Category: hate

0 If you’re surprised, then you haven’t been paying attention

March 16, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · culture · hate · liberalism · racism

We often like to delude ourselves into thinking that we have, as a society, somehow transcended racial barriers. That through sheer will-power and positive liberal vibes, we’ve managed somehow to craft the first society in the history of the world where racism is a thing of the past. Even those who reject my view of racism will point to the fact that at least we don’t see black men getting beat up for the crime of being black, right?

Right?

The people targeted in assaults in February by four men alleged to be white supremacists say the attacks were provoked by race. “I couldn’t believe something like this could happen,” one of the victims, who was born in Saudi Arabia and raised in Canada, said Wednesday. “I was upset and angry.”

The young man, who CBC has agreed not to name, was having a cigarette on the sidewalk outside a Whyte Avenue bar early on Feb. 13 when a friend was bumped by one of a group of men. “My friend looked back and he was like ‘Hey, excuse me,’ and the guy just ran towards him … I put out my hand so I would just stop them and he just punched me,” he said.

I cannot be clear enough about this point. When I say that we are all racist, I do not mean that we are all capable of doing something like this. I do not wish to imply that I look at my fellow citizens with fear and suspicion that, given the opportunity, they would assault me for being black. The very idea is nonsense – my race probably means more to my black friends than it does to my friends from other racial groups. I’d go so far as to say that 99.9% of Canadians would recoil from the idea of perpetrating physical violence against people based on their racial background. White supremacists of this type represent a vanishingly small proportion of the overall population, and can be looked upon as fringe elements that do not reflect the attitudes of the general public.

In fact, I’d imagine that even among the white supremacist community, these men are seen as outliers. They claim to be members of a white supremacist group known as Blood and Honour (link totally NSFW, and probably not safe for eyes either – bright red background), which is somewhat dubious given that B&H isn’t really known for violence. However, it’s not particularly relevant which particular supremacist group these particular assailants belong to – the point is that even among white supremacists they are a minority. White supremacists tend to exist in largely rural areas, where their extreme form of race-based hatred is considered a minority opinion.

However, a more general kind of race hatred does tend to exist in greater volume in many rural communities – a generalized intolerance and feeling that non-white people are somehow the “other” that deserves special scrutiny and attention. This is not because people who live in rural communities are bad people; I was a child in a racially-monolithic rural community, and the people there were some of the warmest, friendliest and most welcoming people I’ve ever met. All the same, my “otherness” was palpable from a very young age. The attitude within these rural communities is a concentrated version of a generalized feeling of racial normalcy that exists as a popular myth in the broader culture that says that America was founded by white people, for white people, and PoCs are here by the magnanimity of their white brethren (so don’t forget to genuflect).

So here’s the thing: each one of the subcultures I’ve mentioned here gain support and succor from the larger group they exist in. While most members of Blood and Honour would likely repudiate the violence perpetrated in their name, they would likely agree with everything else the attackers stand for. While most rural people disagree with the members of Blood and Honour, they tend to tolerate the non-violent race bigotry of their neighbours. The general sense of mistrust and non-citation-supported anti-immigrant sentiment prevalent in the rural communities gestates in the larger sea of the white Canada myth. Each level of the pyramid is supported by a larger group in an act that diffuses responsibility, and makes the act of a handful of extremists seem to come out of nowhere.

Of course those of us who have been paying attention know better than to waste our time with arch-liberal hand wringing about how this could happen in our “post racial” utopia. We know that we all bear responsibility for at least a little piece of what happened in Edmonton, and by challenging the larger societal lies we can make the acts of violence even more unlikely.

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3 Well THAT didn’t take long…

March 15, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · hate · religion · secularism

*Sigh*

It’s easy to get depressed when you hear stuff like this:

At least 13 people have been killed and around 100 others injured in religious clashes with Muslims in the Egyptian capital Cairo. The deaths on Tuesday occurred in the working-class district of Moqattam after at least 1,000 Copts gathered to protest the burning of a church last week. It was the second burst of sectarian fighting in as many days and the latest in a string of violent protests over a variety of topics as simmering unrest continues nearly a month after mass protests led to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.

