Austinnn wrote:IluvHarvey wrote:Being a Red head I have to put up with being vilified every day.
It really annoys me that you can't say something about the colour of someones skin but can about the colour of their hair.
Whats the difference?
I being serious too.
I am assuming you are serious as you say and not fishing, although I suspect that you are fishing.
Redheads often are the children of other redheads. All the abuse that they have experienced, odds on other people in their family have encountered to. This is quite similar to people with a darker skin colour. But the redhead's parents and grandparents probably suffered more or less the same as them, rather than drasticly worse. And the redhead doesn't have the burden of centuries of being made to feel inhuman passed down by their family and other redheads in their community. Why?
The difference is that people with red hair haven't EVER been forced into slavery, or burnt on huge wooden crosses because of the colour of their hair. Redheads may have been beaten up at school but they have never been beaten half to death in a police cell, or had their neighbours petition the local council to stop them from buying houses in different places, or had their whole family intimidated and spat on by anyone from old people to kids, and have never been laughed at by the police if they dared to extract justice in the way society tells us is right.
To my knowledge, redheads have also NEVER been killed, severely injured, raped, pushed out to the desert or had their children taken from them on the basis of their hair colour. While it is true that redheads do get called names and are made to feel inferior, the weight of the history of oppression and mistrust of people like them - I would argue - is a little lighter than that for a different ethnicity.
I could go on, but I think you get the picture. It's a bit of a laugh, seeing people try to jump on the offended minority bandwagon just because they've got bad spots or red hair. I wore glasses at school and was not good at sports, so I got a bit of s*** from the kids at school. So what? Not really the same as being born into a violent and recurring history of systemetic violence and abuse.
The only similarity is that the reasons for the vastly varying levels of abuse are equally artificial and ridiculous.
Now back to Homophobia. I'd like to remind anyone that cares, I don't really think Milne was being homophobic, but he used the language of homophobia, gave it oxygen and currency. For example if a player called Brent Harvey a "n*gger", no sane man would say that he was being racially abused. Does that make the use of the word right? Does that make it ok for little kids in the stands to hear their heroes say it, or for Daniel Wells or Majak Daw to overhear it?
I think Milne was charged with his use of a taboo word, not abusing Harry O'Brien. It's a bit sad that we have to get to this stage (it's a bit sad that in the 21st century people still need to be asked to respect the feelings of a homosexual or a black person in the same way they would respect those of anyone else rather than doing it automatically), but there you are. I have no problem with my favourite player been made an example of - someone has to be. Milne is already hated by everyone besides St Kilda, so its just another medal of infamy to hang on his proud chest. The only thing I DO have a problem with is if any similar future incidents are not punished the same way.
As far as the article goes, words clearly did have an effect on this homosexual and others he knows/knew, and though you'll never stop it, the player is only asking that it is condemned and punished officially, rather than turning a blind eye, in a similar way to how inter-marriage rape and domestic violence was only made illegal quite recently. That is the only real point here. This is a real line in the sand, and not just a club motto.
