By now if you’re on Facebook, WordPress, Tumblr, or any other social med service, your header or banner image was already made into a rainbow..perhaps you went one step further and did it yourself, all in the celebration of the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling allowing gay marriage to take place in all 50 states. But a group called the Radical Faeries has a problem with it.
Within hours of the supreme court’s Friday decision on same-sex marriage, people with a certain number of progressively minded friends found their Facebook news feeds dominated by rainbow-colored profile pictures created by a special link on the website.
The gambit successfully put Facebook’s equality credentials in the spotlight. But it was challenged on Saturday at San Francisco Pride, an event the company sponsored.
The Radical Faeries, one of the more idiosyncratic groups at San Francisco’s Pride, said the festival should dump Facebook as a sponsor because of the company’s ban on adopted names.
The policy was unfair to LGBT people who use adopted names to avoid homophobia or to express their true identity, they said.
“I don’t like anybody telling me who I am or have to be,” said Storm Arcana, 42, seated on a rug in the Faerie Freedom Village, a colourful camp near city hall.
People paying attention to things of this sort may recall this argument brewing for some time–this has been a long standing issue some have had with Facebook.
I don’t hold any overall anti or pro opinion on this matter. A part of me believes that Facebook as a private company that steals everyone’s information, invades their personal lives, tracks their every move, and sells every piece of information to the lowest bidder–not to mention being the easiest and free-est way for law enforcement to track down virtually any person they want–can do what it wants. And people clamoring for the right to have Facebook abuse them even more? They need to probably think twice.
There are other social media services out there..
I get the point, believe me. But I also think those making the point are missing the point.. There aren’t many nice things about Facebook.. It’s ease of use is one of the few, along with the ability people have to connect. Minus those two things, the policies and privacy issues with the social media service are a little more than atrocious.
So..
That being said, if a person wants an entire life to be monitored, tracked, and traced, I suppose the nicest thing the violating party could do is at least call the person the name the person wishes to be called..