However, the second scene involves one of the subplots. Norman’s sister has a crush on a kid she tries desperately to impress throughout the movie. After she fails to turn his head, she finally asks him out.
“Sure,” he responds. “You’re gonna love my boyfriend. He’s like a total chick-flick nut.”
My friend saw the film in a “red state” and she reported that “you could hear the gasps in the theatre from parents” at the unexpected line. “I should have known something was up when the theatre manager made a huge disclaimer and offered refunds if we did not like the movie,” she wrote.
As a resident of a reddish state, I almost want to go see this movie just to witness the reactions. It must have been incredible to watch the sudden failure of these parents’ homophobic delusion that they can isolate their children from any knowledge of same-sex relationships. I find it implausible that the film actually “introduces” children to homosexuality itself; that would suggest that all these kids had never once encountered the concept of homosexuality before they saw ParaNorman, which is vastly unlikely.
I have no sympathy for these parents – while I’m sure they’re trying to raise their kids in a way they believe to be right, just as we are, the problem is that these people want our son’s classmates and friends to believe that his moms simply don’t exist. These are the people who would protect their children from being “introduced to homosexuality” by keeping them away from us. Say what you will about our family, but we don’t keep our children ignorant of the fact that homophobes, Republicans and religious people exist. We don’t even try. Why would we? These are concepts that they are, unfortunately, going to encounter in their lives – and likely sooner rather than later, thanks to people like Nancy French who think our truth is something their children can’t handle.
We can’t teach our kids that something is right or wrong if they don’t know what it is. I don’t know how these parents intend to do it – the statement “homosexuality is wrong” is meaningless to someone who you’ve prevented from knowing that homosexuality exists. By swaddling their children in ignorance, they’ve placed themselves in the double bind of expressing their disapproval of something without letting their kids know just what it is they disapprove of. Either they must finally address the topic they’re so reluctant to talk about, or attempt to avoid any mention of the subject at all until a movie like ParaNorman blows the whole thing wide open (and not a moment too soon).
It’s a time-honored technique of the gay community to hide the fact that a character is gay until the audience has developed a real affinity for him/her, then catch the audience off-guard by divulging that the character is gay. …
If they really were “brave” they’d announce from the start that Mitch was gay and see just how many parents would take their children to see this movie.
Of course, this just mirrors how coming out often proceeds in reality: being LGBT usually isn’t the first thing you learn about someone, even if you know them well. And when this particular facet of who we are comes to light, the homophobe takes umbrage at the revelation that upends their previous assumptions. After all, they consented to love or raise or befriend or laugh at a straight cis person – not some queer. It’s remarkable how much this resembles the classic “pieces of flair” argument that transgender people should always disclose their history to romantic partners so that they can be rejected outright just for being trans. Bigelow takes it further, saying what even homophobes rarely state openly: that members of invisible minorities are obligated to announce their status in advance, so that bigots can simply hate them before getting to know them or developing any attachment or connection to them as individuals. It doesn’t sound quite so reasonable now, does it?
The arrival of Hurricane Isaac exactly seven years after Hurricane Katrina blasted New Orleans has some people wondering if there’s more to it than random chance, and suggesting the popular homosexual festival Southern Decadence may be part of a judgment from God.
“A hurricane hitting a celebration of decadence … twice in seven years. What are the odds?” asks Robin Cox, a lifelong Gulf Coast resident.
“Does it seem God has it in for New Orleans?” adds Mary Starkey. “Just contemplating why this has happened twice in seven years at exact same time of year.”
Southern Decadence has been a yearly event since its inception in 1972. Over the past 40 years, it’s been delayed or canceled twice because of hurricanes. That’s 2 years out of 40. The other 38 times, it was not affected by hurricanes. So, if we can leap all the way to concluding that God has twice thrown a hurricane at New Orleans because of a popular homosexual festival, can’t we also conclude that for the other 38 years, God has intentionally been moving tropical storms away from New Orleans so that this festival can proceed unhindered? Why is it that a 2-in-40 occurrence is taken as indicative of God’s stance on Southern Decadence, but something that’s happened 38 out of 40 times means nothing? Sure, the central assumption is bullshit, but even if we do accept it, reality still doesn’t seem to agree with WorldNetDaily’s conclusions. As usual.
