Riese’s Team Pick: The Sci-Fi Explanation of Why Gay People Deserve Marriage Rights

Do Worf and Data have “human” rights? This is important, and Discover Magazine is on top of it:

The Sci-Fi Explanation of Why Gay People Must Be Allowed to Marry: “In many of the sci-fi futures that we know and love, racism, sexism, and homophobia are often scrubbed out of existence. Caprica/BSG, Star Trek, Torchwood, Mass Effect, even less thoughtful fare like Starship Troopers, depict residents of the future who are less interested in the permutations of human identity and more interested in the qualities of a person’s mind and spirit. Even Futurama’s “Proposition Infinity,” concerning the fake-contentious “robosexual marriage” controversy, spoofs this tendency.”

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Riese

Riese is the 41-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3238 articles for us.

4 Comments

  1. They must be talking about movie Starship Troopers, because (while I haven’t read it all the way through) the book is quite a bit more thoughtful.

  2. I do like the idea of a continuum, where beings are placed according to sentience. Completely seperate to the whole homo part of the argument, that’s a nice idea.

    On the human rights for some but not for all thing, totally true. It appears a lot of more extremist religions are based on a ‘we’re better than you’ approach to things. In Christianity, that seems rather against the whole ‘Jesus loves everyone’ message of the latter parts of the Bible.

    The Phelps-ian approach of ‘God hates *fill in whatever they decide god hates now*’ is so contrary to the fundamentals of their ‘religion’ – it’s baffling..

    Sci-fi is pretty much gay-free because nothing is seen as unusual about it. There’s no mutterings of ‘dyke’ aimed at Admiral Cain in BSG, as far as I remember? The Cylons were constantly sleeping with each other, no matter what gender.

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