Merry Christmas, everyone! It’s great to spend time with my family celebrating Christmas, and I hope you all are doing the same. And giving lots and lots of gifts. Speaking of which, opponents of Proposition 8 gave a little “gift” to those who supported it.
Website DontBuyFromBigots.com has released a compiled list of individuals and businesses that supported Proposition 8, encouraging people to not “buy from bigots”.
I just have a quick analysis of this idea before I head off to bed to celebrate Jesus-day tomorrow with the relatives. At the very best, this doesn’t seem to me to be consistent. On the one hand, these opponents of Proposition 8 are encouraging people to not buy from people that they view as bigots. This is a good thing; bigotry is not right and should be opposed on all levels. But the temptation with many things is to label those things as bigotry when they really are not. I believe that sites like this are making just such an error, and have very conveniently embraced a bigotry of their own. Bigotry is “stubborn and complete intolerance” (says Dictionary.com) of those whose beliefs differ from ones own. I’m not going to make any argument that all Prop 8 supporters are not bigots. That is no doubt true, and it’s best if Christians are honest and admit that a good portion of the bigots are coming from our own team. But compare true bigotry to, say, the typical Christian. The typical Christian, and what Christians are required to be by scripture, is one who has or is willing to have gay friends, spends time with them, loves them, and also (known to them) believes that homosexual sex (and much more, any sex outside of marriage) is wrong. I am just one such Christian. I love my gay friends, while also (consistently) maintaining that they sin by having homosexual relationships.
Let’s say you have a good friend of the opposite sex and both of you share the same religious views. However, you disagree over whether something is wrong or not – say, speeding, or downloading MP3s. If I walked up to you on the street and you were having a disagreement of said views with your friend, it would be very ludicrous for me to say that you are bigoted against your friend because you happen to disagree with their view on speeding or downloading MP3s. But this is just what websites like this seem to want us to do. They want to call us bigots because we love our friends enough to be honest about what we think about what they’re doing.
Of course, I think that opponents of Proposition 8 are justified in asking everyone to boycott true bigots, those who oppose homosexuality but also hate the people who are homosexual. But there is no way for them to reasonably sort out bigots from non-bigots just by looking at a list of donors.
Thoughts?
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The Demos Critic
