Virtually every meeting I attend which involves a marketing/non-security person discussing corporate risk strategy, there is always at least one person who insists on reviewing a solution based on 'a solving the problem entirely standard' by spending gargantuan sums of money.

Each meeting tends to waste 10-15 minutes selling the idea that if you can buy time (it works but won't work X months/years from now), or reduce impact significantly  - the cost vs. benefit makes a less comprehensive approach (where we reduce but don't entirely eliminate risk) more reasonable.

I've done this so often now that I'm convinced that outside of certain select professional fields, the ability to cost-benefit analysis in bureaucratic environment is an endangered skillset. Example 1 on the Agenda: Societe General dumping all its unauthorized futures contracts on the market because no manager at the company wanted to take responsibility for holding on to the unauthorized position.

What does this have to do with talking about gay people? Like a famous movie, government solutions to social problems tend to "nuke it from orbit - its the only way to be sure". Governments are incapable of setting strategic policy which says "ok..we plan on reducing muders by X%". Instead what the leadership says is, "we are going to put a stop to gun and knife crime". When it comes time to policy implementation (tactics) -- the solution dictated from the strategic mindset is to ban gun ownership and carrying knives. The original point (reducing murders) gets lost by tunnel-focus.

So where we once had an intent of stopping people being killed/beaten up for being homosexual, we now wind up with attempting a top-down mandate for culture change telling people (especially kids!) not to be mean.

In a word -- the whole method that modern western bureaucracies use to solve social issues is gay.

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.

The one aspect of the new anti-homophobic guidelines that bothers me is the suppression of the term "gay" which is not  a derogatory term, and which is a term that I think we genuinely need, since the only other non-derogatory term we could use would be the five syllable word "homosexual" which is a bit cumbersome.  I have tended to dislike the alternative term "queer" which clearly is intended to imply that homosexuality is abnormal (I would consider it instead to be part of the normal range of human sexual variations), but it has become so widely used within the gay community itself that I had to drop my objection.  But gay is a better term.  There is nothing negative about its original meaning, which is happy or care-free, and even though being gay does not always lead to happiness (and can have tragic consequences) still, there is a happy element in homosexuality, and it is a nice thing to emphasize.

I have also observed that homophobic language (i.e., "faggot") is the most commonly used form of linguistic bullying even when the target is someone who is actually heterosexual.  It's the standard insult.  To the macho homophobe, everyone he dislikes is gay.  This is a something we need to get over.