I came across this post a few days ago on Facebook:
When a person chooses hate, it is difficult to turn around
and choose not to hate. Hate is not always the label they would choose for the
emotion they put out. Usually, it is more as if they feel that they are right,
no matter what.
OK. Basically I agree with that. But this particular
statement is more than just a bit ironic. Here’s some background.
Several months ago, ahead of the November election, I posted
my ballot recommendations, as I usually do. Unlike most of my posts, these
occasional ones are meant for local/state friends that are looking at the same
ballot I am and want more information before they vote. In this post I included
a short section about the Houston mayoral race. I’m just outside the city of
Houston, so I didn’t delve into the race, but I did point out some basic
information:
photo from David Bro/Zuma Press/Newscom,found here |
The mayor, as well as city council races are non-partisan. That
is, the candidates don’t run from a party, with a primary putting up a chosen
candidate. The candidates themselves, however, generally have a strong party
affiliation. And Houston hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1938[i]….
Then we got Mayor Anise Parker, who ran as a businesswoman.
She sounded sensible. You’re supposed to vote for the best person. I don’t vote
in Houston city elections, but she seemed reasonable, and I wasn’t against her.
As soon as she was elected, the news announced how remarkable it was that a
lesbian had been elected.
During her campaign her sexual orientation had not been an
issue. Suddenly it was. And she conducted her administration as an activist for
homosexuality. HERO (the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance), Prop 1 on the city
ballot, is an example—which you must vote AGAINST if you're in Houston; it adds
no equal rights protections to anyone, but does take away the right to believe
women and children are put at risk if men are allowed in their bathrooms. If
you followed that issue, you know Mayor Parker threw out tens of thousands of
signatures intended to put it on the ballot, rather than just going along with
her. And she subpoenaed pastors for their sermons and communications to see if
they said anything about LGBT issues. She was legally slapped down for that.
So now, maybe it’s time to forget about who appears to be the
best person, cross off everyone that is a Democrat, a liberal, or a progressive
(or any other code word). And from whomever is left, find the best conservative
and vote for that person.
That commentary was a trigger. Was I wrong to say we shouldn’t
vote for that sort of leadership? The writer of the anti-hate words I quoted
above thinks so. Disapproval came as a late-night Facebook attack, even though
he had known me since my teenage years—and had not that long ago told me I was
one of the kindest, sweetest people he remembered from high school. Suddenly I
was one of the most hateful people he’d ever encountered. “So much hate,” and “homophobia,”
and “How is this not defending hate?”
What had I done to deserve that epithet? Only write the above
portion of a story on local politics—which I had posted where he could go read
them, but I had not invited him to do so.
Family and friends messaged me and said to block the jerk
(worse word was used). I disengaged, went to bed, and didn’t block him until I
saw that he had gone on through hours of the night, and still tried to bait me the
afternoon of the next day.
Because I’m hateful? For not approving of the former mayor
of Houston’s illegal attack on local churches and anyone who disagreed with
her?
A reasonable person would see that, in actual fact, I didn’t
say anything anti-gay or hateful; I noted that the former mayor was elected
even though she was a lesbian, because people didn’t care about that if she was
going to be a good mayor. But she wasn’t a good mayor. And she betrayed the
people who voted for her by using her platform as mayor to favor a segment of
the population and attacking people who disagreed.
Writers get this kind of attack. Why bother about this one?
Only to illustrate about the definition of hate that is being forced on
reasonable people. Truth and people who speak truth are attacked louder and
louder as haters.
Matt Walsh summed up the situation earlier this week:
But it’s one thing to fail in your pursuit of holiness, and
it’s another to call holiness ”hateful.” It’s one thing to sin, it’s another to
say that sinning is not sinful. It’s one thing to disobey the Commandments,
it’s another to categorically reject the authority of the Commandments. It’s
one thing to crawl back to God and beg for forgiveness, it’s another to stand
there and say you don’t need forgiveness because God was wrong when he called
your sin a sin. It’s one thing to follow Christian teachings imperfectly, it’s
another to loudly denounce them. It’s one thing to fall short of the faith,
it’s another to change the faith to suit you.
He was speaking at Catholic University on religious liberty.
One would think that would be a safe place to speak on such a topic. But, it’s
a university, not the safest place for free speech these days, maybe especially
religious free speech. Walsh talks about the Q&A afterward:
Nobody shouted or heckled during my speech, which was nice,
but the Q&A afterwards was mostly dominated by one student after another
fishing for applause by calmly explaining why I’m a mean, hateful bigot, and so
forth. I argued with as many of them as I could before they kicked us out of
the room, then I stood in the hallway and argued for another hour.
Most of the kids offended by my arguments and my very
presence were upset that I don’t believe in “marriage equality.” Some said they
agreed with me but believe my approach is hateful. The word hate was tossed
around quite a bit. My words are hateful, my ideas are hateful, my beliefs are
hateful. Everything is hateful. Except for a crowd of people pointing at me and
calling me hateful. They’re not hateful, remember. Just me.
Yes, there’s the irony.
There’s been a lot of that hate word in the news lately. North
Carolina’s HB2 bill was similar to Houston’s anti-HERO fight. The bill intended
to keep things the way they had been since about the time public restrooms were
invented, a month after the Charlotte City Council imposed transgendered bathrooms on people there.
In Washington State female victims of sexual abuse are
speaking out against a transgender bathroom policy there. They’re getting
called hateful, but the people who disregard their realistic fears are
supposedly the caring, open-minded, tolerant ones.
Are their fears realistic? These incidents lead to a yes:
·
A sexual predator in Toronto was
jailed after claiming to be “transgender” as a ruse to assault women in a
shelter.
