Betting On A Civil Unions Veto By Lingle
Wednesday - July 07, 2010
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Del.icio.usOK, this is it. Today or tomorrow we learn what Gov. Linda Lingle does with the civil unions bill.
I’m betting she’ll veto so she doesn’t crimp the religiously conservative style of her political partner and gubernatorial candidate Duke Aiona. We’ll see.
But it’s an opportune moment for me to explore something that’s been on my mind for a long time. I don’t think we should use the words “gay,” “straight” or “lesbian” in our newspapers and news broadcasts to describe sexual preferences.
Homosexual and heterosexual are more factual. No problem with bisexual, transvestite and transsexual because those accurately describe states of being or dressing.
There was a time when “gay” described a kinetic personality type, and “straight” was not bent. “Lesbian” is a 20th century construct that we’ve borrowed from the mostly lost poetry of Sappho, who lived on the Greek island of Lesbos and wrote about her love for some schoolgirls in her care.
I don’t care a whit about those common terms being in the dictionary. They are not properly descriptive for the record.
And why write “gay” or “lesbian” to differentiate about the sexual orientation of men and women? Both are homosexual.
A bisexual person is just that. A transvestite is a cross dresser who may or may not be homo or hetero. A trans-sexual falls into a singular category because he or she may or may not retain some sexual organs of a second sex. And so it’s very difficult to categorize the nature of the sexual attraction between two transsexuals of differing reconstruction, or a transsexual attracted to a normal man or woman or both.
We’ve ventured a long way in our agonizing journey to come to grips with some cosmetic and behavioral changes that were too bizarre to talk about just a few decades ago. Remember “the love that dare not say its name”?
We now tend to call a transsexual man “she” and a changed woman “he.” I’m comfortable calling a person by the sexual pronoun he or she prefers.
I’m comfortable with but a bit giggly over the large fellow who occasionally uses Kaimana Beach and fits his 300 pounds into a woman’s bikini.
Daniel Kahanaoi goes to lawyer Craig Kimsel’s Kailua home armed with a pistol, goes through a gate and into the house, and shoots Kimsel twice, once in the back and once while Kimsel lies wounded on the floor. Kills him.
Kahanaoi’s lawyer says his client was just shooting Kimsel in self-defense.
That story definitely belongs in Chuck Shepherd’s Weird News column in MidWeek.
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