A View From Middle England - Conservative with a slight libertarian touch - For Christian charity and traditional belief - Free Enterprise NOT Covert Corporatism

Thursday, May 01, 2008

Lesbians come out fighting - nominally speaking!

What's in a name? Sometimes not a lot, other times it is your very identity. If I was a Lesbian I would not be too pleased if everytime I told people I was one it provoked amusement, silly laughter and innuendo. That is apparently the sort of thing that happens to Lesbians every day. They have the good fortune to live on the Greek island of Lesbos. Now, as we know, female homosexuals have appropriated the name. In fact, for most people around the world, it is the latter they think of before considering the people of Lesbos (if they ever do).

A similar fate beheld the people of the French region of Alsace. Alsatians are a people of distinct background with a language and culture. Canine it is not. For some reason, they managed to get dog owners and breeders in England to call the animal a German Shepherd rather than Alsatian, although some do lapse on occasions. Some name identities are confused by association of ideas. Mongolians or Mongols had to endure being likened to Down's Sydrome simply on account of their facial features. Siam (now called Thailand) disliked the term siamese twins preferring to get the world to speak of conjoined twins.

Can the people of Lesbos succeed in protecting their name? Judges in Greece will have to decide whether to grant an injunction against the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece and to order it to change its name. Apparently history is on the side of the campaigners. Sapphos, the Greek goddess whose name is linked with female homosexuality and was a native of Lesbos, was no lover of other women, but a heterosexual female who had a family, and committed suicide for the love of a man. So that puts the record straight, then!

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