A missed point

[avevale_intelligencer]

With trepidation (and probably softening of the brain) I dip my toe into the burning petrol again...

filkertom and others have been commenting on Obama's appointment of an anti-gay-marriage pastor to speak at his inauguration, and asking, with brows furrowed in honest puzzlement, "how does someone else's marriage affect him?"

To ask this, to assume that this is the important question, is to miss the point by a hundred and thirty seven miles, as I've pointed out on a number of occasions, and to fail to understand your opponents by that much is to diminish to a serious degree your chances of ever reaching an accommodation with them, which short of killing them is the only way to end this rhubarb.

Disclaimer that no-one ever reads: I do not agree with these people nor am I opposed to gay marriage as should have been obvious to anyone who reads this journal at all regularly. I've taken my knocks for uncomplicatedly opposing Prop 8, so you could at least listen to me while I explain this about the other side to you.

Assuming for the moment, outlandish as it may seem, that this Warren person is sincere in his Christian belief...it doesn't have to affect him. There's this story, see, that the Christians tell, about a guy who got mugged and was lying in the road wounded and broke, and only one person stopped and helped him, and that was the ideal held up by Jesus to his disciples. It didn't affect the man from Samaria that this guy had got himself robbed and beaten, but he saw a fellow human being in trouble and wanted to help.

Now supporters of Prop 8, those who are sincere in their beliefs (yes, I know that phrase doesn't compute because you can't imagine how anyone could sincerely believe such nonsense, just file it somewhere and move on), they see a whole lot of people in trouble with God. God (and I've said this before as well) isn't a choice to them, he's not negotiable. He's like gravity. He's THERE and he has RULES and if you break them you will go to HELL and that's true as far as they know whether they like it or not. It really isn't any of their business who other people marry...but they wouldn't be good Christians if they did not try to save people from the pains of hell, and if that means dissolving marriages that are not made according to the rules of their God, then they'll do it. Not to interfere would, to them, make them the same as those people who stood by while Kitty Genovese was murdered.

None of that matters to the people whose marriages, legally entered into, are now threatened, of course, or to those whose view of God is more modern and flexible and New Testament, or to members of other faiths, or to atheists. And you don't have to try to get inside these people's heads, to understand that they genuinely think they're helping. But it might help to bring a good ending to this fight just a little closer.

Comments

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I never knowingly advocate for the devil: if I put an argument it's almost always because I mean it, or at least see some possible reason in it. And I would be the last to deny the existence of hate and fear and discrimination, towards gay people or black people or Jews or any distinct group that can be characterised as "different." It all still exists, despite the efforts of valiant and good people to fight it and destroy it and wipe it out, because that never works. Fight hate and you strengthen it. Try to destroy fear and you give it food and drink. Seek to wipe out discrimination and you drive it underground to fester and grow.

And here's where I'm really going to enrage Tom. Even knowing this, even knowing that many of the opponents of gay rights are motivated by base and unworthy emotions, I believe the thing to do is to talk to them as though we knew their motives to be noble. Talk to them, in other words, not as contemptible hate-ridden enemies unworthy of our condescension, but as reasoning beings capable of understanding and meriting respect.

Hatred and fear are not hard to reason with; they are impossible to reason with. So the reasoning must be done around the hate and fear, and without engaging with it. Because reasoning must be done if this is ever to end, if there are not to be Matthew Shepards fifty and a hundred years from now, and new Proposition 8s coming on to statute books with every new administration.

Christ said "love your enemy." His followers have either forgotten this, or are interpreting it wrongly. Someone has to remind them, and that someone had better be us, because there isn't anyone else. And example is the only way to do it.

This is the truth as I see it.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Put like that (I don't think I've seen it expressed that clearly anywhere else) I have to agree completely, and it's not just on that subject. It's a basis, possibly the only workable basis, for any communication, to take as a premise that the other person is rational, not stupid, and wants to communicate. If they don't, well, that's their choice, but by starting with the assumption that they are 'bad', 'stupid', 'evil', or whatever, it fails before it begins.

Thank you for that, and Happy Christmas!