Just weeks after Copts surrounded praying Muslims to prevent them from being attacked by pro-Mubarak thugs, and Muslims reciprocated with protection of their own, it seems as though the statute of limitations has been reached on religious tolerance.

The protest outside Cairo’s radio and television building also came a day after at least 2,000 Copts demanded the re-building of the torched church, and that those responsible be brought to justice. The Shahedain [Two Martyrs] church, in the Helwan provincial city of Sol, was set ablaze on Friday after clashes between Copts and Muslims left at least two people dead. The violence was triggered by a feud between two families, which disapproved of a romantic relationship between a Christian man and a Muslim woman in Sol.

Is it only religion that does this? I’m inclined to say ‘no’ – families have come to blows over tribal affiliation, race, politics, and even simply historical familial animosity. It seems that in this case, religion is just a place-holder for the things that have divided groups of people since time immemorial. There have always been oppressed minority groups on the receiving end of systematic discrimination by a majority with an overinflated sense of entitlement, and there will always be even if religion were to suddenly evaporate.

However, and this is important, if you are a religious person who fears the creeping advance of secularism, your fears are misplaced. It is not the atheists who torch churches, who start riots, who stage demonstrations demanding that people’s civil rights be taken away. Just like you are far more likely to be robbed by a white corporate banker than a black gang-banger (more on that on Friday), you are far more likely to experience violence and suppression of your civil rights by your coreligionists than you are by us non-believers. However, just like the bankers/bangers, we fear the “other” more than we fear the party that is actually more likely to hurt us.

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5 Movie Friday: The American religion

March 11, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · conservativism · crapitalism · forces of stupid · hate · politics · racism

Hate is not a word I like to throw around lightly. Talking about ‘hatred’ for a group of people in the sense of “hate speech” or “hate crimes” somewhat diffuses individual responsibility, and is a reasonable descriptor; however, I am loath to say that a person is deserving of hate. I am irritated by creationists. I disagree with and oppose the beliefs of conservatives. I dislike certain individuals, sometimes strongly, but I would rarely go so far as to say that I hate anyone.

I hate the people in this video:

It’s hard not to see these people as a pack of braying dogs, mouth foaming as they corner innocent prey. These are people who have been led so blindly astray by the malicious lie of “American exceptionalism” and a conservative revisionist history (one in where the United States is a Christian, rather than a secular country), that they feel justified in persecuting people based on their personal beliefs. The chant of “go back home” simply reveals their deep-seated racism, which has been allowed to slip its leash because of rampant anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment that equates Islam with terrorism.

I am sure that those holding the reins of the Tea Party (or perhaps the leashes is a more apt metaphor in this case) will tut-tut and say what a shame it is that certain individuals do hateful things, but that people are just scared and you have to understand their fear. The politicians you hear speaking in this video are the authors of that fear, using it to whip up unthinking support for a political agenda that will leave most of their followers worse off than they are now. It’s straight out of Orwell – create a stereotyped enemy, sow seeds of dissent and hatred against that enemy, and then quietly screw the masses while they are distracted in their hatred.

This is the ugliest side of mankind, and it will persist as long as those at the top can continue to galvanize those on the bottom in hatred against “the other”.

