Quote:
Originally Posted by jthig32
I hate to keep beating a dead horse here, but I just want to reiterate:
There's no doubt that tons of Christians express hate towards homosexuals, which is tragic needs to change, very soon. But in this specific instance, unless I missed something, Broussard simply stated that in his opinion, it is a sin. He also mentioned heterosexuals that have sex outside of wedlock and lumped them in the same bucket.
Stating that you believe something is wrong is NOT the same as being hateful. It can be accompanied with hate, and often is, but is not always.
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Jthig, your comments here and elsewhere on this subject are pretty moderate, and while I sincerely appreciate that, I think you're falling into the trap of 'false equivalence'. That's not a dead horse-argument you're beating, it's more of a jackass's argument, and frankly you seem a lot more intelligent than that. I'm going to disagree that Broussard's comments don't reveal underlying bigotry. Here's why.
If someone says to you: "I think it's a sin for people of different races to get married.", or "I believe it goes against biblical teaching for a woman to work outside the home, or for a woman to have a position of authority over a man.", do you fail to understand what they're saying and where they're coming from? Do you reserve judgment about such a person's racial bigotry or religious sexism, and assume that they have a reasoned basis for their views, even if they don't go on to explain that basis to you?
I can't believe that you would. In fact, I think that most people, whether they agree with such views or not, understand immediately what the person saying such things thinks about matters of race and gender equality. And I also think that most people today would regard such views as racially bigoted and sexually chauvinistic, whether the speaker grounds the views in scripture or not.
Same with Broussard's comments. True, he didn't equate homosexuality with pedophilia, bestiality or polygamy as bigots of old would have (and as many still do). He has moderated his views for public consumption such that he only equates homosexuality with the lighter, milder 'sins' of sex outside marriage, adultery, and whatever he understands 'fornication' to mean. (According to some fundamentalists, he could've added the sins of contraception and masturbation, but he might've been laughed off the public stage.) But he still couches the rationale for his views as being from a religious perspective, by saying "As a Christian....", and by condemning homosexuality as "unrepentant sin" and "living in open rebellion to God". He doesn't nuance his opinion as to whether it was based on Old Testament Levitical law, or New Testament (just to make things interesting), but it doesn't matter--either way, resorting to religious texts as a justification for condemning social behavior just makes the bigotry religiously-grounded bigotry. And as we all know, that's the most traditional kind. (FYI: I imagine you know this already, but the origin of the term 'bigot' in 16th-century France referred to people who held particularly sanctimonious
religious views, and who observed them hypocritically; thus bigotry, religion and hypocrisy have long been intimately intertwined in a kind of vile three-way.)
So you say, "Okay, big deal. He made an ill-advised, ill-timed comment. You say it's bigotry, I say it's not. No harm, no foul. We'll just have to agree to disagree." And to a point, I can agree. In the bigger scheme of things, Broussard's comments probably only added to the list of slurs and hateful comments that closeted gay teens endure every day, and because they came from a distance, the sting was probably minimal, or at least one among many for the day. Broussard's comments, while repugnant, probably don't shift the public debate in anti-gay bigots' favor. His comments only resonated with the shrinking audience of anti-gay fundamentalist evangelical bigots, and he looked like such an utter fool, that in the big picture he probably turned off more neutral people. ESPN apologizes (sort of) and Broussard tries to sidestep the blowback by fake-apologizing (sort of).
But as you point out, Jthig, public condemnations of homosexuality as 'sin', 'evil' and 'disordered' DO have consequences, sometimes violent, sometimes fatal. In the recent marriage equality debate in France, the archbishop of Paris observed that extending marriage rights to homosexuals would be how "..a violent society develops...". About the same time, the leader of the main political group opposing the impending marriage equality legislation threatened French President Hollande by saying: "Hollande wants blood, and he will get it." Bullets and gunpowder were mailed to some French legislators, and shortly thereafter there occurred in France a spate of extremely violent gay bashings in which gay men were attacked, and had their faces beaten into bloody pulp while having anti-gay slurs shouted at them. An as of Friday, the Archbishop of San Francisco (and convicted drunk driver) Salvatore Cordileone published a response to passage of marriage equality in Rhode Island in which he asserted that secular law can mean nothing over church tradition and teaching. A religious leader stacks the kindling, a political extremist pours the gas, and thugs on the street light the match.
Even worse, are the involvements of Western anti-gay fundamentalist groups in countries like Uganda and Ethiopia, who go and stir up hatred against gays and lesbians, and help anti-gay politicians in these countries craft legislation criminalizing homosexuality (not homosexual acts, homosexual EXISTENCE), punishable by death. And this is not just something from years back, it's ongoing, and going on today.
And it makes you wonder, whether some of the proud and unabashed bigots posting here (Dude?) would vote for such legislation in their state, or in the United States, if they thought they could get by with it, if they thought they had the support for it. Is the only thing holding people like this back broader public support? Will they just resort to individual acts of violence against individual gays or lesbians instead? I'm not that concerned about a guy like Dude. He sounds like he's too old to be very dangerous, even if he wanted to. But what about his impressionable teen-aged son(s), with still-developing impulse control? What about the kids he indoctrinates in Sunday School, or in his Boy Scout troop, or the ones he coaches on a youth basketball team? How will the teen-aged kids react to the derogatory slurs that you can be sure he throws around in their presence? Will it make them think it's okay to bully that gay kid at school? Or if they get a little alcohol in them when they're older, will they go beat up a gay man somewhere? Just for kicks?
Words matter. Just dressing up your bigoted views to make them more respectable for public airing doesn't obviate the underlying bigotry. And bigotry (or even just the dissemination of negative attitudes towards gays and lesbians, if that's what you want to call it) breeds hate. Hate corrodes, sometimes slowly, sometimes explosively. I can't imagine that a truly decent person of whatever faith would want to stand by while words like 'sin' and 'evil' and 'disordered' get rained down on gay teens, or on impressionable young teens who might grow up to harm them.