An activist's thoughts.

I don't agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
- attributed to Voltaire

In response to this stamp:
and this news article: [link]

No, of course I don't SUPPORT what the stamp says. I'm a lesbian, and an avid gay rights activist. I think it was a dick move on their part to post something so stupid. So no, I don't agree with them.

But I sure as hell support their right to say it. Because, as the stamp says, if they didn't have the right to spew their bigoted opinions, we wouldn't have the right to spew our justified ones.

This stamp is NOT hate art, as stated in this FAQ topic:

FAQ #12: deviantART prohibits the submission of 'Hate Art' and 'Hate Propaganda', how is this defined?

"The staff reserves the right to remove immediately and without warning any submission which advocates or promotes the genocide, killing, or destruction of an identifiable individual, race, religion, nationality, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender or disability or which promotes inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction. Submissions which incite or willfully promote hatred against an identifiable group or individual will be removed in a similar fashion without warning."

The stamp does NOT promote the genocide, killing, or destruction of homosexuals. It also doesn't promote hatred against them. The stamp only states the opinion of the individual artist. It does not try to persuade others or preach that homosexuality is wrong. It is not propaganda by definition.

If this stamp were to be removed as hate art, then, in all fairness, so should these two:


If YOU have the right to hate a group of people for any reason, then so does someone else. For ANY reason. You don't have to like it. I don't like it, either. But unless you have NO ONE that you hate, even the homophobes and people against you, then you SHOULD NOT be preaching that 'hate is wrong'.

The majority of the gay community, in my opinion, is going about this all wrong. Our goal is to be accepted, not to take over. Acceptance doesn't come through force, it comes through time and work. We've already come so far, but there will always be people who disagree with us, and trying to get rid of them and being so in-their-face isn't helping us at all.

But that's getting a bit off topic. The point of this stamp is that a lot of the community is completely warping the definition of hate art, and most of them could seriously use a read-through of the rules before they start preaching them.