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0 U.S. shows its hypocrisy over free speech

March 10, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · civil rights · crapitalism · free speech · hate · law · news · politics

Sadly, with this whole free speech thing, sometimes this is what it looks like when your side wins:

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a grieving father’s pain over mocking protests at his Marine son’s funeral must yield to First Amendment protections for free speech. All but one justice sided with a fundamentalist church that has stirred outrage with raucous demonstrations contending God is punishing the military for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality. The 8-1 decision in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., was the latest in a line of court rulings that, as Chief Justice John Roberts said in his opinion for the court, protects “even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

Yeah… fuck. Possibly the worst scum of the earth, Fred Phelps, has been granted a landslide license from the Supreme Court of the United States to picket military and private funerals, spreading his ludicrous doctrine. In the name of free speech, he’s allowed to cause widespread suffering to grieving families who have done nothing to deserve such hateful condemnation from a group of people they’ve never met.

I’ve never been less happy to win.

Nate Phelps, estranged son of Fred Phelps and director of Centre For Inquiry’s Calgary branch is, understandably, opposed to this ruling:

It has been my contention all along that protesting at a funeral is unconscionable. For the Court to give greater consideration to Free Speech, at the expense of a citizen’s right to bury a loved one in peace, is a dangerous travesty of justice… If ever there was a just reason to limit the time and place that a person can exercise their First Amendment right to free speech, this would be it.

I admire Nate a great deal, and his journey away from his family cannot have been an easy one. Forever being known as the son of that crazy hate preacher must be incredibly tiresome. It is therefore with some trepidation that I must disagree with him in principle. First of all, there is no law in the national constitution or any state constitution that grants an explicit right to bury a loved one in peace. To be sure, privacy isn’t a guaranteed or delineated right in the US Constitution either, so there is an argument that can be made over explicit and implicit rights. However, an implicit right cannot trump an explicit one, and the right of free speech is an explicit one. While it is certainly not a good thing to picket funerals, the rule of law dictates that we must prioritize rights that are codified over those that we wish were codified.

Secondly, there are far better reasons to curtail the right of free expression. From the government’s perspective, vibrant and wholesale protestation of the actions of government officials is dangerous. It could in fact be dangerous to the safety of citizens to have certain ideas made public or encouraged openly. Curtailing that kind of free speech would be far more justified than telling a tiny group of zealots that they’re not allowed to wave ugly signs at a funeral. However, the government is specifically enjoined from banning such demonstrations of lawful speech, and so by the literal interpretation of the law, the WBC slides in.

That being said, since the United States government is more than happy to curtail even legitimate free speech, it seems incredibly hypocritical of them to give the WBC a pass. Apparently it doesn’t violate the constitution to lock political protesters into fenced-off areas, but when those protesters are only harassing innocent civilians, it’s an 8-1 matter for the SCOTUS? Not to mention that since the content of the protests are personal in nature, a legitimate argument could be made that these protests are tantamount to criminal harassment, which is against the law. Not to mention the fact that even if they are not harassment, they are certainly disturbing the peace (another crime). It seems as though these protests can be moved on other legal grounds.

But of course, it is definitely too much to expect consistency from the United States. Free speech is a fundamental right! Well, unless it’s speech we don’t like:

The US army has filed 22 new charges against the soldier accused of leaking thousands of classified documents published by the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks. Bradley Manning is facing life in prison if found guilty to the charges which include aiding the enemy. Manning, 23, had previously faced a host of charges including downloading and transmitting to an unauthorised person a classified video of a 2007 helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in Iraq, including two Reuters employees.

I am well aware that Private Manning has broken military law and is subject to prosecution as a result. However, his ongoing imprisonment and his treatment as a hostile combatant is both cruel and unusual (there’s that pesky constitution again!). Considering that “the enemy” hasn’t been defined, and that Private Manning didn’t release the information to any specific foreign government or terrorist group, the charge of “aiding the enemy” is as ridiculous as it is transparently a ploy to torture someone who caught the US government with its pants down.

