Do conservatives really think that the problem with what Robertson said was because gays and liberals and liberal gays and atheists and liberal gay atheists all hate Christianity? Like, if someone quoted the Sermon on the Mount, we'd have equal issues, or even any of that "Love thy Neighbor" "Love thy Enemy" and "Turn the other cheek" stuff?
The reason I'm asking is, the response on the right has even gone so far as to label this guy another Rosa Parks-- I guess because he's sticking it to the liberal, atheist, gay Powers That Be that have systematically...soundly criticized people we disagree with and occasionally engaged them in debate, usually while being greeted with slurs for who we are while having our own liberties curtailed, like actually, as in--enshrined in laws, like laws against gay marriage or atheists holding office and stuff? Because that kind of thinking is not even satirically funny. It isn't even like "Joke is on you guys, because you're doing it too" kind of funny, because we aren't. Because one side is saying "We want you to leave sexual minorities be so long as they are engaging in consensual private behavior" and the other is saying "It is our right to demonize and use eliminationist rhetoric against people who engage in the kind of consensual private behavior we deem inappropriate." I can easily see the difference. Why is this difficult for them?
Being supportive of the rights of gay-identified persons to exist, to work, to marry, and to participate fully in the civic society (public office, military service), is not anti-Christian. There are certainly churches that accept gay congregants and gay clerics, and perform gay weddings. The language that excludes gays by insisting that support of them is anti-Christian also eliminates gay-friendly churches, gay theologians and celebrants of the faith. If they want to cry about how offended they are that their beliefs have somehow been crossed--how about they acknowledge that they are doing the same trespass to gays of faith who they refuse to acknowledge at all?
I'm thinking, for example, of The Rev. Frank Shaefer, who was defrocked for officiating at his own son's same-sex wedding. His subsequent defrocking seems to be his church's way of saying that they do not need his alternative point of view--but since he still considers himself a man of faith and considered what he had done an act of compassion and love for his son, are we going to say he isn't Christian? If I think of the retired Bishop Gene Robinson of the Epicopal faith, who spoke at President Obama's first inauguration and came from a family of Kentucky sharecroppers, and has been an great example of how faith can survive life's changes--is he anti-Christian? I think of Father Mychal Judge. I think of the thousands if not millions of gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans people who sit in the pews of churches that love them, and that sit in the pews of churches that hate them, but that they can't turn away from. I don't suffer from the burden of faith, but I will stick up for their reality and the faith they keep. And I wonder how it is okay to make light of them--if it isn't right to make light of the bigots who don't understand not only that these people exist--but that their feelings and faith are no less real.
And for that matter, let's talk about the Christian supremecy and racism implicit in some of the comments made by the Duck Dynasty patriarch. In addition to slagging gays, he indicated that he believed Shintoism as a religion was behind Pearl Harbor, that Nazis weren't Christian (because all of European Germany lost their faith all at once, and Nazi's had "Gott Mitt Uns" on their belt buckles ironically, and the Kulturkampf of the period before Hitler, and the Koncordat with the Vatican had nothing to do with congregations that still existed within Germany at the time--of course! And blood libel and anti-Semitism inherited from Martin Luther was no factor at all, and also, the Inquisition and the Crusades never happened--in other words--no one could say what he said and not be a total jackass!) and also was thick-headed enough to suggest things were just great under Jim Crow, because black folks weren't "singing the blues" (like, they totally invented the blues) at the time, because he never saw with his own eyes any discrimination (because he never was witness at a lynching, even if there were, like newspapers and stuff reporting those things).
There is a whole lot there which is damn stupid that this guy never got from any Bible that he certainly said, and that a whole chunk of the right is signing off on. It is beyond what is justified by his faith alone--you think?
So consider this--why do conservatives think we have a problem with racist and homophobic speech--or what you might dub "pc"? Do conservatives think it is because we're power tripping on being accepted sometimes? And can't wait to exclude and discriminate? Or is it because we know there are bigots today, like Bryan Fischer, who wants to cry about "heterophobia" as if it was impossible to be straight and be a gay ally? Who not only thinks all gays are bad, but even being sympathetic to them is kinda gay and totally of Satan? So there's an idea floating out there that supporting gays is not Christian, and even supporting gays is like revoking your being straight? And does sticking up for the civil rights of POC's make you less white too? (see : N*****lover--as in, I guess I am.).
