Thinking about it, I suppose they might be rejecting the idea that my endorsal of a community should be contingent on that community offering support for families like mine.
Which, actually, I agree with; there are lots of communities I endorse that don’t actively support such families. Heck, LW is itself such a community, insofar as it has not getting involved in politics as a virtue, given that the existence of my family is a political issue in the U.S..
It was clear to me that by “community” I meant community of the sort Swimmer963 was talking about, but I can certainly understand if that wasn’t clear to others.
Thinking about it, I suppose they might be rejecting the idea that my endorsal of a community should be contingent on that community offering support for families like mine.
The idea seems reasonable to me; it would be pretty tough to get any of the support benefits of a community if the community explicitly won’t offer you support. :-\
For my own part, I have difficulty endorsing any community that is incapable of supporting families like my husband and I, and I would not feel welcomed or supported by them.
I think that’s a somewhat different kind of support than what swimmer963 was talking about. For a given community to be considered supportive of you, they only have to actively support you. If they hypocritically denounce others who are in the same situation as you but who aren’t part of the particular community, that’s an indication of internal doublethink going on and also a stress on the relationship between you and the community, but I dunno if I’d call it “unsupportive”.
Sure. There’s a reason I talk about support for my family here, rather than support for me.
I mean, something like “Hey, Dave, we think you’re awesome, and it’s a real shame that you’re caught up in this relationship, and we want you to know that whatever we can do to help you get over that, we’re here for you, buddy!” is perhaps supportive of me, but it is certainly not supportive of my family.
(I actually had someone say essentially this to me once, upon discovering that I was queer. We’d met professionally, and she made me a job offer to join her on a startup, and had commented that she was a devout Christian and that was very important to her. I commented in turn that I was indifferent to her religion, but it might make her reconsider the offer upon knowing about my sexuality. Which indeed it did. I thanked her for her concern, let her know that I didn’t consider my family to be at all inappropriate, and offered my assistance should she ever choose to get over her religious affiliation, and we haven’t spoken since. But I digress.)
She believed that the way I lived my life wasn’t in my best interests and wasn’t moral/ethical, and she therefore offered her assistance should I wish to change the way I live my life. She did that without trying to impose herself into my life or take away my freedoms or damage me or etc.
I actually endorse all of that, as far as it goes. The world would be a far better place if more people responded to that situation that way.
And given the number of people in the world who do try to impose themselves into my life, take away my freedoms, damage me, etc. based on their beliefs about my interests and/or the morality of my life (or do the equivalent for people in my reference class), I feel it’s important to calibrate my reaction. If I get bent out of shape by people like her, then I don’t have a way of dealing with people who would, say, beat me up and hang me from a tree, or remove legal protections from my marriage, or force me into a behavior-modification program.
I consider her evaluation of my interests flawed, of course, but that’s just as true of the many people who offered to, or informed me that they were, praying for my recovery after my stroke. And I really appreciated them.
She did that without trying to impose herself into my life or take away my freedoms or damage me or etc. I actually endorse all of that, as far as it goes. The world would be a far better place if more people responded to that situation that way.
I...guess. Maybe I’m just spoiled by living in a country, and belonging to an age group, where the people who are okay with homosexuality say so loudly and the people who AREN’T okay with it don’t talk about that. The church I go to (the Anglican Church of Canada) officially accepts homosexuals into its clergy, and that’s kind of what I’m used to. So to me, a response like hers does seem pretty awful, but not to you because you’re used to worse...
I still think what you said was a good comeback. Not helpful, maybe, but snappy and funny, and it might have made her think...
Don’t get me wrong: in my actual life I don’t have to deal with much of that stuff.
I go to friends’ religious ceremonies with my husband all the time, for example, and nobody blinks… or if they do, they keep it to themselves. More generally, people who don’t consider me a social and moral peer are cordially invited to get the hell off my lawn, and I have enough social power to make that stick, enforced by an awesome community in which my basic humanity is simply never in question. (Well, at least not because of my sexuality. I do get a certain amount of “What planet are you from, Dave?” but that’s different.)
I suspect that if I didn’t have those advantages, I would rapidly lose my sense of perspective.
All of that said, I think it’s the correct perspective, and would remain so even if I lost it. It makes no sense to judge people against my social context rather than their own.
Oh, yeah, that is pretty nasty. I was imagining something more along the lines of “Oh, we support you and you family, you’re not like those other gay families”.
Yeah, I get that sort of thing too, by virtue of not being stereotypically Other in any particularly visible way.
When i was growing up, I got a lot of variants on “Funny, you don’t look Jewish”; when I came out I got a lot of “But you don’t really act gay.” (To which my usual response was “I do, actually. This is how a lot of gay people act. It’s part of our devious plot to trick you into treating us like people.”)
I mostly treat that kind of statement as a good sign, though… a symptom of cracks in the infrastructure.
That is, someone starts out believing that all Xes are Y, and that W is not Y, and then discovers W is an X. If they can avoid concluding that W actually is Y after all (which is the easiest fix), the contradictions in their worldview will start to build up. My usual experience is that after weeks or months or years of continued acquaintance, those people ultimately reject the “All Xes are Y” bit.
