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

[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.