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Perhaps I am misreading this but the premise is that it’s unfair to ask a marginalized community to comply with public health ordinances so that community has n

Perhaps I am misreading this but the premise is that it’s unfair to ask a marginalized community to comply with public health ordinances so that community has no responsibility for the spread of a disease? But the community effected by a disease is also the most able to carry out interventions so this is almost to throw our hands up and accept an epidemic. Yes the gay community was marginalized and oppressed by civil society at many levels. But hosting massive contagion events during an epidemic is highly unethical. If Diane Feinstein had not closed the bathhouses the disease would have continued to multiply and even then people resisted any interventions. The current culture wars around masks emerged around condoms. To simply exculpate a community because they had been treated badly ignores the many choices people made at a personal level to spread a lethal disease, and makes it near impossible to stop such a disease.

throwanem 6y ago
The premise is that it's not reasonable to expect a community maltreated by public health and law enforcement for decades to instantaneously reverse themselves and comply with those authorities' dictates when, at long last, those dictates are finally motivated by something other than abusive and too often outright lethal prejudice. As I noted in a response to your sibling comment, this implicitly expects people to act on the basis of knowledge which, at the time they have to choose their actions, does not yet even exist. It's an easy mistake for an armchair historiographer to make, but that it's easy constitutes no excuse. I'm not even going to address the suggestion that gay bathhouse culture in the 1980s is somehow to blame for COVID anti-maskers in the 2020s.
howinteresting 6y ago
It is society's fault that it created an environment of distrust in public health among a marginalized group. (It is not society's fault if there is distrust among a dominant group, such as with COVID vaccines and white Republicans.) Power differences are the single most important fact of society, and too many people assume symmetries exist in situations that are actually asymmetric.

throwanem 6y ago

The premise is that it's not reasonable to expect a community maltreated by public health and law enforcement for decades to instantaneously reverse themselves and comply with those authorities' dictates when, at long last, those dictates are finally motivated by something other than abusive and too often outright lethal prejudice. As I noted in a response to your sibling comment, this implicitly expects people to act on the basis of knowledge which, at the time they have to choose their actions, does not yet even exist. It's an easy mistake for an armchair historiographer to make, but that it's easy constitutes no excuse. I'm not even going to address the suggestion that gay bathhouse culture in the 1980s is somehow to blame for COVID anti-maskers in the 2020s.

howinteresting 6y ago

It is society's fault that it created an environment of distrust in public health among a marginalized group. (It is not society's fault if there is distrust among a dominant group, such as with COVID vaccines and white Republicans.) Power differences are the single most important fact of society, and too many people assume symmetries exist in situations that are actually asymmetric.