While politics, particularly (it seems) in the United States, is a breeding ground for hypocrisy, this kind of double-speak is particularly egregious. Free speech is important to uphold for hate groups who persecute grieving families, but speak against the government and your rights under the constitution are shredded. Land of the free and home of the brave indeed…

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0 Well that’s good to know…

March 9, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Catholic church · crapitalism · critical thinking · good news · hate

Hey Jews! Good news for you guys? Remember how generations of Catholic leaders said that you were collectively responsible for a murder that supposedly happened 2000 years ago? Pope Ratzinger is letting y’all off the hook:

A new book by Pope Benedict XVI offers a sweeping exoneration of the Jewish people for the death of Jesus Christ, tackling one of the most controversial issues in Christianity. Wednesday, Benedict uses a biblical and theological analysis to explain why it is not true that the Jewish people as a whole were responsible for Jesus’ death. Interpretations to the contrary have been used for centuries to justify the persecution of Jews

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no friend to the current pope, but I will always give credit where credit is due. First of all, it should be very clear that this is not a new pronouncement from the current administration that reverses Church policy. Jews were let off the hook for the murder of Jesus many years ago, and Church doctrine has been clear about that fact. Reminding Catholics of this fact is a positive step, and hopefully will help stem the tide of anti-Jewish sentiment around the world, at least from Catholics. There is nothing negative to be said about this announcement, which is simply an excerpt of a much longer work by the pope.

Having said all that, it is still a stupid thing to have to say. A group of people cannot be collectively responsible for the actions of a few of their ancestors. The very idea is ludicrous. First of all, there are strong reasons to doubt that the account of Jesus’ trial and execution is anywhere near accurate, or that Jesus as a single person even existed at all. Second, even granting the accuracy of the collective account in the New Testament, some of the Jews in the crowd were trying to secure Jesus’ freedom, a good many of them knew nothing about the case at all, and still thousandsfold more weren’t anywhere near Jerusalem at the time and couldn’t have done anything about it even if they wanted to. Third, even if they were responsible, Jesus’ death was part of the original plan of God, so their involvement was pre-ordained. Fourth and perhaps most importantly, the decisions of a group of people do not carry forward to their offspring. It is only the most profoundly evil mind that could possibly punish a child for the sins of its forebears (yes, apparently that is how the word is spelled).

I should, at this moment, attempt to stem the tide of “aha!” accusations from those who think that the above paragraph also applies to the issue of reparations, affirmative action, or white privilege. Reparations were a promise made on behalf of the Union government, which still exists as the United States government – promises made should be kept. Affirmative action is not punishing white people for the sins of their forebears, and I have explained in depth why this is so. White privilege refers to the fact that children of white parents start their lives with a set of assumptions that benefit them (or at least do not count against them) from day one, which means that they continue to benefit from the actions of their ancestors – Jews are afforded no such benefit, and are usually detrimentally treated for their religious/cultural affiliation (except within their own in-group, obviously).

It is perhaps not unique to religion, this punishing of children for things that their parents did, but it is certainly a hallmark of religious teaching. The doctrine of original sin, for example, is based on the slight disobedience of a fictional ancestor, and punishment is meted out against not only the species supposedly involved in the transgression, but against all other species as well. The Old Testament is replete with examples of innocents being punished for the actions of others. The Qu’ran treats nonbelief with torture – nonbelief which is surely the fault of whatever religious instruction one receives (unwittingly) as a child. Hinduism states that entire families are forever cursed to live as subservient to others based on nothing more than ancestry. The idea that guilt is a heritable trait is certainly one that, if it does not find its authorship there, certainly finds succor and support from theology.

The pope, by declaring that each individual Jewish person in the world is not responsible for the torture and murder of a person who a) may never have existed, b) even if he was, did not experience universal persecution at the hands of Jewish people, c) even if he did, whose persecution and execution were part of a divine plan… by declaring that this is not the fault of their two millennia distant descendants, the pope has basically come to the same realization that a normal and non-god-blinded person would have reached in about 5 minutes of reflection (if they were distracted). To treat this announcement as some kind of mercy or generous gesture is to grant license to the series of fallacies that the idea of deferred transgenerational responsibility requires to carry any force, not to mention the deep and abiding evil that is inherent in the idea of punishing someone for what someone else has done.

