What does "normal" exclude?

At least two people mentioned in my blogrolling post were disturbed by the word normal in the original category heading "normal people living real lives".

Savtadotty explained (in an e-mail) her view of the matter: I have a problem with "normal" because it seems to exclude not only vertically (I'm happy to be a snob) but also horizontally: that is, to exclude "different." I became hypersensitized to the word "normal" ... when I participated in the Israeli version of PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians And Gays) about 8 years ago, and found that many unhappy parents there described their GLBT children as "not normal," and many very unhappy gays and lesbians thought of themselves are "not normal." The group's goal was not only to define homosexuality as normal, but to get away from classifying people who just wanted to live and let live.

She is clearly right, which is why I changed the category heading; but I find this very sad.

I would like to think that we might one day judge "normality" on the content of people's minds, not on what their bodies get up to. I think that it is normal to (wish to) have a satisfying sex life, and that what consenting adults do in private is nobody's business but their own.

Anyone who spends half an hour on the Internet, will find many things which any decent society would abhor: Racism, sexism, bigotry, superstition, willful ignorance, deliberate lies, incitement to hate on the flimsiest of pretexts. That is abnormality, my dears, not with whom we play "trains and tunnels".