I’m a bit of a weather enthusiast, and moving to Florida has given me the opportunity to experience something we don’t have in Illinois: hurricanes, and their less intense cousin, tropical storms. Not very many have threatened the United States this season, but that’s recently changed with the development of tropical storm Isaac. We’re far enough inland that we won’t get much more than some wind and rain, but others won’t be so lucky. While Isaac was initially predicted to hit the west coast of Florida, it’s now headed directly for Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
We have had lots and lots of people praying around the clock that it would move, and after you watch from the very beginning where they were saying it was coming, and now where they say it is going, then it has really moved out of the way for us, and we appreciate God doing that and moving it for us.
Indeed, Isaac did move. Instead of striking Florida as a tropical storm and rapidly dissipating over land, it’s now charging across the Gulf of Mexico and intensifying into a hurricane that will almost certainly hit New Orleans.
While I doubt anyone was hoping that Louisiana would be damaged by a hurricane, the limitations of prayer and those who use it are especially obvious in a case like this. Is there any reason that Peters and her team haven’t been praying for every tropical storm to veer out to sea instead of making landfall? Are Tampa and the RNC her only concern, and not the 19 people who were killed by Isaac in Haiti? Or, if they didn’t get their bright idea until the storm was already here, why not just pray for it to disappear or go back the way it came? If God can nudge a hurricane away from Republicans, why can’t he destroy it, or make it go backwards?
But Peters and her group did not pray for any of this, because they knew it wouldn’t happen. A storm shifting from its predicted track is nothing special – it happens all the time whether you pray to your gods or not. But a complete absence of tropical storms threatening the United States is highly unlikely; even in the least active season on record, 22 people in Texas were killed by a hurricane. And the sudden dissipation or reversal of a rapidly intensifying tropical cyclone is practically impossible. Does Peters believe there’s any real risk that New Orleans might pray hard enough to send the hurricane back to Tampa? Obviously not.
These are things that might actually require some supernatural intervention, yet this is exactly what Pray Tampa Bay did not ask for. Instead, they only asked God for something that would be fully explainable in terms of natural phenomena. I think they know exactly what’s going on here: they don’t honestly expect that the laws of nature will be suspended in an obvious and visible fashion, even if they do ask God for it. They’re just looking for any sign that could possibly indicate that their prayers actually did anything.
But in trying to make God responsible for a storm having shifted, they’ve put themselves in an awkward situation: they now have to deal with the ugly implications of the unavoidable fact that it still has to go somewhere. Really, was no one in New Orleans also praying for the storm to miss them, or was the RNC just more important? How many people are going to die so a convention can go ahead? If you’re going to take responsibility for moving an entire hurricane, you’re also responsible for where you move it to.
But perhaps some believers still prefer this disturbing conclusion to the alternative: admitting that God has nothing to do with it. After all, if your god can only operate in ways that are already accounted for by the mindless workings of natural laws, who needs him?
I’m a bit of a weather enthusiast, and moving to Florida has given me the opportunity to experience something we don’t have in Illinois: hurricanes, and their less intense cousin, tropical storms. Not very many have threatened the United States this season, but that’s recently changed with the development of tropical storm Isaac. We’re far enough inland that we won’t get much more than some wind and rain, but others won’t be so lucky. While Isaac was initially predicted to hit the west coast of Florida, it’s now headed directly for Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
We have had lots and lots of people praying around the clock that it would move, and after you watch from the very beginning where they were saying it was coming, and now where they say it is going, then it has really moved out of the way for us, and we appreciate God doing that and moving it for us.
Indeed, Isaac did move. Instead of striking Florida as a tropical storm and rapidly dissipating over land, it’s now charging across the Gulf of Mexico and intensifying into a hurricane that will almost certainly hit New Orleans.
While I doubt anyone was hoping that Louisiana would be damaged by a hurricane, the limitations of prayer and those who use it are especially obvious in a case like this. Is there any reason that Peters and her team haven’t been praying for every tropical storm to veer out to sea instead of making landfall? Are Tampa and the RNC her only concern, and not the 19 people who were killed by Isaac in Haiti? Or, if they didn’t get their bright idea until the storm was already here, why not just pray for it to disappear or go back the way it came? If God can nudge a hurricane away from Republicans, why can’t he destroy it, or make it go backwards?
