Am I supposed to be the one to say this?

[fpb]

johncwright has been outraged by the violent and widespread reaction to a post of his. As he has seen fit to close his comments page to non-friends, I am forced to publish my reaction here. Bear in mind that this is the reaction of someone who shares his basic and currently unpopular views. To judge whether what follows is a suitable response - and if you have a strong stomach for debate - the original post is this: http://johncwright.livejournal.com/269139.html.

I am surprised that you are surprised. Your post was couched in deliberately provocative terms, and I can tell you that one reasonable and decent liberal of my acquaintance called it a "gross-out post". I am not saying that you were wrong in what you said, but the way you said it was equivalent to walking into a crowded saloon and proclaiming that you could lick every guy in there. If you seek the battle, don't complain of the wounds. These are matters that affect people in their deepest sense of identity and relationship with others. It is all very well to say that one hates the sin and not the person, but this particular kind of - to call things by their names - sin does actually involve the whole identity of a person in a way that makes it both thorny and dangerous to separate the one from the other. Homosexuality affects the whole relationship of a human being with his/her fellow humans, and as such is primary, not just to the moral, but to the emotional and relational being of its victim. (Again, let us call things by their names.) Homosexuals, in my experience, walk around with a great raw, exposed patch in their emotional and relational life, sensitive to any slight - as one of them said to me, it is not nice to go out and feel that everyone is against you. That means that the approach you have taken is not even apt to get through to them. They will dismiss it, not without reason, as hate speech, and not even pay attention. And your scorched-earth attitude will not even encourage anyone in the middle to pay attention. You are preaching to the converted, and even among them your abrasive approach is as apt to rouse instinctive resistance as agreement. After all, there are very few of us in this day and age who have not had at least one good friend who is a homosexual, and may well end up taking up arms in their defence.

I am not saying that you should avoid trouble. My experience is that there is a hate-ridden, insanably aggressive and brutal hard core of homosexualists - not all of whom are even homosexual - who will go for you no matter how you speak, not only because they want to shut your mouth, but because they need to build up their wounded egos with pyramids of slaughtered victims. Those I dismiss without argument, leaving them as a lost hope to people holier than myself. But unless you want to do nothing but build up a small, aggressive group of like-minded zealots, matters which involve people's sense of identity and self must be handled with as much kindness and as low an emotional temperature as is compatible with honesty. And that is the opposite of what you have done. To repeat myself (it is my own personal motto): seek the battle, don't complain of the wounds.

Comments

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

John called the 'flash mob' out. It is as simple as that. A paragraph like the one below does not invite reasoned debate. And the rest of the post was, or appears to be, deliberatly provocative.

"Come, my liberal leftist comrades! You openly boast of your superior intellectual power and more profound moral sobriety than we mere working Joes of flyover country (including working Joes like me with a doctorate in law who works in DC)."

What cam you expect when you say something like that?

I read the post myself and wondered if I wanted to comment, but decided against it. There seemed little point as I could not answer John's questions as they were all of the "when did you stop beating your wife?" type.

I couldn't try to "explain to him how his culture reached a position where a public entertainment company can be criticized for failing to contribute to the moral decay of the land" because I disagreed with the premise of his question.

I do remember thinking that he was opening himself up for cheap shots with the following:

" Someone explain to me by what series of events persons with serious sexual-psychological malfunctions would somehow be awarded the status of moral arbiters, something like priests and confessors and sages"

So even there I think he could probably have forseen attacks on the Church as a result of his words. He could have forseen the use of the argument that some priests are 'persons with sexual-psychological malfunctions who have been awarded the status of moral arbiters.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I'll put it more simply: when someone like me has to rebuke anyone on their polemical manners, some sort of limit has certainly been passed. Indeed, that is why I gave this post the incredulous title I did.

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

Well yes, but I wasn't going to say that first.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

8-)

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Judging by his latest entry, John thankfully seems to have become more or less aware of the problem.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

John always realizes the problem too late. By now, his original entries are being bandied around the four corners of the Earth as perfect examples of hate speech.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

John always realizes the problem too late.

