The either/or dilemma is a lame tactic used by people that are trying to push an agenda, are lazy, or perhaps just stupid.
This is from "Industrial Society and Its Future" (
PDF here), and nicely illustrates part of the problem:
11. (fr) When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem. This tendency is pronounced among minority rights activists, whether or not they belong to the minority groups whose rights they defend. They are hypersensitive about the words used to designate minorities and about anything that is said concerning minorities. The terms “negro”, “oriental”, “handicapped” or “chick” for an African, an Asian, a disabled person or a woman originally had no derogatory connotation. “Broad” and “chick” were merely the feminine equivalents of “guy”, “dude” or “fellow”. The negative connotations have been attached to these terms by the activists themselves. Some animal rights activists have gone so far as to reject the word “pet” and insist on its replacement by “animal companion”. Leftish anthropologists go to great lengths to avoid saying anything about primitive peoples that could conceivably be interpreted as negative. They want to replace the word “primitive” by “nonliterate”. They may seem almost paranoid about anything that might suggest that any primitive culture is inferior to ours. (We do not mean to imply that primitive cultures ARE inferior to ours. We merely point out the hyper sensitivity of leftish anthropologists.)
And it's pretty much bang on the money, whether you like the author or not. (There's a lot of good insight in that essay.)
The system puts forward an agenda telling you WHAT you SHOULD feel, and if you don't, YOU are WRONG.
But the entire framework is based on setting up a sick and twisted world view. That the people are gay or whatever is simply an irrelevant consideration. It perpetuates the "~ism/~ist/~phobic" nonsense that itself sets up. Remove all that claptrap from the equation, and you are only left with people. It is the activists and idiots (group members or group opposition) that are the real problems as they are the ones perpetuating the illusion that these "groupings" matter.
Here's an example of setting up an arbitrary distinction that groups people:
Coffee drinkers
Thrills gum chewers
Short haired men
Bearded men
To pretend that these are important distinctions is simply insane. The us/them then comes into play and everything goes to Hell.
Now, that isn't to say that it doesn't make sense for men with beards to talk amongst themselves about beard-stuff, like what trimmers are better to use, etc. But that's no different than software users talking in an online forum about software.
For those that have never read the essay above, it's an excellent read. You can (and will) draw your own conclusions about it, but most likely will enjoy reading a lot of it if for no other reason than it presents a different viewpoint.