But Peters and her group did not pray for any of this, because they knew it wouldn’t happen. A storm shifting from its predicted track is nothing special – it happens all the time whether you pray to your gods or not. But a complete absence of tropical storms threatening the United States is highly unlikely; even in the least active season on record, 22 people in Texas were killed by a hurricane. And the sudden dissipation or reversal of a rapidly intensifying tropical cyclone is practically impossible. Does Peters believe there’s any real risk that New Orleans might pray hard enough to send the hurricane back to Tampa? Obviously not.
These are things that might actually require some supernatural intervention, yet this is exactly what Pray Tampa Bay did not ask for. Instead, they only asked God for something that would be fully explainable in terms of natural phenomena. I think they know exactly what’s going on here: they don’t honestly expect that the laws of nature will be suspended in an obvious and visible fashion, even if they do ask God for it. They’re just looking for any sign that could possibly indicate that their prayers actually did anything.
But in trying to make God responsible for a storm having shifted, they’ve put themselves in an awkward situation: they now have to deal with the ugly implications of the unavoidable fact that it still has to go somewhere. Really, was no one in New Orleans also praying for the storm to miss them, or was the RNC just more important? How many people are going to die so a convention can go ahead? If you’re going to take responsibility for moving an entire hurricane, you’re also responsible for where you move it to.
But perhaps some believers still prefer this disturbing conclusion to the alternative: admitting that God has nothing to do with it. After all, if your god can only operate in ways that are already accounted for by the mindless workings of natural laws, who needs him?
Following the shooting of a security guard at the anti-gay Family Research Council, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank called it “reckless” for the Human Rights Campaign and the Southern Poverty Law Center to say the FRC is a “hate group”. He further suggested that calling the FRC “hateful” is an example of “inflammatory labels” and “hurling accusations that can stir up the crazies”, and questioned why the SPLC considers the FRC a “hate group” alongside the KKK and Aryan Nations. Throughout the piece, Milbank describes the FRC as “a mainstream conservative think tank”, “a policy shop that advocates for a full range of conservative Christian positions”, “a mainstream Christian advocacy group ” , and “driven by deeply held religious beliefs”.
But Milbank’s appraisal of the FRC as something other than hateful is only possible because of his complete refusal to examine the actual substance of the organization’s infamous “conservative Christian positions”. For anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the group’s so-called “mainstream Christian advocacy”, the claim that they aren’t hateful is so plainly ridiculous that the very word “hate” is meaningless if it doesn’t include the FRC.
An accusation of hatefulness certainly isn’t something to be thrown around lightly – it has to be earned. And the FRC has been working overtime since its inception to do just that. They’ve made no effort to hide their extraordinary attacks on the LGBT community; for anyone who cares enough to look, all of this is a matter of public record.
The FRC is pervasively opposed to the recognition and acceptance of transgender people. In one edition of their “Washington Update”, they criticize the rules of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for providing undocumented transgender detainees with continued access to hormone therapy rather than forcibly de-transitioning them. As they see it, trans people as a group are not even entitled to receive their own prescribed medications. Contrary to the recommendations of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which recognize gender transition treatments as beneficial and medically necessary, the FRC considers this “exacerbating a mental health crisis like cross-dressing”.
Testifying before the Maryland State Senate, FRC senior policy fellow Peter Sprigg – whose medical qualifications include being a professional actor and an ordained Baptist minister – again claimed that trans people should only receive “mental health treatments to help them become comfortable with their biological sex”. He further added that they transition “to fulfill their sexual desires”, which he describes as “transvestic fetishism”. In a policy document on gender identity nondiscrimination ordinances, which Sprigg labels “bathroom bills”, he argues against trans people being allowed to present as their identified gender, calling them “often highly unconvincing and therefore disturbing to witnesses”. To Dana Milbank, this is just “mainstream Christian advocacy”, which apparently includes denying health care and legal protections to entire classes of people and calling them sexual fetishists who are ugly.
The FRC and its staff have also used distorted and debunked studies to claim that LGBT people are unfit parents and are more likely to molest children. FRC president Tony Perkins describes pedophilia as “a homosexual problem”, and senior fellow Timothy Dailey has claimed that “disproportionate numbers of gay men seek adolescent males or boys as sexual partners”. An FRC pamphlet from 1999 stated: “One of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order.”