·
In southern California, a perpetrator
dressed as a women, spent two hours in a women’s restroom to video women going
to the bathroom before being caught.
·
A man who had victimized grade school girls was
caught in a women’s changing room where girls were changing into swim suits. He
was caught in similar acts two years later.
·
A man put on a bra and wig to spy on women in a
community college women’s bathroom. This was not his first voyeurism incident.
·
A self-identified transgender boy dressed as a
girl, and insisted on accommodations by the school district, including using
the girls’ locker room.
·
A 24-year-old transgender male youth minister is
guilty of dozens of counts of sexual abuse of a 9-year-old girl.
·
A man was arrested for multiple counts of
indecent exposure was dressed as a woman in the women’s section of a Walmart.
·
A prisoner guilty of second-degree murder and
beating up women decided he was a woman during his 28-year sentence and has
been paroled.
·
A 6’3” 280-lb. martial arts expert decided he
was transgender. A woman questioned his presence in a women’s bathroom and he
knocked out five of her teeth.
·
A man was caught twice on voyeurism charges in a
women’s bathroom of a public library.
These last eight are among many more compiled on a 23-minute video. There are plenty of examples, not for the
squeamish.
“Transgendered” individuals are an extremely small subset of
society—an estimated 3 per 1000, while women who are victims of sexual
predators in their lifetime are estimated to be about 20%, and those who feel
uncomfortable when subjected to possible voyeurism is almost universal. We
ought to be able to come up with an agreeable practice that doesn’t ignore the
concerns of half of the population and those who care about them. I believe we
had one until agenda-driven activists started imposing this unacceptable new
LGBT “right.”
The American College of Pediatricians recently called it child abuse to
submit children to gender reassignment, since 98% of gender confused boys and
88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after
naturally passing through puberty[ii].
Of adults who have gone through surgical and hormonal reassignment suffer 20
times greater rates of suicide than those who don’t undergo a chemical and/or
surgical change.[iii]
It is possible, even probable, that “transgenderism” is more
accurately a mental illness. It was put like this, by Michael Brown, in an “open letter to Bruce Springsteen,” who has decided to boycott North Carolina over the issue, while
not worrying about much greater violence to LGBT people in other parts of the
world:
First, how do you know if someone is really “transgender” or
not? Is it determined entirely by how they feel about themselves? If so, do you
think that it might be hard to make laws based entirely on how people feel? Did
you ever stop to consider that?
Second, what’s the difference between someone with “gender
dysphoria” (or, as it used to be called, “gender identity disorder”) and
someone, say, with schizophrenia or “multiple personality disorder” or some
other psychological condition? In other words, if a man is a biological and
chromosomal male but believes he is a woman, is he actually a woman, or does he
have a psychological disorder?...
Since you don’t like HB2 — indeed, your guitarist called it
an “evil virus” — what’s your plan to keep the predators out? How can we tell
the difference between a “genuine” transgender person and a sexual predator?
I like his final question to Springsteen—about the irony:
When you booked the concert in Greenboro, the laws in North
Carolina were just as they are today: In public facilities, people had to use
the bathrooms and locker rooms that corresponded to their biological sex. Why,
then, did you agree to come in the first place? Why cancel the concert when
things today are just what they were six months ago?
I suggest that the answer is a knee-jerk assumption. By
definition, they believe anyone who disagrees with their currently trendy yet ironically
illiberal political correctness couldn’t possibly have any motive for their
beliefs except hatred and bigotry. And they hate
those different believers for it; they will
not tolerate opposing beliefs or the people who hold them.
I do not accept their definition of hate.
I can tell I’m not hating. I’m calm; I’m feeling compassion
toward all sides. I’ve considered the arguments on all sides and come down
where I think God is guiding me to believe, which happens to be also where the scientific evidence is leading.
I think my belief is more compassionate all around. And when
I find old friends who believe otherwise, I don’t throw away years of positive
interactions to call them hateful sinners. Only the real haters do that.
[i]
This detail was in error. I had misread some information on Wikipedia. Later I
learned that the last Republican mayor of Houston was James Joseph McConn, from
1978 to 1982. My basic point still holds; the city has rarely had a Republican
(even a moderate Republican) mayor in its long history.
[ii] American
Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
Fifth Edition, Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013 (451-459).
See page 455 re: rates of persistence of gender dysphoria.
[iii] Dhejne,
C, et.al. “Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex
Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden.” PLoS ONE, 2011; 6(2).
Affiliation: Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Division of Psychiatry,
Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. Accessed 3.20.16 from http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885.
The 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted in their lifetime comes from a faulty reading of the results of one study. The study was done by survey and none of the questions ever asked if the women felt they had been sexually assaulted. The people who published the study have spoken out against the oft quoted 1 in 5 statistic, but it is still pervasive. Other studies put the percentage at between 0.5% and 4.0% which is still a lot, but nowhere close to 1 in 5. Now on to the rest of my comments.
ReplyDeleteI have noticed that people don't understand that the 1st amendment in the bill of rights is to protect offensive or unpopular speech. If you read it and think for a minute, inoffensive, popular speech has no need for any protection. They immediately attack anyone who has an opinion different from their own and call for it to be banned, which shows their clear contempt for the constitution and hatred of intellectual diversity.
Schools are some of the worst offenders of blocking intellectual diversity. Conservatives who make it through college have usually had their beliefs questioned and attacked for 16 years, liberals have possibly never heard a dissenting opinion. Which of these groups has likely checked to see if their argument is sound?
I knew the on-campus data for sexual assault was known to be flawed. And the lifetime measure used to be 1 in 4, so I thought maybe they were more accurate now. But I can't say I'm surprised if it's still off. Still, I think the point holds. And you're right about the first amendment. Good point.
ReplyDelete