A Long While Ago

A while back, when I was just relearning to walk and still thought I'd be an aerospace engineer, I got back in touch with some friends from high-school.

This is significant in my support of LGBT because half of them turned out to have been gay as long as I'd known them.

Hanging out with these friends introduced me to their friends and, thus, I met a lot more gay people.

Iowa State University created a concentration of LGBT (though it was just LGB back then).

One evening one of the, as we affectionately called her, bull dykes didn't show up to play her half-elf.

Turns out she was in the hospital.

She ended up there for coming out of the women's room at a gas station and some asshole decided she was a dude because of her build and haircut.

He and his buddies beat her almost to death.

I don't cotton to that.

But it's an example of actual violence against someone who's gay because of how they look.

Lately, though, I've been reading about "violence".

More, accurately, it's just being rude.

Bad manners don't cause any lasting damage.  If words can break you, you're breaking yourself.

It's OK to be upset when someone is rude to you.  You can be angry.

But it's not actually violence.  It's not even similar to violence.

The media is wanting to warp the language again.

It's a bad kettle of fish to open because once it's accepted that language is violence, fighting words returns to play and we get valid self defense claims for bad words.

Though, people were a lot more polite when they knew they'd get physically assaulted for being rude.