They’ve recently cited a widely criticized study, which included hardly any examples of long-term same-sex parenting and was found to be severely flawed in an audit by the journal that published it, to claim that children of gay parents were more likely to be sexually abused, and “fare worse on most outcomes”. The study’s author admitted that it was not representative of stable families with same-sex parents, and the journal Social Science Research believes the paper’s methodological flaws should have disqualified it from publication. The FRC called it a “gold standard” of research. Is misrepresenting the competence of same-sex parents and the welfare of their children just one of those “deeply held religious beliefs”?
Of course, the FRC isn’t content with merely opposing the recognition of our families and depicting us as sexual predators – they’ve repeatedly challenged the very legality of our consenting, adult relationships. In 2010, Peter Sprigg appeared on Hardball and stated, “I think that the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas which overturned the sodomy laws in this country was wrongly decided. I think there would be a place for criminal sanctions against homosexual behavior.”
The FRC was also found to have spent $25,000 lobbying Congress against approving a resolution condemning Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which would institute the death penalty for anyone who had gay sex more than once. Their explanation was that while they don’t support the Uganda bill, they only wanted to remove “sweeping and inaccurate assertions that homosexual conduct is internationally recognized as a fundamental human right”. It’s not that they want us dead or anything – they just don’t think we have the right to do what heterosexuals do every day without facing “criminal sanctions”, like death.
And these aren’t just exceptions to an otherwise respectable record. At the FRC, such extreme stances are the rule. Whether they’re calling to “export homosexuals from the United States”, asking public health organizations to tell people to quit being gay as if it were a cigarette habit, recommending that teenagers be discouraged from identifying as LGBT in order to reduce teen suicide, comparing gay marriage to a man marrying a horse, describing efforts against anti-gay bullying as “telling school children that it’s okay to be immoral”, or comparing gay pride events to “adultery pride” and “drunkenness pride”, the FRC has made a name for itself. And that name is hate – proud, shameless, unapologetic hate.
What does Dana Milbank have to say about this?
Offensive, certainly. But in the same category as the KKK?
I have to wonder: if the KKK restricted itself to calling people of color child abusers and immoral sexual deviants with pedophiles for prophets, and demanded that they be denied health care and subject to “criminal sanctions”, would Milbank similarly object to calling them a hate group? Or would it be obvious that these are unambiguously hateful beliefs?
In asking us not to call this hateful, we’re expected to accept people wanting us demonized, detained, deported and dead as a normal part of American political and religious life. We’re the ones being told we must tolerate this as a simple difference of opinion – after all, it’s just “mainstream Christian advocacy”. To call them hateful is “reckless” and “inflammatory” of us; to be that hateful is mainstream and conservative of them.
There’s a remarkable irony in Milbank’s attempt to gloss over the particulars of the FRC’s beliefs by simply saying they’re “Christian”. He accuses us of calling Christian and conservative beliefs hateful, and yet he’s the one claiming that this unbelievable hostility toward our lives is just another element of Christianity and conservatism. Which is really worse: calling out hate groups for truly hateful behavior, or saying that mainstream American religion involves hating every aspect of our existence?
Not all deeply held Christian beliefs are hateful, and not all conservatism is hateful. But hate is still hate regardless of its religious or political origins. If these are your deeply held religious beliefs, then your deeply held religious beliefs are hateful. If these are your conservative Christian positions, then your conservative Christian positions are hateful. And if the FRC can’t be called hateful, then what can?
When people feel the need to state explicitly how “tolerant” they are, it’s usually a sign that something is amiss. Such is the case with Bristol Palin’s recent blog post, where she declares that she would have no problem with a gay dance partner, but laments that others are unwilling to extend the same tolerance to certain Christian beliefs:
In their simplistic minds, the fact that I’m a Christian, that I believe in God’s plan for marriage, means that I must hate gays and must hate to even be in their presence. Well, they were right about one thing: there was hate in that media room, but the hate was theirs, not mine. …
Look, my responsibility is pretty darn clear: to treat people as I would like to be treated, to be gracious, and – yes – to uphold and advance my Christian principles in all that I do. Would I want a gay dancer to refuse to dance with me because of my beliefs? Why would I refuse to dance with a gay man because of his?