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2 Movie Friday: Proposition 8 – The Musical

March 4, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · bmusic · funny · hate · LGBT · movie

Sometimes hypocrisy goes best when set to a brilliant Broadway score:

Alternative ending: Jesus fails to pop into existence because he’s a fictional character. Batman appears instead.

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0 Shawna Forde sentenced to die

March 2, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · hate · law · news

I’ve been holding this one in my pocket for a while, hoping to have something to connect it to. However, nothing has come up and I don’t want to let it go uncommented:

An anti-immigration activist has been sentenced to death for the 2009 murder of a nine year-old-girl and her father. Shawna Forde, 43, organised a break-in at the Arizona home of Raul Flores apparently to fund her group, which campaigns against illegal immigration. But the burglary went wrong and 29-year-old Mr Flores was shot dead along with his daughter Brisenia.

I don’t like the BBC’s use of the word “activist” in this context. Shawna Forde is a terrorist who used violence and intimidation as tools to advance her political agenda. Her group, Minutemen American Defense should not be confused with The Minutemen, which is a non-violent group (one that I still think is misguided, but nonetheless non-violent) of volunteers that patrols the US/Mexican border looking for illegal immigrants. Shawna Forde was kicked out of the Minutemen for being too insane.

Shawna Forde and two other people broke into the Flores home looking for drugs that they could sell to fund their organization. They shot the inhabitants of the home, killing two and wounding one. One of those who died was 9 year-old Brisenia Flores. Less of a fuss was kicked up over this murder than the equally-tragic shooting death of Christina Taylor Green at the hands of Jared Loughner in January, a fact that may have a number of explanations of which race is undoubtedly one.

Even for a hateful monster like Shawna Forde, I cannot condone the death penalty. Not only is it not an effective deterrent for further crimes, it is far more expensive than simply jailing her for life. While it may be just to kill someone who kills another, there is no value to such a murder except removing Shawna Forde from society. It is likely to turn her into a martyr, as is evinced by her fan page. Maybe if they just flew her into the middle of the Mojave and left her out there without any supplies…

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3 Religious chicken and homophobic egg

February 23, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · bmusic · culture · hate · LGBT · religion

The three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) get the bulk of the attention in North American media. This is partially due to their immense familiarity and power in the world, partially due to number of believers in North America, and partially due to the fact that they stem from a common root. As a result, the way we think of religion as a concept tends to be coloured by those particular traditions. It is important to note that besides these three, their bizarre offshots (which would include Mormonism, Baha’i, Jehova’s Witnesses, and others), and the so-called “Eastern” religions (chiefly Hinduism and Buddhism), there are a number of religions that are seemingly created uniquely, or at least which weave together a number of other traditions into a new narrative.

Religions like these allow us to examine the way in which humans are able to craft new creation mythologies and rites of worship, and give us a clue into how the older traditions may have gotten their start. Aside from Scientology, which gained its notoriety by systematically making bizarre and grandiose claims while defrauding its adherents of their lives and human rights (which is, I realize, a fair cop for pretty much any religion) and Vodun, which has been mischaracterized and caricatured by Christians into something far more bizarre than anything anyone actually practices, this phenomenon of a completely new religion is probably no better and popularly exemplified than it is by Rastafari*.

Rastafari is a somewhat bizarre patchwork of beliefs, stitching together Christianity, pre-Christian Judaism, African mysticism, post-slavery Afrocentric thought, and the worship of a former political leader in Ethiopia. As a general movement it is mostly harmless, as the main underlying philosophy is an existential exploration of man’s relationship with the divine and with other human beings, often fueled by smoking marijuana. It is, interestingly, difficult to divorce Rastafari from its roots deep within post-slavery Jamaican culture. As such, it is hard to tell where Rastafari ends and Jamaican culture begins, which makes this issue far more interesting:

On November 27^th, 2010, protesters in Sacramento, CA gathered outside musical artist Capleton’s reggae-dancehall concert to oppose the violent gay-bashing ideas his lyrics promote. This wasn’t the first protest against reggae artists calling for violent homophobic acts in their music. Other reggae artists criticized and boycotted over the last decade for anti-homosexual lyrics include Beenie Man, Buju Banton, Sizzla, Elephant Man, T.O.K., Bounty Killa and Vybz Kartel.