I'm sorry, but it is really hard to accept conservatives as being okay sometimes, when they seem to be okay with all the language that says so many people that I love are not okay. A person can be Christian and not a Jackass. Accept Gays and be Straight. Be Christian, and not hate non-Christians or people whose understanding of Christianity is different. I just don't see why the hate is not only sanctioned, but championed among conservatives. If you all think I don't like you, I want to say you all started it. And I don't care if you think I'm one of the good ones.
I don't hate conservatives per se, and I don't think conservatism has to do with racism and homophobia necessarily--it needn't. But I think it's a choice. Since there is a church without homophobia, since there are parties without racism--why stick with the losers and bigots? If conservatives hate being associated with racism, why are there still so many of the Stormfront/Pat Buchanan/Ron Paul Newsletter mold about? Why is a bigot being called a hero? Inquiring liberal gay atheist minds are damn interested to know!
11 comments:
It all feeds into their "we're the REAL victims" mythology, which you can hear Rush Limbaugh braying all day every day.
~
Like, if someone quoted the Sermon on the Mount, we'd have equal issues, or even any of that "Love thy Neighbor" "Love thy Enemy" and "Turn the other cheek" stuff?
The fact that Jesus was totally a liberal is what makes them so pissy about their religion. They really should just call themselves "neo-Leviticans" or something.
The reason I'm asking is, the response on the right has even gone so far as to label this guy another Rosa Parks--
Rosa Parks risked death, grievous bodily harm, or imprisonment... Duckfucker faces mild censure and the possible loss of a gig he doesn't even need.
Greetings, Vixen,
you have constructed a post that is almost impossible to respond to. It is more like a rant with various invectives than a question.
You have thrown so many bowls of spaghetti on the wall that it would take a novel-sized post to reply in full.
Nevertheless, I will try to answer you over several posting periods, because I believe you are fundamentally genuine and basically a decent human being who really would like to know why some conservatives feel as they do.
First, you conflate conservatism and Christianity. You talk about conservatives being against atheists and others.
This is not correct. You'll recall that Atlas Shrugged was one of the most passed-around books in the Reagan White House. Ayn Rand was an atheist and is generally well thought of in conservative circles.
Orthodox Jews are almost all conservative politically, although Conservative and Reform Jews are frequently liberal. You'll note that Michael Medved and Dennis Prager are two outstanding spokesmen for conservative views -- and are frequently invited speakers at different congregations.
Your concern about Christianity may or may not have some merit, but your real argument is with specific denominations within the Christian communion. In these cases you are dealing with a species of institutional life.
Each denomination has its own theology based on its interpretation of the scriptures. The theology has to be demonstrated to accommodate what the scriptures say, and this leads to the subject called apologetics. Each denomination has apologetics which try to demonstrate the validity of its theology.
Phil Robertson was speaking from 1 Corinthians which he would view as a profound truth.
I'll try to get back to this later, as I have not touched the hem of the garment that you have advanced in your post. This really should be a dozen or two discrete questions or assertions, but maybe we can get somewhere with it.
--Formerly Amherst
Greetings--I had thought I was a bit more specific despite the length of my post, but I'll try to encapsulate a bit:
I don't assume all conservatives are Christians, and the actual title of the post as well as what I wrote contains the assumption that Christians are not a monolith--that people can even sit in the same pew, yet take away different meanings from the sermon. The point about conservatives is that the kinds of thought and language coming from these handfuls of denominations of more strict or authoritarian strains of religion are more likely to be championed by conservatives of any faith. Or even the handful of no faith conservatives, although only S E Cupp actaully comes to mind as an out-atheist conservative at the moment.