Don't we all? In my own experience, this kind of lesson is seldom learned the easy way, and usually has to be re-learned multiple times before it really sticks. It is a shame that this will likely follow him for the rest of his career, though.

(I can say that, at least in my view, in the time since I started reading his LiveJournal -- roughly around the time he left atheism -- he's become a much gentler man than he used to be. Which may not be saying much, but considering where he started out...)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

All I can say is that I would not have wished to meet him in his atheistic days, then.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

I am not saying that you were wrong in what you said, but the way you said it was equivalent to walking into a crowded saloon and proclaiming that you could lick every guy in there.

Probably not the best wording in a discussion of homosexuality and homophobia! I'm giggling.

See, I could remotely agree with part of what he said - I do think it's silly for cable channels to be rated by special interest groups, and to bow to those ratings (though I don't think that SciFi actually will). It's not discrimination that there happens to be no gay characters in the extremely gay series of Stargate, Star Treck, and - what else does SciFi show? Battlestar Galactica?

Okay, Battlestar Galactica is much less homoerotic than my other examples, and it actually has a gay character (albeit not one that was explicit such on the TV portions of the show). I often find that's the case; if you have a character who somehow forces a discussion of sexuality, the atmosphere becomes much more relaxed with regard to sexuality. I don't think gay characters are a bad thing to have on a TV show. I don't think they're a requirement, either. The sort of tokenism that leads to the addition of a Girl and a Minority has improved exactly zero scripts.

So, you know, maybe I agree with John C. Wright about that, but he was such a wanker with what he said. It pisses me off to no end that he equates homosexuality with animal fucking, pederasty, racism, and the end of heaven and earth, but when someone calls him a bigot he cries "Ad hominem!" and runs back to his mommy.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You have to remember that, in Catholic doctrine, homosexuality is a perversion, or, to use the technical jargon, an objectively disordered state. You talk as though there was nothing wrong with it; no serious Catholic (I do not mean the Kennedy-Pelosi kind, of course) could possibly agree with you. And to treat the matter as acquired, certain, in no need of debate, is exactly the mistake that John - on the other side makes. You both are assuming that yours is the only reasonable and sane position, and, by implication, treating everyone else with contempt.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

You both are assuming that yours is the only reasonable and sane position, and, by implication, treating everyone else with contempt.

I didn't say that!

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Assuming is not saying. The assumption is at the back of the fact that you find it offensive to compare homosexuality to a laundry list of perversions.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

Well, you know the saying about assumptions ...

I didn't imply it was offensive, I implied it was insulting. Look, I *do* believe there is nothing wrong with homosexuality, but I *don't* believe that any other opinion is - how did you put it? - irrational and insane. If you inferred it from something I wrote, you inferred wrongly. Of course, I like to think that my beliefs are the most rational; doesn't everyone? But I know better than to dismiss what others think, including you and John C Wright

[fpb.livejournal.com]

All right. But you must make the imaginative effort to understand the premises of someone who regards homosexuality as "objectively disordered", and see that from that perspective, there is nothing wrong with comparing it with, say, incest, or even paedophilia. Homosexuals kill nobody, you might say; but then, neither does incest.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure; but why does he get his panties in a twist so easily?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That is an issue. You would think he had never met the modern world. Although it is interesting to see how it would strike someone from a different age.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I feel like I was raised in a different age.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

seek the battle, don't complain of the wounds.

Yeah, he loses about a million points there, for wiping out all the comments to the post.

Freezing threads 'cause you're sick of the arguing= legit
Comment deletion= wussy

Addition

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

Jebus, I just went and read his latest entry for the hell of it, and this just jumped right out--

The only place I can think of where people still talk this way is Boot Camp. Not many Boomers go there.

O HELO VIETNAM WAR!

*headdesk*

Re: Addition

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Open mouth, insert foot. When foot found in mouth, push harder and deeper.

Re: Addition

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

Ha!