To the Left, “tolerance” means agreeing with them on, well, everything. To me, tolerance means learning to live and work with each other when we don’t agree – and won’t ever agree.
At first glance, this seems like a pretty straightforward example of tolerance: I accept you, can’t you accept me? The problem is that, in this case, the ideal of tolerance is being used to call for inaction in the face of intolerance. Palin implicitly parallels two instances of tolerance – the first is simply tolerating the existence and presence of gay people; the second is tolerating the belief that the defining feature of gay people, as embodied in their relationships, is immoral and should be legally treated as unequal.
These are clearly quite different things. Under a meaningful understanding of what tolerance is, there are indeed some beliefs that are simply unacceptable – indeed, they are intolerable. Think about it: Is there any belief that you would consider so unreasonable and inhumane that passively tolerating it, and remaining silent in the face of it, would be more unacceptable to you than speaking out and letting it be known that you’re not okay with that? For instance, do you see no difference between women voting and those who would act to prevent them from voting, or gay people holding a parade and those who would seek to suppress them by violence, or women wearing the clothes of their choice and those who demand they be cloaked in veils, or gay people merely existing and others who want to execute them? At what point do you recognize that such things are not just two sides of one coin, not just an innocuous difference of opinion, and plainly not the same?
If you can acknowledge that it is possible for certain beliefs to be so troubling that you cannot accept them, then you can understand that this is only a matter of where we draw that line. And many of us draw the line at the belief that gay people’s love is immoral and should be legally unrecognized. If our commitment to tolerance has any teeth to it, then advocating tolerance of gay people necessarily precludes being okay with such anti-gay beliefs. After all, if someone claimed to tolerate your own beliefs, how much would that really mean to you if they never spoke out in protest when others called for such homophobic Christian speech to be criminalized? Such an obligation to object should at least be familiar on a conceptual level to Christians, who have often claimed that “loving” someone demands that we tell them the unvarnished “truth” about the supposed sinfulness of their sexuality.
Calling for tolerance, at the most basic level and regardless of the specifics of what we believe ought to be tolerated, means advocating one approach to beliefs and expressions over another. A kind of universal “tolerance” that says literally anything is okay negates that, and as a result, it’s barely even coherent or distinct as a position. At most, it has all the force of “I think this might be a good idea, but, you know… whatever.” If you think that tolerance of you or your beliefs is at all important, then realize that tolerance needs to be more compelling than that. Tolerance doesn’t mean agreeing with “the Left” – it means, at a minimum, agreeing that tolerance should actually stand for something. And if you expect to be admired for your tolerance, then espousing a position that amounts to “I’m so tolerant, I’ll never let anyone know I disapprove of prejudice against minorities!” isn’t the best way to make that happen.
When people feel the need to state explicitly how “tolerant” they are, it’s usually a sign that something is amiss. Such is the case with Bristol Palin’s recent blog post, where she declares that she would have no problem with a gay dance partner, but laments that others are unwilling to extend the same tolerance to certain Christian beliefs:
In their simplistic minds, the fact that I’m a Christian, that I believe in God’s plan for marriage, means that I must hate gays and must hate to even be in their presence. Well, they were right about one thing: there was hate in that media room, but the hate was theirs, not mine. …
Look, my responsibility is pretty darn clear: to treat people as I would like to be treated, to be gracious, and – yes – to uphold and advance my Christian principles in all that I do. Would I want a gay dancer to refuse to dance with me because of my beliefs? Why would I refuse to dance with a gay man because of his?
To the Left, “tolerance” means agreeing with them on, well, everything. To me, tolerance means learning to live and work with each other when we don’t agree – and won’t ever agree.
At first glance, this seems like a pretty straightforward example of tolerance: I accept you, can’t you accept me? The problem is that, in this case, the ideal of tolerance is being used to call for inaction in the face of intolerance. Palin implicitly parallels two instances of tolerance – the first is simply tolerating the existence and presence of gay people; the second is tolerating the belief that the defining feature of gay people, as embodied in their relationships, is immoral and should be legally treated as unequal.
