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Comment by IvyMike | Hacker News Reader

> Here's the thing: You probably disagree and even loathe the personal politics of many of the artists whose works you enjoy

The thing that is most infuriating about OSC is that his stories imply a philosophy completely opposite those he espouses in his political writings.

For example, one of my favorite short stories is OSC's Unaccompanied Sonata. The story has a message about the cruelty and ultimate impossibility of making someone deny their core self.

http://janlowman.escuelacampoalegre.wikispaces.net/file/view...

But then in real life, OSC says stuff like gay people already have marriage rights because they can get married, just not to their own sex. How can the guy who wrote the above story think something like that? Like I said, it's infuriating.

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What is your response to this point though? I don't see how it is anything but completely valid; the point is that there is no objectively defined action that is prohibited for one group and allowed for another, so the "equal rights" argument is a canard. Perhaps there are other arguments to be made, I certainly don't want to get into that here, I am simply responding to your feeling that this is an infuriating thing to say.

Would you have accepted this as a valid argument back when anti-miscegenation laws were in effect?

"There's no issue, black and white people can get married. Just not to each other."

I also wonder how OSC would argue against changing the law so that ONLY homosexual marriage was legal. By his argument, he should have no problem, since he would still have marriage rights, only to another man.

> your feeling that this is an infuriating thing to say.

It's infuriating in light of the subtext of the linked story, which is that ultimately you can't deny your true self. When he makes an argument that gays have rights if only they would deny their true selves... Arg!

Thank you.

Well, yes and no. I think it's true that a simple inequality argument likewise doesn't apply in the case of anti-miscegenation laws. However these laws denied individuals a natural right for no good reason and were therefore immoral and illegitimate.

How to establish the natural right though? Fairly easy in the case of mixed race marriages-- No one at the time thought marriage between the races was impossible or unthinkable, they just didn't want it to happen. That's why they wrote laws against it. And note even that the history of such laws is rather skimpy![1] The overwhelming majority of human history attests to the possibility of the free mixture of races.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws

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