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Re: Hello!

 

Scott:

On 24 Apr , 2009, at 10:54, Scott James Remnant wrote:

On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 10:57 +0100, Jimmy Forrester-Fellowes wrote:

Would also be good to see this group get more popular & active. I was
shocked when I was told in the official ubuntu IRC channels
(#ubuntu-offtopic on irc.ubuntu.com/freenode to be specific) LGBT is a
banned topic according to the channels terms of service. I think in
this day and age that's appalling, what does everyone else think?

I hadn't heard about that, I'll investigate and raise this with the
community council.


You just made my day, Scott. THANK YOU!

Maia, my concern with such a "banned topic" is that it targets LGBT people and is therefore blatantly discriminatory. Now, I say that, at this point, not exactly having READ it so I may be talking out of my butt (although that hasn't happened in at least the last 5 milliseconds!)

The issue is what is banned by this policy? If I say, "My boyfriend and I installed Ubuntu together last night and liked it" will that get me kicked out of the channel by this policy? Because I'm a boy with a boyfriend, is that not seen as an "LGBT topic." However, if you tried to kick me out for saying, "My girlfriend and I installed Ubuntu..." people would be in an uproar because no one sees anything wrong with that.

There cannot be any LGBT policies on our lists. They are discriminatory. There are no Black policies. There are no Jewish policies. Why are there LGBT policies?

I'm not sure how you can NOT discuss gender because its "usually" obvious by the name. Discussions regarding the concept of gender may be inappropriate because the channel is for dicussing Ubuntu topics, but this is true both for Straights and LGBT people. The same thing goes with sexuality. You need to have the SAME standards for Straight people and for LGBT people. No one bats an eye if a boy mentions his girlfriend or his wife. No one SHOULD bat an eye if a boy mentions is boyfriend or his husband. And if someone DOES bat an eye, they are in the wrong and need to be dealt with.

Within the spectrum of sexuality discussions, of course, if a guy and a girl are discussion how they got it on last night, I think that might be inappropriate to the forum, but not more so and not less so than if two guys or two girls were discussing the same thing.

So, Jimmy, thank you for bringing it up.

Scott, THANK YOU for looking into it. Such a policy (granted I've not read it, so I may not actually know what I'm talking about) would disturb me greatly and poison the community for me.

===================

Its wonderful to see the list becoming more active! The MA Loco had their Release Party in Boston's Back Bay last night and it worked out well. I myself will be upgrading my little Pentium II Dell Inspiron 7000 to Xubuntu 9.04 this weekend.

More later.  :-)
---
Richard "Doc" Kinne • Rikardo «Dokĉjo» KINNE, BA, MSc., AMAAS
<kinnerc @ gmail.com>
"I'm the Doctor, and you're in the biggest library in the universe. Look me up!"
- The Doctor
"Forests of the Dead," Doctor Who



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