These are clearly quite different things. Under a meaningful understanding of what tolerance is, there are indeed some beliefs that are simply unacceptable – indeed, they are intolerable. Think about it: Is there any belief that you would consider so unreasonable and inhumane that passively tolerating it, and remaining silent in the face of it, would be more unacceptable to you than speaking out and letting it be known that you’re not okay with that? For instance, do you see no difference between women voting and those who would act to prevent them from voting, or gay people holding a parade and those who would seek to suppress them by violence, or women wearing the clothes of their choice and those who demand they be cloaked in veils, or gay people merely existing and others who want to execute them? At what point do you recognize that such things are not just two sides of one coin, not just an innocuous difference of opinion, and plainly not the same?
If you can acknowledge that it is possible for certain beliefs to be so troubling that you cannot accept them, then you can understand that this is only a matter of where we draw that line. And many of us draw the line at the belief that gay people’s love is immoral and should be legally unrecognized. If our commitment to tolerance has any teeth to it, then advocating tolerance of gay people necessarily precludes being okay with such anti-gay beliefs. After all, if someone claimed to tolerate your own beliefs, how much would that really mean to you if they never spoke out in protest when others called for such homophobic Christian speech to be criminalized? Such an obligation to object should at least be familiar on a conceptual level to Christians, who have often claimed that “loving” someone demands that we tell them the unvarnished “truth” about the supposed sinfulness of their sexuality.
Calling for tolerance, at the most basic level and regardless of the specifics of what we believe ought to be tolerated, means advocating one approach to beliefs and expressions over another. A kind of universal “tolerance” that says literally anything is okay negates that, and as a result, it’s barely even coherent or distinct as a position. At most, it has all the force of “I think this might be a good idea, but, you know… whatever.” If you think that tolerance of you or your beliefs is at all important, then realize that tolerance needs to be more compelling than that. Tolerance doesn’t mean agreeing with “the Left” – it means, at a minimum, agreeing that tolerance should actually stand for something. And if you expect to be admired for your tolerance, then espousing a position that amounts to “I’m so tolerant, I’ll never let anyone know I disapprove of prejudice against minorities!” isn’t the best way to make that happen.
CNN contributor Dana Loesch recently provided a textbook example of how ready and willing religious conservatives are to leap into a shameless, disgustingly self-righteous defense of their narrow and exclusive version of faith, utilizing every fallacy at their disposal to pretend this is the One True Religion, while not even respecting it enough to bother trying to make a valid argument. They demonstrate no real concern for whether they’re actually right – sheer loudness and repetition will suffice to convince themselves of this.
This five-minute excerpt from the July 24 episode of Loesch’s radio show is a display of rapid-fire ignorance so packed with intellectual dishonesty that it’s a challenge just to keep up with it. When a caller says she refuses to go to Chick-fil-A because of the upper management’s homophobic beliefs and funding of anti-gay causes, Loesch responds with a string of claims so ridiculous, it’s difficult to accept that she even believes what she’s saying.
She first tells the caller: “I don’t understand how you can claim to practice the Christian faith while saying that someone else’s Christian viewpoint is hate.” Apparently nothing can possibly be hateful as long as it’s part of someone’s “Christian viewpoint”. It doesn’t matter what their viewpoint is, or how obviously hateful it would otherwise be – claiming it’s covered by some kind of Christianity is enough to legitimize it. But Loesch takes this even further, telling the caller, “you consider aspects of the Christian faith to be hate” – as if criticizing Chick-fil-A is the same as criticizing Christianity as a whole. Is the anti-gay stance of a chicken company now a defining feature of the Christian religion, delineating what is and is not Christianity?
And then comes the most hollow accusation I’ve ever heard: “You only subscribe to certain aspects of Christianity.” You know, unlike all of the other Christians who somehow follow every mutually contradictory belief that’s ever been endorsed by thousands of different Christian sects. When the caller rightly points this out, Loesch objects: “That’s not how the gospels are presented!” Well, you’d better go tell that to every Christian who’s ever existed. Congratulations to Dana Loesch, the one person who, out of billions of Christians throughout history, has finally established what Christianity truly is.
