Clanad
You raise some interesting points, especially when you refer to businesses who have been targeted, but 'militant' homosexuals.
Do you think that the right response to these tiny number of cases is justification for enshrining bigotry in law? What this bill represents for the first time since Jim Crow, is legislation which will allow someone to be sacked for their sexual orientation.
You wrote:
It's amazing to some of us that a segment of the population totalling, by latest counts, less than 2%, has the power to force so many other people to conform to their wishes through coercion
There's a common misconception that just 2% of the nation are pro gay rights. There are substatial numbers of straight people who also support equality for gay people.
Regarding gay people dying 20 years earlier than straight people.
I'm loving that this piece of nonsense is still doing the rounds.
Please read this:
THE ARGUMENT
Anti-LGBT organizations, seeking to promote heterosexuality as the healthier "choice," often offer up the purportedly shorter life spans and poorer physical and mental health of gays and lesbians as reasons why they shouldn't be allowed to adopt or foster children.
THE FACTS
This falsehood can be traced directly to the discredited research of Paul Cameron and his Family Research Institute, specifically a 1994 paper he co-wrote entitled "The Lifespan of Homosexuals." Using obituaries collected from newspapers serving the gay community, he and his two co-authors concluded that gay men died, on average, at 43, compared to an average life expectancy at the time of around 73 for all U.S. men. On the basis of the same obituaries, Cameron also claimed that gay men are 18 times more likely to die in car accidents than heterosexuals, 22 times more likely to die of heart attacks than whites, and 11 times more likely than blacks to die of the same cause. He also concluded that lesbians are 487 times more likely to die of murder, suicide, or accidents than straight women.
Remarkably, these claims have become staples of the anti-gay right and have frequently made their way into far more mainstream venues. For example, William Bennett, education secretary under President Reagan, used Cameron's statistics in a 1997 interview he gave to ABC News' "This Week."
However, like virtually all of his "research," Cameron's methodology is egregiously flawed — most obviously because the sample he selected (the data from the obits) was not remotely statistically representative of the LGBT population as a whole. Even Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has called Cameron's methods "just ridiculous."