Take the example from last year, of neocon political consultant Richard Grenell enjoying about a week of being a part of Mitt Romney's political campaign, and then (in a story that was broken by Jennifer Rubin, btw, whom I do not mistake for a Christian) he was dismissed from the Romney campaign in large part due to a campaign against him from the AFA pretty much on the basis of his being gay. Or from earlier this year, when not only GOProud but also the venerable Log Cabin Republicans were excluded from CPAC; oh they might be conservative, but they made the religious right unhappy so...
The one long strand of spaghetti that might look like bowlsfull is this--we sometimes talk about he problem of outreach in poltics and whether a party has a "big tent" or what have you. The left has embraced multiculturalism to an extent because we think government can make solutions that fit a whole lot of categories of people regardless of their faith,ethnicity, etc. and actually try to keep government out of the church and bedroom for just that reason. But as a political arm, conservative outreach seems to be retracting, and excludes so many when it supports this kind of language--so why is it so often done? Why do the bigots win out?
Robertson's comments also waded into racial content, and I do shy from frankly addressing it as racist per se as such because he really seemed to be commenting on the larger question of whether social programs were necessarily beneficial, but it still hewed to a type.
And I might appreciate knowing exactly which bits of my comments were actual invective as opposed to merely being unpleasant to hear, because I do like to learn how to approach my subjects more civilly, when I can.
Oh, and I think Josh Barro is an atheist, too, so. Although that is not why influential derpy person Erick Erickson doesn't like him. Also, when guys like him and David Frum criticize the derp aspects of conservatism--they sure do get so slammed. And yet they are, undeniably, still conservatives.
Hi Vixen,
... why do the bigots always win out... You see, this is the kind of invective that demonstrates to people on the right what the left thinks of us. I'm not a bigot. I know a lot of conservatives, and none of them is a bigot (some of them are black).
Conservatives feel that there is only so much flexibility from basic principles before you begin to lose the principles altogether. Conservatism is really just a handful of ideas. Limited government, low taxation, strong defense, etc. That's all conservatism is about. We have good arguments for those positions, because we believe them to be in our best interests personally and in the best interests of the nation.
Frankly, please don't take this the wrong way, speaking as someone who has been repudiated on Rumproast more times than I can count, it seems to me that the bigots are all on the other side.
I started to post on Rumproast because I thought is was the most intelligent hate site that I could find on the left. My idea was to try to be good-natured enough and friendly and supportive enough even when offering a different point of view. Despite that I have never seen one single drop of kindness displayed to any conservative politican, spokesman, or movement. Not the slightest suggestion that someone might have a small glimmer of truth on the other side. Nothing but out-and-out prejudice, bigotry, slander, defamation of character with your breakfast and your tea.
Now of course it is said to be just for snark humor, and it makes you wonder what all liberals laugh about if just spewing hate speech is what makes them laugh. It's a mystery to me.
I think one of the reasons for the swelling of support for Phil has to do with the issue of gay marriage.
Many of us worked very hard to try to bring around the idea of civil unions. We had heartfelt support for the predicament that gay Americans found themselves in, and we pushed hard to find a harmonious solution.
We thought we had it in civil unions. But as we know, the next push was for marriage.
Now this is pretty understandable, and furthermore, you can't find federal, constitutional disagreement with homosexuals being able to marry.
So on the one hand, a naive person might wonder why there might be resistance.
Those of us who pushed for civil unions then found the ground cut from beneath our feet.
Now Vixen, let me ask you question. Seriously. Suppose your parents raised you, and their parents had them, and back through the generations of your family it was the same.
And then, suddenly, someone discovered that in Israel they have this think called a kibbutz. And in the kibbutz, the children are taken from their parents at an early age and raised by a community.
Now suppose forces in this country then decided that children in the US should be taken from their families and raised in a kibbutz.
You could point out that the kibbutz has been successful. You can point out that none of the children seems to have been intrinsically harmed, so why shouldn't every mom and dad smilingly and willingly turn their children over to the agency for the new feat in social engineering.
Obviously, parents would come unglued.
Despite the fact you can point to success with the kibbutz and it is not unconstitutional or illegal, parents would see this as trampling on their most sacred rights.