Finally, Loesch claims that if she thinks so-called “traditional marriage” is “hateful”, then she’s “literally calling Christ hateful”. It’s not unexpected to see conservative Christians twist any criticism of their openly prejudiced beliefs into some kind of personal attack against their head honcho in heaven, but the sheer arrogance of treating disagreement with their views as a direct assault on the almighty creator of the universe is always staggering. Of course, Loesch wasn’t finished taking offense on behalf of her imaginary savior, concluding: “I know you hate Christ.”
That’s just how immersed some people are in their religious worldview. They can’t conceive of any kind of difference of opinion without it being forced into the framework of either loving or hating their preferred deity. If you don’t agree with them, if you don’t follow their personal interpretation of religion, if you don’t patronize a business whose president declares that support for marriage equality means shaking our fist at God, that means you are literally hating some guy who died 2,000 years ago. This is nonsense. We don’t need to hate or love your Jesus – he’s just not that important. Try to understand that just because he matters to you, that doesn’t mean he matters to us. This is about what you said, and we simply don’t care about some unaccountable corpse to whom you attribute your beliefs.
CNN contributor Dana Loesch recently provided a textbook example of how ready and willing religious conservatives are to leap into a shameless, disgustingly self-righteous defense of their narrow and exclusive version of faith, utilizing every fallacy at their disposal to pretend this is the One True Religion, while not even respecting it enough to bother trying to make a valid argument. They demonstrate no real concern for whether they’re actually right – sheer loudness and repetition will suffice to convince themselves of this.
This five-minute excerpt from the July 24 episode of Loesch’s radio show is a display of rapid-fire ignorance so packed with intellectual dishonesty that it’s a challenge just to keep up with it. When a caller says she refuses to go to Chick-fil-A because of the upper management’s homophobic beliefs and funding of anti-gay causes, Loesch responds with a string of claims so ridiculous, it’s difficult to accept that she even believes what she’s saying.
She first tells the caller: “I don’t understand how you can claim to practice the Christian faith while saying that someone else’s Christian viewpoint is hate.” Apparently nothing can possibly be hateful as long as it’s part of someone’s “Christian viewpoint”. It doesn’t matter what their viewpoint is, or how obviously hateful it would otherwise be – claiming it’s covered by some kind of Christianity is enough to legitimize it. But Loesch takes this even further, telling the caller, “you consider aspects of the Christian faith to be hate” – as if criticizing Chick-fil-A is the same as criticizing Christianity as a whole. Is the anti-gay stance of a chicken company now a defining feature of the Christian religion, delineating what is and is not Christianity?
And then comes the most hollow accusation I’ve ever heard: “You only subscribe to certain aspects of Christianity.” You know, unlike all of the other Christians who somehow follow every mutually contradictory belief that’s ever been endorsed by thousands of different Christian sects. When the caller rightly points this out, Loesch objects: “That’s not how the gospels are presented!” Well, you’d better go tell that to every Christian who’s ever existed. Congratulations to Dana Loesch, the one person who, out of billions of Christians throughout history, has finally established what Christianity truly is.
Finally, Loesch claims that if she thinks so-called “traditional marriage” is “hateful”, then she’s “literally calling Christ hateful”. It’s not unexpected to see conservative Christians twist any criticism of their openly prejudiced beliefs into some kind of personal attack against their head honcho in heaven, but the sheer arrogance of treating disagreement with their views as a direct assault on the almighty creator of the universe is always staggering. Of course, Loesch wasn’t finished taking offense on behalf of her imaginary savior, concluding: “I know you hate Christ.”
That’s just how immersed some people are in their religious worldview. They can’t conceive of any kind of difference of opinion without it being forced into the framework of either loving or hating their preferred deity. If you don’t agree with them, if you don’t follow their personal interpretation of religion, if you don’t patronize a business whose president declares that support for marriage equality means shaking our fist at God, that means you are literally hating some guy who died 2,000 years ago. This is nonsense. We don’t need to hate or love your Jesus – he’s just not that important. Try to understand that just because he matters to you, that doesn’t mean he matters to us. This is about what you said, and we simply don’t care about some unaccountable corpse to whom you attribute your beliefs.
