First, from a comment posted on Thinking Anglicans on Tuesday:
We who think that homosexual practice is immoral certainly don't think that it puts one outside the race or entails a loss of respect or acceptance (of the person) any more than lying, adultery, lust, greed or any other moral failing. I have serious moral failings, some of which I struggle not to justify, and yet I claim full membership in the race. Why would I think differently about any LGBT person?
Second, a Tweet sent to Joe Jervis of Joe.My.God on Wednesday:
2 comments:
While at some level I understand the desire to do so, I don’t understand the logic that attempts to link moderate statements with extreme ones. Not only is there no clear connection between the TA post and the tweet from – well, whoever that is, which is another problem in what I think you’re implying – the best inference is that there’s none at all. (You don’t logically go from a position of disagreement that 1) advocates, not only non-violence, but respect – which is a more rigorous standard – and 2) makes an explicit identity between oneself and one’s opponent – to a call to kill.)
But, let me ask you: is this statement, by Barack Obama:
“I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism.What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.
“What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Roves to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income – to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.”
morally equivalent to this call for murder?
“..And then there’s Rumsfeld who said of Iraq ‘We have our good days and our bad days.’ We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say ‘This is one of our bad days’ and pull the trigger.” – from a fund raising ad put out by the St. Petersburg Democratic Club
As I recall, there were moderate segregationists 50 years ago during the Civil Rights struggle. Among them were members of my family. Of course, they tried mightily to distance themselves from the violence of the Klan and others. They were members of neighborhood organizations who believed in the "right" to freely associate with who they wished, and that did not include people of a certain type. They certainly didn't want to lynch anyone. They didn't mean any harm. They just didn't want certain types of people as neighbors, that's all.
And yet, their determination to cling to a claim that was rapidly becoming discredited by experience and morality, that some people were a little less than fully human because of innate characteristics that were not pathologies but natural variations, enabled those people who committed the violence. That was something that these same respectable moderate people confessed none-too-subtly in their private expressions of satisfaction over the death of Dr. King in 1968.
The expressions of hostility toward my kind are legion and frequently shade into paranoid lunacy and violence, a violence which people sometimes act upon. Just ask Fanny Ann Eddy, Harvey Milk, or Daniel Zamudio among many others.
Joe Jervis collects these expressions of hostility daily, and he always has a ready supply every day.
I realize this is perhaps not perfectly rigid philosophical evidence that would satisfy a theology department, that my evidence is anecdotal and based on experience, but we live in narrative and experience, not in arguments.
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