I’ve gone through the analogous process myself when breaking down some of my own prejudices, and I appreciate the patience of the folks who helped me through it. It seems only just to pay that forward.
I’m unclear on why the parent has been voted down. Can someone who has downvoted it please explain?
Thinking about it, I suppose they might be rejecting the idea that my endorsal of a community should be contingent on that community offering support for families like mine.
Which, actually, I agree with; there are lots of communities I endorse that don’t actively support such families. Heck, LW is itself such a community, insofar as it has not getting involved in politics as a virtue, given that the existence of my family is a political issue in the U.S..
It was clear to me that by “community” I meant community of the sort Swimmer963 was talking about, but I can certainly understand if that wasn’t clear to others.
The idea seems reasonable to me; it would be pretty tough to get any of the support benefits of a community if the community explicitly won’t offer you support. :-\
I think that’s a somewhat different kind of support than what swimmer963 was talking about. For a given community to be considered supportive of you, they only have to actively support you. If they hypocritically denounce others who are in the same situation as you but who aren’t part of the particular community, that’s an indication of internal doublethink going on and also a stress on the relationship between you and the community, but I dunno if I’d call it “unsupportive”.
Sure. There’s a reason I talk about support for my family here, rather than support for me.
I mean, something like “Hey, Dave, we think you’re awesome, and it’s a real shame that you’re caught up in this relationship, and we want you to know that whatever we can do to help you get over that, we’re here for you, buddy!” is perhaps supportive of me, but it is certainly not supportive of my family.
(I actually had someone say essentially this to me once, upon discovering that I was queer. We’d met professionally, and she made me a job offer to join her on a startup, and had commented that she was a devout Christian and that was very important to her. I commented in turn that I was indifferent to her religion, but it might make her reconsider the offer upon knowing about my sexuality. Which indeed it did. I thanked her for her concern, let her know that I didn’t consider my family to be at all inappropriate, and offered my assistance should she ever choose to get over her religious affiliation, and we haven’t spoken since. But I digress.)
That is...fairly horrible. Good comeback though.
(shrug)
She believed that the way I lived my life wasn’t in my best interests and wasn’t moral/ethical, and she therefore offered her assistance should I wish to change the way I live my life. She did that without trying to impose herself into my life or take away my freedoms or damage me or etc.
I actually endorse all of that, as far as it goes. The world would be a far better place if more people responded to that situation that way.
And given the number of people in the world who do try to impose themselves into my life, take away my freedoms, damage me, etc. based on their beliefs about my interests and/or the morality of my life (or do the equivalent for people in my reference class), I feel it’s important to calibrate my reaction. If I get bent out of shape by people like her, then I don’t have a way of dealing with people who would, say, beat me up and hang me from a tree, or remove legal protections from my marriage, or force me into a behavior-modification program.
I consider her evaluation of my interests flawed, of course, but that’s just as true of the many people who offered to, or informed me that they were, praying for my recovery after my stroke. And I really appreciated them.
I...guess. Maybe I’m just spoiled by living in a country, and belonging to an age group, where the people who are okay with homosexuality say so loudly and the people who AREN’T okay with it don’t talk about that. The church I go to (the Anglican Church of Canada) officially accepts homosexuals into its clergy, and that’s kind of what I’m used to. So to me, a response like hers does seem pretty awful, but not to you because you’re used to worse...
I still think what you said was a good comeback. Not helpful, maybe, but snappy and funny, and it might have made her think...
Don’t get me wrong: in my actual life I don’t have to deal with much of that stuff.
I go to friends’ religious ceremonies with my husband all the time, for example, and nobody blinks… or if they do, they keep it to themselves. More generally, people who don’t consider me a social and moral peer are cordially invited to get the hell off my lawn, and I have enough social power to make that stick, enforced by an awesome community in which my basic humanity is simply never in question. (Well, at least not because of my sexuality. I do get a certain amount of “What planet are you from, Dave?” but that’s different.)
I suspect that if I didn’t have those advantages, I would rapidly lose my sense of perspective.
All of that said, I think it’s the correct perspective, and would remain so even if I lost it. It makes no sense to judge people against my social context rather than their own.
Oh, yeah, that is pretty nasty. I was imagining something more along the lines of “Oh, we support you and you family, you’re not like those other gay families”.
Ah, I see.
Yeah, I get that sort of thing too, by virtue of not being stereotypically Other in any particularly visible way.
When i was growing up, I got a lot of variants on “Funny, you don’t look Jewish”; when I came out I got a lot of “But you don’t really act gay.” (To which my usual response was “I do, actually. This is how a lot of gay people act. It’s part of our devious plot to trick you into treating us like people.”)
I mostly treat that kind of statement as a good sign, though… a symptom of cracks in the infrastructure.
That is, someone starts out believing that all Xes are Y, and that W is not Y, and then discovers W is an X. If they can avoid concluding that W actually is Y after all (which is the easiest fix), the contradictions in their worldview will start to build up. My usual experience is that after weeks or months or years of continued acquaintance, those people ultimately reject the “All Xes are Y” bit.
I’ve gone through the analogous process myself when breaking down some of my own prejudices, and I appreciate the patience of the folks who helped me through it. It seems only just to pay that forward.