Originally Posted by paborn
Prejudice expressed by members of one minority against another has always interested me. Perhaps MFAS does not know, or maybe he does not care, that the Stonewall Riots which many believe mark the beginning of the modern gay power movement in America occurred when police raided the Stonewall Inn where a large number of drag queens had gathered to mourn the death of Judy Garland. Perhaps it’s the “twinks” he disapproves, rather than the “fem”, and he’s a closet transvestite himself?
One of the pop psychology theories proposes that the louder you scream, the more you have to hide; as Shakespeare puts in in Hamlet “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”, a principle I apply as much to anti-paedophile statements as to anti-gay or anti-“fem twinks” ones. Not that I’m appalled by it; for me it’s part of life’s rich tapestry, or, as Terence wrote in Heauton Timorumenos: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", or "I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me". Perhaps the concept of Original Sin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin appeals to me?
But there’s a general question of why some members of a minority dislike members of a different minority so much. One theory is the “crowding out” one – society in general has a fixed quota of sympathy for members of minorities, and if one minority is being considered sympathetically, there’s less room for another minority to get an equal share
Some of this thinking was triggered by a book review I was reading recently. It ends “At a time when concerns about the judiciary focus on diversity as well as merit, the two judges’ ancestry was as unusual as their education was typical. Lord Dyson is the son of a Lithuanian father and a Bulgarian mother; all four of Sir Stephen Sedley’s grandparents were immigrants from Poland. There is a book waiting to be written on the contribution that the offspring of Jewish refugees have made to English law.”
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