A major leader in the campaign against the homophobia found in dancehall music (the reggae spinoff popular in United States and western Europe) is Stop Murder Music, who eventually initiated the “Reggae Compassionate Act”. This contract requires artists who sign it to preclude all homophobic sentiment from their future music and to vow against further reproductions of prior songs which promoted intolerance or killing of gay individuals—thus ensuring that their music will no longer be subject to boycott. The original problem that lingers past these artist’s vows of free-but-destructive-speech abstinence, however, is the defense originally used to justify the lyrics: Homophobia is a cultural, even religious value.

One of the knotty problems when considering the intersection between religion and homophobia (and to anyone who wants to claim that “homophobia” just means “fear of gay people” and therefore doesn’t apply to their particular gay-bashing agenda, please take your pedantry and shove it somewhere uncomfortable – adults are talking) is that there is a real chicken-egg conundrum to resolve. Are people homophobic because their religion instructs them to be so, or does a homophobic society spawn a homophobic religion?

Having been to the Caribbean a handful of times, and having half of my family members being of Caribbean extract, I can claim a bit of familiarity with the culture. As with any group of people among whom machismo and “manliness” is considered a high virtue, homophobia is endemic. After all, what greater abdication of the rightful role of a man could there be than mincing around like a goddamn fairy? Add to this male-centred mentality the extreme anti-gay sentiment of colonial Britain and you have a culture that is richly steeped in the hatred and persecution of gay men (and it is predominantly men – Caribbean lesbians seem to by and large escape the kind of hatred they experience in places like South Africa and the Congo).

It is mostly inevitable that a religion that comes from such a background is going to have homophobic elements. I say mostly inevitable because, by a strict interpretation of Rastafari, there’s really no doctrinal reason why homosexuality is wrong – to get there, one must invoke the Old and New Testaments. Additionally, considering that the reggae prophets of Rastafari (Desmond Decker, Peter Tosh, Bob Marley) chose to spend their time concerned with uplifting the human spirit and avoiding hatred, the focus of contemporary reggae and dancehall music on gay hatred seems like the result of foreign influences rather than something that sprung through the religion itself.

As with the anti-gay movement in Uganda, Iran’s bizarre treatment of its homosexual population, and the simmering hatred of gay people (again, predominantly men) here in North America, this intrusion of homophobia into the cultural expression of Rastafari seems to be the pre-existing anti-gay sentiment of adherents being masked as a religious tenet. Of course this kind of hatred tends to be self-feeding as people come to sincerely believe that YahwAlladdha (or Jah, as the case may be) cares more about where your neighbour puts his penis than He does about you specifically inciting violence against one of His creations.

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*I must insist that people remove the term “Rastafarianism” from their vocabulary – the doctrine explicitly rejects “isms”, and even if you don’t care if they don’t think they’re an “ism”, Rastas find such classification offensive. You don’t call Jews “Heebs” simply because they are descended from ancient Hebrews – there’s no need to be unnecessarily offensive.

6 Hating gay people brings the world together

February 3, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · civil rights · crapitalism · forces of stupid · hate · LGBT · news

We tend to have a fairly blind spot for Africa in this part of the world. Above and beyond our annoying tendency to think of Africa as a single political entity (rather than a continent with 53 distinct sovereign states – there are only 49 in Europe) , we have an entirely fictitious picture of the continent as a whole. I had drinks a while back with a friend who opined to me that part of the reason Africa had such an economic problem was because it lacked the natural resources that were so abundant in North America and Europe. This is, of course, the product of thinking of Africa as a vast wasteland of desert with slim pickings that require subsistence farming by its various tribes of bushmen. That entire picture is ludicrously false – the problem is that Africans have little control over their abundant natural resources, most of which are owned by foreign multi-national corporations.