[fpb.livejournal.com]

My point is: what did he expect? When I post a polemical post, I expect polemics. And of all sensitive points to step on, homosexuality is the worst. If he did NOT expect to be mobbed, he must have had a sheltered upbringing.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

Can't do anything but agree with you there!

[arhyalon.livejournal.com]

>Yeah, he loses about a million points there, for wiping out all the comments to the post.

That was a user's error. He's not the most Live Journal Savvy guy. ;-)

More straightforwardly: John did not mean to remove the comments. He just tried to lock the post to stop the flood of comments flooding his inbox until he could catch up with answering what was there.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That can happen. And having been in his position with respect to a flood of abuse, I do not quite take elegant_bonfire's easily negative position. I am not sure she realizes just how vicious, degrading, repulsive this kind of concentrated attack can be. As I said in the original post, there is a hard core of destructive hate-ridden homosexualist who just want to ruin and humiliate people.

[arhyalon.livejournal.com]

I guess it gives us something to pray about.

But thanks.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

OK, I can see that. Mistakes happen. I read the edit to the post more as "here's my answers to everyone, and that's that." It wasn't clear that it was just supposed to be locked and not comment-deleted.

When you are right, you are right

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

"It is all very well to say that one hates the sin and not the person, but this particular kind of - to call things by their names - sin does actually involve the whole identity of a person in a way that makes it both thorny and dangerous to separate the one from the other. Homosexuality affects the whole relationship of a human being with his/her fellow humans, and as such is primary, not just to the moral, but to the emotional and relational being of its victim. (Again, let us call things by their names.) Homosexuals, in my experience, walk around with a great raw, exposed patch in their emotional and relational life, sensitive to any slight - as one of them said to me, it is not nice to go out and feel that everyone is against you."

Yes, and amen. Now that I have my foot wedged firmly in my mouth (not to mention my head wedged up my fundament) only the Grace of God will see me some way clear to straighten up again.

I am not planning to avoid the battle or speak untruth, but I have to keep ever before my eyes what a hard life some people have -- as you say, the feeling that everyone is against you.

"As he has seen fit to close his comments page to non-friends..."

With your kind permission, I would like to friend you again, because I welcome your comments -- even the ones I delete. I don't mind seeking battle with you, friend, and someday soon I will learn not to complain of the wounds.

Re: When you are right, you are right

[fpb.livejournal.com]

By all means.

Re: When you are right, you are right

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

Blessed children of God (even if you two are currently planning the next wrestling match).

[sum1-different.livejournal.com]

Not relevant to this post but relevant to the low-down, overly-personal, overly aggressive manner with which you, fpb, treated me on the LJ of a mutual friend of ours:

Tonight I find you coming back at me with yet more aggressive-toned, contemptuous-toned replying. What bewilders me is that you seem to think I would respect anything more you could say to me, after the crappy way you treated me. After the out-of-line way you behaved, everything you say is to me invalid. To me you are nothing but a troublemaker and I don't listen to the views of troublemakers.

Like I said, I think you should learn from our friend about how to take disagreement without getting aggressive. You treated my views as reason to get personal and pour scorn on me and generally get aggressive when there was no call for it. We could have discussed the topic civilly without aggression but for some reason that was beyond you.

Her LJ is not your LJ. You don't own it and it's not your job to answer every comment there that's not directed at you, particularly not in a way that continues personal rows. You foulled up her LJ with aggression (hardly the act of a true friend) and it is because I am not going let her LJ be further foulled up that I am taking this here rather than replying on her LJ.

Don't expect me to waste my time with you in the future. I am done with you. And as such, I won't waste my time reading any replies to this. Feel free to delete this if you want to. I don't care either way. I hope you find the peace of mind not to need to be aggressive with those who just disagree with you.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Her NHS is my NHS, and your ignorant slurs, which you repeated without even paying attention to any response, do not invite any respect or sympathy. You may claim that you did not mean to insult someone else's country, but that is what you are doing. End of story.