Quote:
Originally Posted by apretty
critical thinking, at least that was my read.
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Yes, apretty, critical thinking is *precisely* what I'm advocating for.
I am, pretty much, a free speech fundamentalist. Outside of advocating immediate violent action (we hate group X, we have bats and knives, they don't, there's a group of them over there let's go get 'em!) and child pornography I'm pretty content to let anyone say, print, write, speak, sing, publish, broadcast or post any damn thing the spirit moves them to do. That does NOT, however, mean that I have to give credence to that idea or treat it as if, on its face, it must be true or valid or worthwhile just because someone else believes that to be the case.
Again, taking segregation and anti-miscegenation as my examples. Firstly, I have to say that one thing I find, ironic, is that people who will reflexively praise Martin Luther King, Jr. for his vision don't understand something very core about his vision (or the vision of my parents). It is this (and it is my vision as well): black people are human beings and deserving of the full package of rights, responsibilities, duties and obligations of any citizen. No matter how many people might say that I am not, I am not obliged to give those ideas any kind of quarter. Just because person X thinks that the only reason I am where I am is because I'm an affirmative action hire who is unqualified for their job does not mean that I, at any point, need to sit down and think "maybe their right". I see nothing in Martin Luther King's speeches that ever led me to believe that he thought that Bull Connor or George Wallace might have a point and that he thought SNCC or any other civil rights group should perhaps consider that maybe segregation and anti-miscegenation was correct and best for all parties concerned. King's vision was uncompromising on that point. Today many would call King closed-minded because he wasn't willing to ever grant "well, maybe Buckley is right when he writes that blacks shouldn't have the vote". I don't call that closed-minded, I call it having clarity of vision and the courage of his convictions.
I am really advocating three things--clarity of vision and communication, courage of our conviction, and critical thinking.
I am not interested in pretending that Fred Phelps might just have a point that queers are hell bound. So I won't.
I am not interested in pretending that the ideas that queers are more likely to be child molesters and that this myth (which is wrong) is as valid a point of view as the reality that queers are no more likely to abuse children then anyone else in the population. So I won't.
I am SO convinced that I am a full human being--capable of both good and evil, kindness and malice, member of a species that is, at once, the most beautiful and the ugliest creature on this planet--that I will not give credence to any ideology that states otherwise.
Lastly, I think that ideas are important. If ideas don't matter then it really shouldn't concern us if good ideas are drowned out by bad ideas. We needn't go to the trouble of taking ideas seriously if they don't matter. This idea that having contradictory ideas out there seems, to me, to be a way of not taking ideas seriously. If Fred Phelps' ideas don't matter then what do I care what he says as long as he isn't saying it to me? Who cares how many people listen to Phelps and believes what he says, his ideas don't matter anyway and they're just his opinion to boot. If, on the other hand, ideas matter, if they impact what happens in the real world then we should take ideas seriously and put some kind of care into both choosing ideas and developing criteria upon which to choose them.
So let me ask everyone here these questions:
Do you think that a world in which it is commonly believed that queer people are a threat to children is the same as one in which queer people are not believed to be a threat?
Do you think that a country in which Hispanics are thought to illegal aliens invading 'our' country is the same kind of country in which Hispanics aren't thought of in that manner?
If you don't believe they are equivalent then you have *some* kind of criteria for telling the difference between a bad idea and a good idea. If you do believe that they are the same then why should any person, any community, any nation choose one set of ideas over the other set?