First of all, I'm posting this more as a discussion than a call to action, though I admit, anyone's move to action that wouldn't break my heart.
I caught wind of some groups complaining about a Facebook Group, Heterosexual Awareness Month. They were encouraging members to report it to Facebook for hate speech violations.
I can't say personally I am super-invested in shutting down this page or any page. These things are always Hydras, and the bigger issue is general public education and that is coming along pretty swimmingly.
The foundational premise of this page seems to be one can only be proud of one's heterosexuality by being disdainful and hateful to people who are not heterosexual. And a component of expressing heterosexual pride is spreading lies and misinformation about gays.
Gee. Kind of like the "white pride" movement cannot be proud of their own ethnic heritage without being disdainful and contemptuous of other cultures.
Under the supposed guise of humor they are distributing a lot of ugly misinformation and cheap stereotypes. It certainly seems like a gathering place that collects a lot of homophobes and invites a lot of gay-bashing.
And all the usual discredited any-gay tropes are regularly represented. Some examples after the fold, warning, NSFW nor for the easily nauseated.
It paints all gays as scary and sexually depraved by of course, cherry-picking, from a few individual examples.
And of course, the gays are going to molest your children.
And gays deliberately go out and infect others with sexually transmitted diseases:
And the page constantly uses dehumanizing language, like describing LGBT people as a "toxic waste zone."
More dehumanizing language that gays are "animals" that need to evolve, like heterosexuals have.
Do they believe in evolution? How do they square the idea that Darwinian evolution would begin with homosexual orientation and 'evolve' to hetero? Wouldn't homos never proliferate enough to get to hetero? My head hurts.
It suggests that violently spanking children will prevent them from being gay:
Which of course is nonsense. Suggesting people "discipline" the gay out of kids is a good prescription for child abuse, since it's a tactic that is guaranteed to fail, having no basis in science. The failure may cause escalation. Many adult LGBT people can share memories of being viciously abused by their own family as children, and will attest every strike did nothing to make them less gay. Aren't enough
Christian conservatives are already beating their children death?
Facebook reviewed and ignored my request.
I have to say, if another minority group were told they were animals that need to evolve, who spread disease and molest children, and I have a hard time imagining they wouldn't be running afoul of Facebook's anti-defamation policy.
And though I'm generally a free speech libertarian, I also recognize the First Amendment does not guarantee anyone a Facebook page, and if Facebook chooses to engage in moderating community content, there is no reason not to avail oneself of that service. And in fact, many conservative groups do regularly conduct coordinated attacks on innocuous LGBT pages and report them as "obscene." Many LGBT orgs have had difficulties maintaining pages on Facebook, mostly due to automated disabling. In general Facebook has been fair and responsive when personally engaged by the orgs.
Facebook arbitrated my complaints and came to a conclusion which I disagree with but I can accept. But I do have to wonder what Facebook's standards are relative to hate speech, which are said to be LGBT inclusive, considering some of the filthy, dehumanized lies that are all over that page?
Perhaps Facebook is giving the group a pass because it's all ostensibly an ironic joke, though not in my opinion a funny one.