That Gay Thread

[Rev. Rye]

It took them this long to ban the gay panic defense?? A few questions:

-How the filet-o-fuck was that ever a ‘defense’ in the first place?

-Who the hell panics because they’re hit on by a gay person?

-Isn’t this really just a lame, troglodyte way to justify gay bashing (‘He asked me to dance, so I killed him.’)?

Fuxxake. Enjoy your exit from the Stone Age, Colorado.

Boru

Given that, since Christianity took over the Western world, gay people were treated as essentially predatory, it makes some sense. Take this infamous 1961 short, Boys Beware:



For what it's worth, the same year, the director of Boys Beware made a companion piece called Girls Beware, warning girls about predatory boys. Naturally, they didn't say the boys in that short did what they did because they had a disease (as virulent as smallpox) called heterosexuality, even though, frankly, if they were going to write off gay people as inherently predatory because of outliers like Ralph, it only makes sense to do the same to straight people, especially when, odds are, this predatory behaviour is probably more common in straight people (definitely in sheer numbers, possibly in per capita), at least if the MeToo movement is any indication.

If they were working under the assumption that this is what gay people are like,



Then it only makes sense that gay panic would seem a viable defense (Note: as someone who's been thinking a lot about Ken Branagh's Hamlet for my Anglotopia column, I'm pretty familiar with the difference between "seems" and "is.") Of course, when this happens in the real world (something I know from personal experience), the defense should definitely be more "motherfucker tried to rape me" than "motherfucker was gay and I couldn't help but kill him."