Last week, I blogged about Christian Post writer Matt Moore, a self-described “redeemed sinner” who posted an open letter to gay youth proclaiming that Jesus would save them from a life of drinking, drugs and meaningless sex. As I’m sure you would expect, I found his goals misguided and his metaphysics incoherent. In response, one of my readers left a comment saying:
Why are people so threatened by Matt Moore’s experience? Because it takes away their excuse to continue to sin? If Matt can be set free from sin and God is real and homosexuality is sin, then it makes them wrong and no one wants have to admit that they are wrong and sinful. Is it easier to mock than face the possibility that Matt may be right? Could it be possible that you are wrong?
This may be the falsest false dichotomy I’ve ever witnessed. It seems this person believes the chance of that entire bundle of claims being true is high enough to warrant serious consideration, and they present it as though this is the only other option, rather than a conglomeration that becomes increasingly unlikely as a whole with every new claim that’s added on. But even if Matt Moore’s experiences contain some element of truth, this still doesn’t demonstrate that any of these other things are real.
While Moore might just be a religious huckster or opportunist, it’s also entirely possible that he genuinely believes being gay means a life devoid of true happiness, and he feels that God personally called him to stop having relationships with men. It could be that his life was indeed terrible, and that his religious beliefs have helped him to become happier and more fulfilled as an individual – unlikely as it may seem.
All of this might be the case, but none of it tells us anything about the validity of various supernatural and theological concepts. Moore’s religious feelings and life experiences do not mean that the idea of “sin” is actually a real thing, or something that ever had any bearing on him. It does not mean that this “sin” is something he was “set free” from, or that it is something that anyone can be set free from. It doesn’t mean that “sin”, whatever it is, has these particular dynamics at all. And it doesn’t mean that being gay constitutes one of these “sins”.
It doesn’t show how the designation of “sin” would relate to any structure of morality. It doesn’t tell us what the consequences are of this “sin”. It doesn’t say why this is something for us to avoid. It also doesn’t mean that any deities really do exist. It doesn’t mean the specific, Judeo-Christian deity named “God” exists. And it doesn’t mean this God is actually capable of “freeing” us from our supposed “sin”.
That’s a whole lot of completely unsupported assumptions packed into just a few sentences. And the idea that we would find this the least bit “threatening” further assumes that we’re just as ignorant as they are. Would they accept the testimony of a supposedly “ex-gay” Muslim as evidence in favor of a specific interpretation of Islamic doctrine and theology? It seems highly doubtful. So why would they think there’s any reason to treat one Christian’s feelings as credible evidence of claims like “God is real” and “homosexuality is sin”?
And atop this logical house of cards, they rest the accusation that we must be seeking an “excuse to continue to sin”, which Moore’s experiences allegedly deprive us of. But for it to be the case that our criticism of his writings is only a cover for our pursuit of a justification to “sin”, we would first have to accept all of the underlying assumptions that are required for the concept of an “excuse to continue to sin” to be meaningful. I certainly don’t. So why would I think I needed any sort of excuse to keep doing something I don’t believe is wrong?
As Megan McArdle said, “It is a vast, and pervasive, cognitive mistake to assume that people who agree with you (or disagree) do so on the same criteria that you care about.” And our Human Conjunction Fallacy here seems to believe the rest of us also suspect that the “God exists, gays are sinning” scenario could actually be true. In their estimation, we consider this probable enough to be scared by the possibility, but instead of accepting its ramifications, we’ve just chosen to stick our heads in the sand.
What they’ve failed to recognize is that we’re not just on the other side of the fence here. We’re actually worlds apart in our beliefs. They think we’re talking on the same level as they are, but they’ve made the mistake of assuming that the entirety of their personal theology is accepted by everyone. It’s rather like believing that those who don’t follow your god must be worshipping the devil. They really don’t understand just how much of this we truly don’t believe. That’s why they expected that out of all the possible sequences of supernatural claims, we would somehow be especially worried about this one.
If anyone is feeling “threatened” here, it’s probably the one who refuses to face the fact that their favorite god is neither loved nor feared by us, but completely absent from the equation. We see their god as no more of a cosmic danger to us than the gods of any other faith, and thus not a relevant factor in our lives. And because of us, they have to contend with the reality that there are people out there who aren’t just selfishly denying a god they know in their hearts to be real, but who honestly see no reason to believe this. Is that so threatening? It shouldn’t be, but I guess it’s easier to ignore the possibility that you might be wrong.
