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There's a difference between saying that a particular fetish disgusts you, and that the people who practice that disgust you. The furry haters do the latter.

Further, furry haters also attack furries on that basis whether or not the discussion to that point has even touched on any particular sexual fetish.

Furry haters assume furries do the things that disgust them on little to no evidence. Furries are no more monolithic than any other group of people, and vary as widely in their sexual practices as any other group.

There's a fine line between saying that something others do is disgusting to you and saying that others disgust you because they do those things. The former is a valid opinion; the latter is bashing and hatred. The former is live and let live, the latter is not. To borrow a line from Christianity (even though many, if not most, Christians do not understand or follow the distinction), "Hate the sin, not the sinner."

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On a related note, Raptavio has the approximate morality of my deceased great-grandmother. He's a sad, angry little bluenose who is to be pitied rather than feared. If you really want to break his power over him, I'll let you know next time I'm in the area and we'll heckle the poor little hack together. :D

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I'm of the opinion that it's fine to express a distaste or disapproval of somebody else's activities. But only if they can either back that distaste up with sound reasoning and facts, or admit that it's purely a personal distaste and not some universal moral absolute that taints the very soul of people who violate it.

Whether it's people just seeking to stir up trouble or people who really hate furries, the most common accusation is that furries are into bestiality and that is just absolutely not true. (David Rust's amateur sociological survey of furry fandom revealed that something like 2% of the fandom claimed anonymous to being zoophiles -- not much different from the general population.) And don't even get me started on people whose sense of morality and decorum starts and stops at "That's just plain wrong! Anybody can see that!"

If somebody's distaste for furries happens to rest upon a untrue, uncharitable, or just plain stupid assumption, no, I don't really feel much obligation to respect them for it! "Live and let live" is fine... but I'm definitely much more impressed by people who take the trouble to actually understand what it is they think they're accepting. :) Tolerance is good, yeah, but it's not nearly as important to me as knowledge and comprehension.

Furry is a very complicated subculture, with a lot of creative artistic and literary activity and a set of values that I frankly like a lot better than I like the mainstream's values. Yes, it's probably thanks to furry fandom that I'm queer and somewhat perverse. But contact with furries was also responsible for a lot of my interest in esoteric philosophy, spirituality, psych of personality, and even graphic design.

I'm just really, really weary after the 100th attempt to explain to people why I feel such an intellectual and social commitment to a group of people which, as far as they know, is committed to nothing more profound than boffing each other in Bugs Bunny outfits. -.-

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Furry is a very complicated subculture, with a lot of creative artistic and literary activity and a set of values that I frankly like a lot better than I like the mainstream's values. Yes, it's probably thanks to furry fandom that I'm queer and somewhat perverse. But contact with furries was also responsible for a lot of my interest in esoteric philosophy, spirituality, psych of personality, and even graphic design.

I really don't know about this. From what I've gathered being within the fandom for about two or three years, it's just a bizarro American society. By bizarro, I mean the ratio of homosexuals to heterosexuals is backwards, people are more nice than assholes, and we like anthro-animals instead of humans. We have the cartoonists that post their stuff on a website, we have the writers, and we have the professional artists. Really, I don't see it as too complicated, just a transposition and bizarro version of the regular American society. We have the psychotic people, the sociopaths, the rapists, everything. Shit, man, we even have our own form of zealots ("mundanes!").

Maybe there's just something I'm not seeing, though?

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Well, just to let you know, these are people who choose to dress up like animals, and take pleasure in anthromorphic man-beasts doing their thing.

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And your point is...? ...even if the entire culture were like that (hint: they're not)?

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Well, from what I've experience, their culture(I hesitate to call it that) centers around that sort of thing.
I'd appreciate being enlightened to what else they do, other than what I and the parent reply stated.

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Here are a couple of cartoons I drew to answer that:

"What are furries?"

"What goes on at a furry convention?"

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