This is what, essentially, struck at the heart of conservative America relative to gay marriage.
And there is still huge resentment about this even though a number of states have ratified the idea.
The question here is who is being unreasonable. The parents who feel that it is their natural and divine right and duty to care for their own children, or some people who have decided that that should be put aside so they can achieve something then want?
I believe that a reaction to legal authorities pressing for marriage among gays have created a hostile environment, and that is why the right has become so energized over Duck Dynasty.
--Formerly Amherst
Formerly Amherst--I am trying to respect what you are saying, but I think we are now at an impasse since you have referenced Rumproast as a hate site. Let me be especially clear--I do not agree that gay relationships should be ghettoized as this less-than thing called a civil union as if "good enough for straights" equalled a total win for gays if it lacked in any respects, and it does.
If you don't care for conservatives being called bigots, and think only people who call out bigotry are the "real bigots"--then we do have a problem, don't we? If you think racists being called out as such equals hate speech and want to offer the existence of POC racists as your figleaf--I am not interested in being civil anymore.
Your analogy to kibbutzim isn't even relevant. There have been peoples, such as aboriginal Australians, who have been actually taken and raised by whites and this is--
I don't even know. Racist? Totally full of western privilege? Not necessarily relevant to the gay marriage question, though. If you are making an argument regarding persons in gay unions adopting a child available for adoption as permitted by their parent(s), your argument is no more sensible than one against a straight couple doing the same.
Are you saying adoption is a problem? Or are we just singling out gays? Please tell me how singling out gays for a curtailing of rights is relevant to limited government, low taxation, strong defense, etc?
And to follow up if this isn't clear enough--civil unions as opposed to marriage is a kind of "separate but equal"--Plessy vs Ferguson, which has been basically established as wrong. The religious doctrines of any group dictating what another does is like my saying you shouldn't have pork at your breakfast table. Are we really going to go there? Sacred cows? Alcohol procriptions? Sharia? Less government interference in all that--please!
Vixen, I have been misunderstood.
I was attempting a daring rhetorical experiment where I actually give liberals a feeling or emotional tone of how conservatives feel.
You know, on the right and left we are all sort of ethnocentric in a way. We see the universe from our own world view, and we have a lot of trouble realizing that another world view has any validity.
As you know, in acting the actors always want to know, "What's my motivation?" And the motivation is some complex of emotion and concepts.
I was trying to give you some insight into the intense emotions that conservatives have that would lead to the widespread support for Duck Dynasty.
A person would have to be a pretty dim bulb not to see that a conservative would find Rumproast to be a hate site. Obviously, if a rightwing site says the same kinds of things in a never-ending refrain about liberal politicians, causes, and initiatives, liberals would regard it as a hate site. And they would probably be correct.
So I had hoped for a little shock value, eye-opener, but of course it was a foolish thing for me to attempt.
I was also attempting to give liberals some insider knowledge into the feeling of betrayal with the experience of the rise of homosexual marriage.
I thought that if I set up a scenario that had children being taken from their parents, it would cause an emotional reaction from the reader.
And this emotional reaction on the part of conservatives, their feelings of their traditions and values and hopes and aspirations being ripped from them would give you an insight into their motives.
In other words, it was foolhardy of me, but I was trying to get you to have a smidgen of the feeling conservatives have when they see something they believe in almost the the extent they believe in God, i.e., marriage between a man and a woman being legally attacked.
I was not attempting a conceptual paradigm, because in this case the motives for the Duck Dynasty reaction lie mostly in the emotions.
Incidentally, I want to clear something up.
1. My own religious views are an amalgam of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Helmrich Zimmer, Paul Tillich, along with 100 years of research by the the Society of Psychical Research, and 30 years of research of the near death experience.
2. I have not expressed my own political views. In short, I believe we are threatened by plutocracy from one side and totalitarianism from the other side. Often the totalitarians and the plutocrats get together and cut deals.
And outside of that, sometimes We the People are able to stop either a totalitarian or plutocratic takeover.
