White Magazine Facing Black ban

It’s interesting how the requirements of the Sexular Culture shift and bend.  Once there were reprisals for what you did say. For what you did do.  Opprobrium for saying words that would be hurtful to a specifically identified sexual minority.

Now there are increasingly going to be reprisals for what you don’t say. For what you don’t do.  For that, apparently, is a mask for the same sort of bigotry.

In other words, rejecting a shibboleth of the Sexular Culture is not simply by voicing a different opinion. It’s by saying nothing at all.  By keeping your head down and avoiding the conflict, as many still hope they can do.

So this story out today makes for interesting reading:

You can read the rest of the report here.

Earlier The Age newspaper filed the initial report, which reveals an outrage (there’s that word again) towards wedding magazine White for, wait for it, not presenting marriage or weddings in the manner to which others would wish it to do so.

Time was hateful speech was the problem. Now silence is being interpreted equally as hateful.

White’s a private publication by the way. Not a government department’s publication or some such.  So I guess there can be no actual edict from above declaring that it change its ways.  All that can be done is for the rage to be maintained.  But well maintained rage is the new black banning of our culture, and with social media well and truly in the outraged’s fold, it will bring White down, no doubt about it.

As it surely is doing, as the Hack article reveals:

Backlash against the magazine has been brewing on White‘s Facebook and Instagram, where commenters have called the magazine “bigoted” and “a disgrace”.

Meanwhile, in a facebook group attracting over 500 members, Australian wedding professionals have rallied around the issue and are calling for equality in the industry.

More than 100 of these vendors now say they are boycotting White Magazine and will no longer submit wedding shoots, provide content, or use the magazine to advertise their businesses.

“I have previously paid to advertise with White mag, and had I have known their stance on this issue, I would not have given my hard earned money to them. It’s not about boycotting or bullying, it’s about transparency,” one vendor said.

Course not.

Politics is downstream of culture.  We’ve seen that the last few weeks in Australia.  The reason the government has changed Prime Ministerships so frequently is because Newspolls indicate we are unhappy with the government.  Every government.  All of the time.  Politics is not toxic.  Culture is.

And when culture screams or shouts loud enough, things have to happen.  In the case of White magazine, there will be a screaming match, masquerading as a call for transparency, and no amount of politicking or freedom of conscience will matter.  They will have to be outed.  Have to be exposed. Have to be brought down.

So you don’t have to have a stated stance.  You just have to have a quiet decision.  Either way you’re going to run afoul of the Sexular Culture.

This was equally demonstrated in a recent Canadian study, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

The study concluded that a primary problem for transgender people is that almost all heterosexual people, along with a huge majority of homosexual people, would not consider dating a transgender person on the basis of that transgendered person declaring what their sexual identity was.

Trans persons were finding that heterosexual men were extremely unlikely to date a man whose sexual identify was a female, and a heterosexual woman was extremely unlikely to date a woman whose sexual identity was male.

The conclusion of the study tells us where the problem lies.  The problem lies with cisgendered people who have not been able to get past their “cisgenderism and transmisogyny” sufficiently enough to take that leap.

In other words, the lack of desire to date someone who is transgender by either straight or gay people, is viewed as the problem.  It is viewed as a passive bigotry that must be addressed.  A majority of people declaring their support for transgender people is no longer enough, if that voiced support does not lead to actual support through dating someone who is transgender.

So a heterosexual man with a long and proud 100 per cent record of dating  lots of women born as women has two problems.  First he’s got a failure to commit.  But secondly, he’s got a bigotry problem that he may not even realise.  30 sexual partners in he past two years and not one of them a trans person.  Dude, you’re uncommitted to women, AND you’re committed to bigotry!

It’s not what you’re saying and not what you’re doing that’s the problem, it’s what you’re NOT doing, what you’re NOT saying.

Fortunately, not all voices are as manic, and there are plenty of sensible people out there, as this comment under the article in the The Age indicates:

I did write in support of StBob, saying that’s the only way we’re going to be able to get along with each other as a community of deep difference, but it didn’t make it past The Age’s comments moderator.

Mind you, careful what you say there StBob, sounds like you might have a bit of secret bigotry in there that we need to expose.