite all those laws to say "married or civil partnered." I'm old school queer and thing marriage is kinda lame.

I'm kinda surprised and disappointed that Eli Sanders, the original poster, didn't know how to contextualize them, or just didn't bother. The thing I don't like about blogs is lazy copy and paste journalism with little to no added value; this is a very good example. Blogs aren't Koans.

@26 I read it and it was worse than I thought.

@31 +1

Slog/Stranger = bunch of stuffy, boring old farts

See this:

http://www.sgn.org/sgnnews39_13/page18.c…

@35: Exactly!!!

That's hilarious. These anarchists ally themselves with right wingers and we're the reactionaries.

There are good reasons to problematize the way abstract notions of "equality" have been the primary way LGBT issues are framed. And it's always good for queer folks to think intersectionally.

alas, the Against Equality people are self-aggrandizing and self-congratulatory to the point of self-parody.

If this group is for "total, across the board" equality, it seems kind of douchey to use the group name "Against Equality."

Wouldn't it have made more sense to name your group something like, "Equality For All Things?"

Just saying.

@26 -- I read several of the linked essays from that site, chosen more or less at random to get a broad flavor. To call them universally whiny and tendentious would be to give them entirely too much credit. Many of them show no credible knowledge of marriage. Kate Bornstein's essay is particularly brain dead on this point, because she pretends that marriage is still largely a religious institution in the US. In reality, it's an entirely secular one at this point. What religious backdrop you choose makes about as much legal difference as the type of cake. And then she calls for the rights that come with marriage to be available to all, which completely misses the point. The legal rights and responsibilities that come with marriage make sense only with respect to another person, in large part because they impose particular responsibilities on that other person.

I read a number of the articles and the discussions in the comments and found it to be typical radical bullshit being spouted by the sorts of pseudo-intellectuals that you'd find in a sophomore level social science class. Not a junior level social science class, mind you. The lack of critical thinking skills lead to them dropping out before then, and probably blaming "the establishment" for forcing logic onto them. There's no honest debate possible, as the comments will show, as they come at everything from a stance of extreme condescension. You either agree with them on all points or you are an idiot for not seeing things their way.

@40: I would assume that the name is used specifically to spark debate and draw attention to the issues. I doubt they would have gotten featured on SLOG or JoeMyGod if it wasn't for their name.

@43 You're assuming they aren't nuts.

Listened to Ryan Conrad speak about this book "Against Equality." He makes some very valid and thought-provoking points. We discussed that equality, essentially, is LGBT assimilation into whatever hetero-nromative society they happen to be in. "Against Equality" simply means "we want justice and freedom from your heteronormative standards." There are some great articles in the book and I urge anyone and everyone to take a peek.