"Queer isn't a choice, like vegetarian or Muslim. Queer isn't an on-its-face ridiculous restriction on behavior. Drawing a picture of Mohammed doesn't actually cause anyone any harm, which is very different than assaulting a homosexual."
Actually, you're wrong. To take the easiest claim first, any grown person knows that words and images can cause harm. Calling someone a nigger causes harm. Publicly shitting on their most dearly-held beliefs (esp. in the context of a culture that makes shitting on such beliefs a national passtime) hurts people.
More complicatedly, to be 'queer' (when 'queer = what westerners mean when they say the word queer') IS a choice. All over the world there are people who prefer having sex with people of the same gender. That's probably biology at work. But to say that they're 'queer' in the US-ian sense is about as accurate as saying that every woman worldwide who asserts her needs and desires aggressively is 'feminist' -- that is to say it's not accurate at all. Though I realize it's a lamentable tragedy for white taxonimists-of-humans everywhere, the labels the progressive US/western european communities have come up with in the past few decades don't obtain all over the word so neatly as some folks would like.
Similarly your notion of 'choice' as far as being a Muslim goes seems to depend on a notion that the middle-class US-ian experience of growing up with a set of beliefs, then going to college and taking World Religions or Philosophy 101 and Questioning It All is universal. It's not. Most Muslims in the world are so CULTURALLY emeshed in their local form of Islam that they can't possibly pick and choose doctrine ala American-style buffet religion.
The funny thing is, you acknowledge that this lack of choice imposed by culture is inevitable -- but it's only ok for US-ians:
"I live on this side of the cultural divide...I stick up for people scribbling stick figures...People are frustrated and scared, and while certainly I think the "Muslim threat" has been far overblown, it doesn't mean that people don't have some right to be frustrated and afraid, regardless of how real the threat is...They're going to lash out"
I live in the west, too. I was born and grew up in freaking michigan! The idea that that means that you inevitably must wed yourself to racist idiot shitbags is preposterous -- and is disproved by the fact that lots of westerners are saying that this 'holiday' is hatemongering nonsense. But even more dangerous is the idea that people "have some right" to be "frustrated and afraid" and "lash out" REGARDLESS OF HOW REAL THE THREAT IS. I mean, doesn't that sound insane to you? Western europeans for centuries PERCEIVED a threat in from Jews. So were pogroms and shtetls and genocoide ok? Or only, say, throwing pig's blood on people's doors, since that's a 'symbolic' act? That's some sad, baa-sheep thinking, esp. form someone who's patting himself on the back for being such an iconoclast.
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Actually, you're wrong. To take the easiest claim first, any grown person knows that words and images can cause harm. Calling someone a nigger causes harm. Publicly shitting on their most dearly-held beliefs (esp. in the context of a culture that makes shitting on such beliefs a national passtime) hurts people.
More complicatedly, to be 'queer' (when 'queer = what westerners mean when they say the word queer') IS a choice. All over the world there are people who prefer having sex with people of the same gender. That's probably biology at work. But to say that they're 'queer' in the US-ian sense is about as accurate as saying that every woman worldwide who asserts her needs and desires aggressively is 'feminist' -- that is to say it's not accurate at all. Though I realize it's a lamentable tragedy for white taxonimists-of-humans everywhere, the labels the progressive US/western european communities have come up with in the past few decades don't obtain all over the word so neatly as some folks would like.
Similarly your notion of 'choice' as far as being a Muslim goes seems to depend on a notion that the middle-class US-ian experience of growing up with a set of beliefs, then going to college and taking World Religions or Philosophy 101 and Questioning It All is universal. It's not. Most Muslims in the world are so CULTURALLY emeshed in their local form of Islam that they can't possibly pick and choose doctrine ala American-style buffet religion.
The funny thing is, you acknowledge that this lack of choice imposed by culture is inevitable -- but it's only ok for US-ians:
"I live on this side of the cultural divide...I stick up for people scribbling stick figures...People are frustrated and scared, and while certainly I think the "Muslim threat" has been far overblown, it doesn't mean that people don't have some right to be frustrated and afraid, regardless of how real the threat is...They're going to lash out"
I live in the west, too. I was born and grew up in freaking michigan! The idea that that means that you inevitably must wed yourself to racist idiot shitbags is preposterous -- and is disproved by the fact that lots of westerners are saying that this 'holiday' is hatemongering nonsense. But even more dangerous is the idea that people "have some right" to be "frustrated and afraid" and "lash out" REGARDLESS OF HOW REAL THE THREAT IS.
I mean, doesn't that sound insane to you? Western europeans for centuries PERCEIVED a threat in from Jews. So were pogroms and shtetls and genocoide ok? Or only, say, throwing pig's blood on people's doors, since that's a 'symbolic' act? That's some sad, baa-sheep thinking, esp. form someone who's patting himself on the back for being such an iconoclast.