The problem with AIDS prevention is that many groups have no intent on preventing or curing AIDS. The money is too sweet to their tastes and they are too cold hearted to care about the millions who are dying.

Any organization that promotes hate groups should be denied permits in the city. Let them go out in the middle of nowhere and hate their promotion of hate concert.

-Alexandra

Sit on a tack!

You make a well structure argument, but I still disagree with your reasoning. I appreciate the effort you put into it though. It has given me food for thought. Thanks!

First of all, the event is a Reggae concert and that limits the number of available acts to Reggae musicians. Also, from a promoters point of view, it is advantageous to have acts with name recognition. This will draw more attendees. I will grant that the offended/gay sympathetic segment will decrease the net attendance. It will attract the audience of the “offensive” artists. Will this offset the attendance lost by offended potential attendees? I don’t know. That is a gamble the promoter has taken.
I suspect that Beanie Man and the others probably have fans that aren’t homophobic nut-jobs. This is probably a significant demograhpic. I think they are an important demograhpic to reach out to in AIDS awareness because they are probably proverbial fence-sitters with regard to AIDS and related issues.

Second, about the issue of spokesmanship. What message does it send when Beanie Man & Co. take a stand that is supportive of the HIV population?

If these people purport to want to kill homosexuals, why are they donating their time to perfor for a cause that will help so many homosexuals live? What are they communicating to their impressionalbe fans?
Don’t you think this blunts some of their former anti-gay rhetoric? Why would this be such a bad thing?
In my opinion this brings us together. I honestly think this is a healing rather than hurting event.

With regarding insulting ALL gay people with money,I suspect that you are over generalizing. While there is a significant number of opposition from the gay community, it appears to me to be the vocal minority.
Besides, I think this event is targeted at young people (teenagers and college-aged folks), not middle-aged professionals.

About the hate crimes Terrance listed, how many of them are actually motivated by anti-gay sentiment. In a lot of them there is enough ambiguity that these crimes would have happend regardless of a persons sexuality, but the victim happened to be gay.

I am ,by profession, a crime policy analyst. To the best of my knowledge incidence of Hate or Bias crimes are grossly exagerated.

Anyway,
Peace out!

Look, let’s put it in plain terms: there are artists out there who do advocate violence against homosexuals, and there are artists out there who don’t. In fact, there are artists in all genres who don’t go out of their way to instruct their listeners in the finer points of killing gay people, and, though it is not widely known, some of them are even just as popular as the ones who do! And in the same genres, even! (Who’d'a thunk, right?)

Given that, and given that there are, in fact, a lot of homosexuals with HIV, wouldn’t it have been politer to have given the job of semi-official spokesman for the organization for a day (and yes, that’s how it comes out looking, and in this case perception is reality) to someone who has not in fact expressed the wish to kill a large portion of the people who the event is supposed to benefit? Given that there is no downside, since you could still bring in the same crowd with other, just as popular artists?

Oddly enough, I see a major downside to insulting a large chunk of your current donor base (gay people, people who are sensitive to gay issues, people who don’t like music that encourages murder, people with taste (oop, sorry, are my prejudices showing?) and so forth), when there’s no real reason to.

-fred

The Lifebeat concert does not require embracing your annihilation. If beanie man wanted to kill you, don’t you think he or his legions of homophobic fans would have done so by now? You’d better be on the look out for teenage boys in rastawear.