Regular readers of my blog will see that on Friday, I wrote about the folly of putting “Lesbian” as your religion on the upcoming UK census. You can read that post HERE.
As I mentioned in my original blog post, this was encouraged by Amy Lame, posting on her Twitter feed on 25 February:
“writing #lesbian as my religion in next month’s #ukcensus bcse no section for sexual orientation…how else r we meant 2 count the queers?”
Since then, Ben Summerskill of Stonewall picked up on it too and commented on it in his March 2011 “ebulletin” for Stonewall.
Imagine my surprise today then when I went to try to find the original tweet on Amy’s feed, only to find she had deleted it!
Did I ruffle some feathers? Did she read my blog post and realise what a silly idea it really was? Or was she just embarrassed by being associated with such an ill-conceived proposal in the first place? I can’t answer for her of course – but in case you missed it, CLICK HERE for the original tweet as published on her feed. Isn’t web caching wonderful?
I’ve also published a screen shot of it (below) in case the cached link stops working too.
UPDATE: 16:00 on 6/3/11 – I now find that Amy has BLOCKED me from following her on Twitter. Come on, Amy – can you not deal with a bit of dissent? Don’t like criticism? Why can you not engage in a reasoned debate? Blocking people doesn’t shut them up, nor does it make the issue go away…
I’ve put lesbian; i don’t think its daft…as a gay man; how on earth am i expected to be counted?
Well, that’s great – but by saying “how on earth am I expected to be counted” you have made several assumption which I don’t believe are true.
Namely:
1) that counting “gay people” will serve the aims that those advocating this say it will, and
2) that everyone who is gay actually WANTS the State to know they are gay! Many do not, and consider it a private matter. So any attempt to count “gays” will by definition under-count – and what’s the point of that? So we can then be told by all the homophobes that “Look! This “gay agenda” is a lie – only 2% of Britons are gay”? Surely that’s entire counter-productive.
How on earth are you to be counted? Well, I am a UK citizen first and a gay man second. I – and you -are being counted as a citizens. I remain unconvinced that telling the State your sexuality will in any way improve things.
I explained this in my earlier post (click HERE to read it).
japan is in a crisis right now
[...] Yes, this is a bad enough idea that Amy Lame, who had the original idea, changed her mind about it. [...]