As a result of this fractured image, we tend to think of ourselves as having little in common with the African people (aside from the sort of universal things we have in common with all people everywhere). However, we can hang our hats on this little nugget: they hate gay people just as much as we do:

A Ugandan gay rights campaigner who last year sued a local newspaper which outed him as homosexual has been beaten to death, activists say. Police have confirmed the death of David Kato and say they have arrested one suspect. Uganda’s Rolling Stone newspaper published the photographs of several people it said were gay next to a headline reading “Hang them”.

Hooray, they’re just as hate-filled as we are! Of course, we should be completely unsurprised by this, as Uganda had gone from being a major international player to a haven for the most vile and disgusting attitudes in the world. There is currently a movement afoot to pass legislation that would authorize the death penalty for the “crime” of being homosexual. I watched the leader of this movement on TV a few months ago being asked why he was persecuting gay people. His response (part 1 here, and part 2 here) was very revealing for two reasons. First, he considers the international opposition to the bill to be fueled primarily by colonial interference (which is a real concern in Africa, so I can’t say I blame him). The second one is that this movement is explicitly defended on religious grounds. He claims that homosexuality is “against God” repeatedly, unashamed to wear his Christianity on his sleeve.

I’ve alluded to this before, but Christians aren’t allowed to duck responsibility for stuff like this, as much as they’d like to. This false notion of “loving the sinner but hating the sin” quickly metastasizes into outright hatred like this. I’m sure that the people who are pushing for this bill think that they’re “loving the sinner” too. The problem arises when the “sin” is an inherent component of the identity of the “sinner” – when those two things are inextricably linked, it’s impossible to actually accomplish the things that this kind of cognitive dissonance would dictate. It is for this reason that homophobes repeatedly try to case homosexuality as a choice, or some kind of disease, or something that can be “fixed” through prayer and counselling.

Things are “sins” based only on their necessary outcomes. If homosexuality necessarily results in negative outcomes, then it is absolutely a bad thing. Rape, for example, is necessarily a bad thing because it violates the autonomy and security of another human being. Paedophilia is necessarily bad because it violates the trust of a minor who lacks the ability to make mature judgments. Homosexuality is not necessarily linked to the kinds of things that anti-gay advocates thump as proof of the harm of ‘teh ghey’ – HIV, abuse, promiscuity – these things all happen regardless of sexual orientation.

It’s tragic that Mr. Kato was murdered for standing up for his human right to exist without being imprisoned or executed for being gay. We can’t pretend that the kind of virulent ideas that are promoted by anti-gay activists and “love the sinner” Christians had nothing to do with it. Pretending to do so is simply willfully remaining ignorant and pretending that the murder of gay people isn’t a big enough problem for you to care about.

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1 Why I’m not content to “leave it be”

February 3, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · civil rights · hate · LGBT · liberalism · news · sex

Go on any Youtube video that has anything to do with religion. Go ahead – I’ll wait.

Found one yet? Good. Now scroll down the comments section. I’m willing to bet money that somewhere in the first 3 pages (unless the pages are dominated by a conversation between a troll and someone patiently attempting to explain evolution or Pascal’s Wager or cosmology to said troll) there is a comment from someone saying something like the following:

“man we shood all chill wit this religion arguin shit let ppl believe wut they believe……i believe in god…..if u dont theres no judgin…..it doesnt affect me so therefore idc and dont judge me sayin that im livin a lie bcuz thats not wut i believe and wut i believe matters to me…..not opinions from u guys tryin to prove your theory…..there is no way to prove god…….but let ppl believe wut they do and chill da fuck out!!”

