This was in 2010.

There are plenty of people like this. The family I mentioned – all of them were extremely politically charged. Extremely. They were die-hard voters and faithful Americans. But if they went to church on Sunday morning and they were told by word of mouth “This is going to keep gays from making our marriages as straight Christians invalid!” – or something else completely heinous, just using that as an example – they would believe it. It’s how they got their news.

We need to work to speak with these people, with friends and families, to show them facts. To tell our newspapers and local news media that it’s wrong to broadcast opinions that don’t share all of the facts. To tell the government that they need to be making sure these people actually are truly well informed. Maybe write letters to the editors of papers to tell them what the bill does and see if they can publish it.

It’s never going to be a perfect world, and maybe there is no one solution – but I see this as part of the problem. It’s just one tiny step, but even in 2012 there are people who still don’t get their news from the internet, still don’t watch shows like Glee or even Ellen, and still don’t know. It’s a sad truth and one that maybe, just maybe, we can all work together to move towards fixing.

After all, it’s 2012 – and that tiny island I’m from still doesn’t have a McDonalds or a place to buy bread if you want toast at 2 AM. That’s saying something.

I guess that my response to your plea for education and patience is that it’s *2012*. Having a LGBT friend or relative isn’t exotic anymore; it just is, for large swaths of the American population. And so when you say “we need to EDUCATE, not hate”, my response is that we’ve had well on two decades of mainstream exposure to gay relationships in the media — at some point, when do we start holding people responsible for being ill-informed, as you put it? How much more “education” do they need?

Because none of this happened in a vacuum, you know? The same people that watch FOX News also watch “Glee” on FOX. They probably watch Ellen Degeneres’ show. They probably watched “Will & Grace” when it was on the air. I could go on and on, but you get the idea — their lives are regularly exposed to LGBT folks on TV, and given that approximately 10% of the population is gay, they probably know a gay person at work or church.

And they *still* voted to curtail their rights.

So yes, education is necessary. And so is confrontation. I think this is what’s behind the calls for boycotts of North Carolina. People want to make it *very clear* that what happened yesterday was WRONG. And I think this is what’s missing from your very thoughtful essay.

How do we make it clear to the voters of North Carolina that they voted the wrong way?

I do ask that with some trepidation. I grew up in a small town in Ohio, which was every bit as culturally Southern as any place in Western North Carolina; and I know that Carolinians don’t cotton well to people from outside telling them how to live their lives (which is why a boycott will fail).

Secondly, we tend to have this monolithic view of populations. We tend to accuse organizations or regions of acting of their own accord. North Carolina did this. The Government did that. Microsoft made this happen. Whatever. But institutions do not make decisions. Individuals do. And the reasons behind any individual decision can be quite complex and varied. Is some of it hate-motivated? Sure. Is some of it ignorance? Sure. Are there a thousand other reasons? Are some of them entirely rational but based on bad assumptions? Are some of them even rational and valid? Maybe. North Carolina is not a collective hive-mind. And when you assume that any population is a collective, and react accordingly, you are choosing to neglect all of the people who acted for different reasons than the one you are ascribing the entire population.

The irony here is that expressing collective vitirol against the entire population of North Carolina, the use of slurs like bigot and redneck, is doing exactly what we are decrying. You are judging a population of over 9 million people based on the actions of just over half of them and using that to reinforce steretypes. It is especially ironice when the battle cry involves living for love instead of hatred.

I think this post hits it right on the head. It is easy, in the fury, to lose sight of the human beings on the other side. It is easy to treat them as a collective of stereotypes and respond to the entire collective with rage and anger. But it does no one any good. Not you. Not them. No one.

It definitely is ugly all around, and that’s probably the best way to put that. I just wish people cared more about hurting others – from BOTH sides of the fence.

Within my family, I had a similar experience, more or less, in that I enjoyed male-identified activities more and my family accepted it without question. But every year of school, every new town we moved to, every new group of friends (male or female) offered a painful wake-up call: You are female – you are bad.

I grew up hating girlie things, not out of pure preference, but because I’d been taught by important social groups that they were less desirable. I was a teenage misogynist. But, not anymore.

But the reminders don’t stop. They are everywhere and they are hard to ignore. They build up and they weigh upon me. And so all told, it’s nice to read your experience and hear your perspective. I’m glad at least on this one instance, a little division is stitched up somehow.

Marinate the porkchops in the teriyaki and 2-3tsp of chopped garlic. Let it marinate for about an hour.

Grill (if you can) or pan-fry the pork chops until they’re done. While they’re cooking, sprinkle the pineapple rings with the cayenne pepper, and grill (again, if you are grilling) or pan-fry until you see the edges separating a bit.

Make your rice, as per the instructions, and add a bunch of black pepper.

Serve it all up together, and make sure that you get a bite that combines the rice, pineapple and pork all in one mouthful. Tasty, tasty.

Simple!!!