Breaking the Spell: Rethinking queer community

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by MissTick

Morality is a difficult thing to discuss really. Personal morality is by definition a personal choice. However, the reality is that if you believe yourself to be an ethical person then your response to a situation will be you doing the right or moral thing. Therefore anyone else confronted with the same situation would invariably make the same choice. To claim to not make the rules or to define morality for anyone else is just a way of not accepting this responsibility.

If it is okay for you to cheat, lie, steal or whatever under a certain set of circumstances then it is okay for the other to do the same under the same conditions. To me the measure of morality is that it is impartial.

If it is a logical right thinking choice for you in a situation, then in the same situation it is the logical right thinking choice for other reasonable people as well. Morality should be defined impartially.

The other necessary component for personal morality is equal respect for the humanity of all persons. Not equal respect for everyone in everyway. Just equal respect for the humanity of all.

This was posted in another thread but I wanted to highlight it because the sentiment above is so refreshingly honest about morality. Instead of maintaining the pretense that there's no such thing as morality (something NO minority group should even contemplate if they have any aspirations toward being treated equally) Miss Tick bravely states that there is such a thing as morality and that, local custom notwithstanding, there are better and worse ways of determining what is moral. The other reason I wanted to highlight this as part of the discussion I really think the queer community needs to have is the part about morality being impartial.

Altogether too often we observe where, in the name of being non-judgmental, we end up being more censorious than if we had just gone ahead and stated our opposition to some action or another. Put differently, it appears that the only things we can truly be judgmental about is, in fact, being judgmental. This seems, to me, to have it almost exactly backward.

Cheers
Aj