I’ve talked before about this kind of response and why it’s a futile one. In religious circles it’s “let people believe what they want!”; in racial circles it’s “black people need to get over it”; and in LGBT circles it’s “gay people need to stop complaining”. These kinds of comments are reminiscent of nothing more than a child whining that they’re quitting a game because the big kids are meanies. It’s the rhetorical equivalent to standing up and proudly refusing to take part in a conversation because you’re too lazy. Issues are important, and the truth is even more so. If you don’t want to be part of the conversation, that’s your business; only don’t insert yourself into it only so long as it takes to chastise everyone else for having the courage to take a stand.

Here’s the problem with everyone just “chilling da fuck out” – it assumes that the only reason people are arguing is to hear themselves talk. While I don’t doubt this happens in some circles, most of the time there is a solid reason why people are getting amped up about human rights:

Police are searching for a suspect after a homosexual U.S. man was beaten unconscious and left nearly naked in the snow after telling another man about his sexual orientation at a central B.C. hot springs. Police said the Dec. 29, 2010, incident near Nakusp, about 240 kilometres northeast of Kelowna, started when two gay men were sitting in a hot tub and were joined by a third man.

Things like this don’t happen in a vacuum. People don’t beat the bejeezus out of each other for no reason. They certainly don’t assault a man and leave him for dead (in the absence of any kind of preceding conflict) at random – this world would be a very different and far more dangerous place if that was the case. Hatred for a group of people doesn’t spring forth from the mind spontaneously – it comes from a variety of sources: upbringing, education, and the prevailing social climate.

“The beating lasted for a little bit of time, where it ended up about 50 feet away from the hot springs. The victim obviously attempted to get away, but was continually kicked and punched and pushed to the ground as he attempted to flee. “He was essentially left unconscious in the snow, in his shorts and in a wilderness environment.”

There is a large contingent of folks who, at times like these, trot out the old chestnut “all crimes are fueled by hate” or some other such nonsense. The premise of their argument is that any assault is fueled by hatred toward the other person – if you didn’t hate them why would you assault them? Of course this is fallacious reasoning that ignores the larger picture: that hate is being propagated against specific groups more than others. If we pretend otherwise, we’re simply trying to sweep the details under the rug, which allows the status quo to continue unabated. Gay and lesbian people (particularly gay men) are being physically assaulted simply because they’re gay; the only way to conclude otherwise is to stick fingers in your ears and refuse to see a pattern where one exists.

I’ve said before that I’m not an advocate of punishing hate crimes as being separate from regular crime. My reason for saying so is that the lines drawn around what kinds of groups are considered targets of “hate” seem pretty arbitrary, and laws with arbitrary definitions are notoriously easy to abuse. I have to amend my position, however. Crimes like this one don’t start and stop with the perpetrator and victim – every gay man who hears about this story is made a victim of hatred:

He said the main obstacle for the victim and his 39-year-old partner, who is from B.C.’s Lower Mainland, is the emotional turmoil they will have to overcome. “Physically, he’s fine,” Hill said of the victim. “All his wounds will heal . . . but the biggest scar he’s going to have is emotional, for both of them. You can only imagine the fear that one would have to go through to be beaten in the wilderness and left in the snow . . . disoriented and not even knowing where the hot springs were.”

Similarly, failing to recognize the abhorrent nature of the assailant’s attitude toward gay men sends a message to every homophobe out there that hatred of gay men isn’t really a problem.

Hate crime legislation isn’t enough though. It does not accomplish the goal of changing people’s minds – only punishing those whose minds are fucked up. The only way to change minds is for people to stand up and refuse to “leave it be”. In the meantime though, we can do our best to protect each other from the kind of hatred and bigotry that erodes the foundation of our civilization and propagates these kinds of attacks, and if hate crime legislation helps accomplish that goal then I can be brought around to supporting it.

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