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

[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.