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

[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.