I trust neither the government nor big business.
I do favor qualified capitalism, but only because I regard it as the best of a lot of bad systems. I don't think it's very good; I just think it's the best we have.
--Formerly Amherst
P.S. My wife looked over my shoulder and thought I should mention that conservatives who are against gay marriage are actually a subset, although a large one, of all conservatives.
Formerly Amherst, this is my problem sometimes with analogies--to whatever degree they may be imperfect, they can lead to misunderstanding. Getting a rise out me with the "hate site" reference was a bit shocking though because if you saw what we do as hateful, I'm not sure we'd be able to have this kind of dialog.
The analogy of child-snatching with reference to gay marriage does have a kind of relevance, which I think is a bigger betrayal-- children snatched from LGBT parents.
The problem with this sort of thing:
Many of us worked very hard to try to bring around the idea of civil unions. We had heartfelt support for the predicament that gay Americans found themselves in, and we pushed hard to find a harmonious solution.
Is that no one gets a cookie for recognizing that human beings deserve basic rights. Civil unions never were the goal for gay couples, just a waystation to getting there. It would be like African-Americans stopping with desegregation while gross discrimination continued to happen with respects to voting and hiring and housing practices. Struggling for equality is always going on until something like equality is acheived (and then there's the fight to keep it).
My dear Ms/Miss/Mrs Vixen, as the case may be, I think I had better spell out my own personal views about Rumproast and marriage.
Previously, I have been undertaking to speak for the conservative point of view because, given the choices we have, I prefer the conservative orientation. And because I've lived most of my life in a red state and presently live in a small town in a red state.
When you talk about conservatives, you usually are speaking about various columnists, editorial writers, and spokesmen for organizations. When I talk about conservatives, I'm talking about friends, relatives, and people in the neighborhood. Where I live, trying to find a liberal would be like trying to find a rightwinger in New York City.
Despite the above, my own personal views have their own shape.
I believe that Rumproast is a cheerleader site for far-leftists and a place for them to let down their hair.
I seldom agree with anything written (although Strange and I could sometimes speak with each other above the fray), but I sometimes find the posts funny.
I like your posts on the NRA. I once told Betty Crocker that I thought Rumproast could be one of the best sites on the 'net if it simply bashed conservatives 70% or 80% of the time and bashed liberals 20% or 30% of the time. Of course this evoked comments about the audacity of imagining that conservative opinion could have the moral equivalent of celestial liberalism. One can scarcely condemn people for naivety. So I would have to say that I disagree with Rumproast and sometimes am a bit offended by it, but I'm also amused by it and often appreciate the level of cleverness that goes into the posts.
Now for my personal feelings about marriage.
My view is that the question comes down to the ontological or metaphysical properties that may exist in the marriage bond. Personally, I do favor marriage between a man and a woman. I see marriage as opposites coming together to create something new and different and as a basis for families.
However, the metaphysical side is unsettled.
Christopher Isherwood, the gay author of Cabaret, was a disciple of Ramakrishna. He went to his guru, Swami Prabhabananda, and confessed his homosexuality, seeking the guru's advice. The swami instructed him to see all of his male partners as the young Krishna, undoubted the most famous incarnation of Vishnu.
So this obviously places the sexual relationship into a perspective not generally seen in the Semitic religions.
So on the one hand we have the institution of marriage seen from the point of view of our legal and constitutional system. And on the other hand, we have marriage as society's ratification of a spiritual relationship. I'm a traditional guy, and I am an exponent of traditional marriage. At the same time, I understand that this view can be challenged because of the situation I wrote of above in respect to Isherwood, whom I like as a writer.
Let me explain that I do think that most conservatives would probably see Rumproast as a hate site. How could they not? However, in my past I was more hardcore than any of you. My best friend was the roommate of a Weatherman who helped break Timothy Leary out of jail and helped him escape to Algeria to be with Eldridge Cleaver (who eventually became a Ronald Reagan Republican).
Ergo I could hardly be expected to be a mimic of Pat Robertson.
--Formerly Amherst
Post a Comment