Originally two comments by Tom Foss on The words spoken.
“We need to stop spending our money on military and police and start spending it on education.”
“He wants to eliminate the whole military and all police! It’s exactly what he said!”
There’s a phrase missing from your strawman here that would actually make your “charitable” reading accurate: “so much.” We need to stop spending so much of our money on military and police and start spending it on education.
We keep hearing all this about charitable readings and giving people the benefit of the doubt when the people in question have given no indication that they deserve it. Regardless of whether or not she meant the actual words that she said, her claim about the “worst thing that can happen” to a gay person in the US is insultingly, dismissively false. There is literally no reason for her to so blatantly distort the actual situation for gay people in the US to make her point, because the death penalty as actual policy is worse whether American gays are being denied cake or being denied employment. The same is true for her comments about women’s rights. Why dismiss these issues if your point isn’t to say that we need to switch our focus to the real problems? Which, again, is what she actually said.
It’s the same bullshit Patricia Arquette was peddling a few months back, it’s the same bullshit intersectional feminists and civil rights activists have been talking about for ever. Some outside observer sees that a civil rights movement has made some high-visibility victories and declares that the war is over, so now we can focus on the issues that really matter (to me).
Maybe it’s uncharitable to read the words as they were actually said. I suggest that Ali’s comments about the “worst thing that can happen” to gays are far less charitable. At least our reading has a basis in reality.
Funny how charity and benefit of the doubt never go both ways. Ali apparently wasn’t writing her speech thinking “gays in the US still spend a lot of time lobbying and campaigning for rights reforms. Maybe they dohave worse things to worry about than Christian bakers.” No, it was all “they must not know about how bad it is in Iran. I need to tell them how silly this cake nonsense is by comparison, and then they’ll totally see it my way.”
I like being charitable as much as anyone, but the cake is a lie.
The problem isn’t the cake. The problem is also not about gay people not getting cake. The problem is enshrining discrimination into law for a few people with “religious” objections.
Is it uncharitable to assume Hirsi Ali knows this?
Should Tom Foss read this, I’m feeling uncharitable about the fact that his personal blog is updated so infrequently. Simply unacceptable!
“Regardless of whether or not she meant the actual words that she said, her claim about the “worst thing that can happen” to a gay person in the US is insultingly, dismissively false.”
If it’s false, make the case. Point out that its false and why it is insulting and damaging to make such a false claim. You may even change her mind (as you won’t with insults) and there is nothing uncharitable about argument. It is the accompanying smears that Myers and other ladle on that many of us object to. Ali may be wrong but there is no reason to therefore insinuate that her work to prevent the murder, imprisonment and mutilation of women, crimes she herself is a victim of and in defiance of which she has put her life in real danger, is a front cynically (happily!) exploited to promote a sinister ulterior social agenda.
Michael Nugent objected to those words too. But he didn’t feel he had to libel Ali over them.
Bluntnose, are you really that completely ignorant of the current situation in the US? Let me school you from another continent.
And then I went: oh, I don’t have any links handy.
So I googled. Within seconds:
(trans murder us)
http://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2015/02/20/miami-seventh-trans-woman-murdered-us-2015
(gay homeless us)
http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/americas-shame-40-of-homeless-youth-are-lgbt-kids/
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/the-forsaken-a-rising-number-of-homeless-gay-teens-are-being-cast-out-by-religious-families-20140903
Not knowing this stuff and commenting about this topic as if you know something about it is *exactly* the same as what a creationist does.
@PatrickG:
I know! Only so many hours in the day, sadly.
@bluntnose:
Oh, I guess the burden of proof shifts when we’re talking about prominent atheist speakers? Ali has made a positive claim; it’s up to her to back it up.
But hey, let’s go for it: in the US, 28 states have no employment discrimination protections for gay people. In more than half of the country, the “worst thing” that the Christian community can do to a gay person (aside from disproportionate rates of violence, especially for people of color) is deny them employment and/or housing based on their (presumed) sexual orientation with no legal recourse available.
But even the “cake” issue isn’t about cake. It’s about any business being allowed to refuse service to people on the basis of the owners’ religious beliefs. A bakery just happened to be the first to cash in, rather than a hotel, a pharmacy, an apartment complex, a hospital. But somehow Ali’s failure to do even five minutes of research before giving a keynote speech (wherein she repeatedly proclaims how necessary it is for people to understand religious bigotry elsewhere in the world) is our problem, because we’re not being charitable enough.
And then you go on to misunderstand the definition of libel and completely misrepresent the criticisms against Ali. Oh, hi there hypocrisy.
Ali could have easily made her point about how bad it is to be gay in Iran without dismissing the issues facing the gay community in the US as being about cake at worst, and generally limited to “subtle” discrimination in “homophobic communities.” There’s nothing subtle about state governors signing anti-gay legislation while surrounded by outspoken homophobic religious leaders. Instead, she made the exact same comparison and exact same point that one of those unsubtle homophobic leaders, Tom Cotton, made earlier this month.
I didn’t give Tom Cotton a charitable reading or the benefit of the doubt when he said that gays in the US should be happy and thankful that they aren’t given the death penalty like they would be if this were Iran—and like they would be if people like Tom Cotton had their way here, as we’ve seen with the US religious meddling in Uganda—and I’m not giving Ali any more credit for making the same basic point as toxic homophobic republicans.
“Oh, I guess the burden of proof shifts when we’re talking about prominent atheist speakers? Ali has made a positive claim; it’s up to her to back it up.”
Not, it is the same whether the person has a high or a low profile. If they say something we believe to be wrong, we should make arguments to show that they are wrong rather than adopt Myers line and simply try to smear and libel. I agree that Ali is too complacent about some of the difficulties faced by gay communities in the west, but I don’t think she has a duty to agree with me before I have made my arguments.
And I didn’t misrepresent Myers accusation against Ali. If I accused you of ‘happily exploiting’ the suffering of gay people in the USA in your article order to win blog clicks, the obvious and natural implication would be that you did not genuinely hold the positions you claim to hold but dishonestly adopt them for personal gain. The ‘happily’ makes it a bit worse actually, suggesting you may even take some pleasure in the suffering you pretend to oppose. Which is a gross smear and one that Ali has faced all her life, especially from the Muslim far right.
Ali is kicking back against Western ‘progressives’ who actually DO downplay and excuse Islamist atrocities.
Boko Haram, ISIS etc. etc. are all ‘really’ just the poor downtrodden little dears striking back against Bush/Cheney. Never mind that the violence goes back decades before Bush. Before the founding of Israel. Before the decline of the Ottoman Empires attempts to conquer Europe.
The evil of religion needs to be recognized as a primary problem. Indiana and Mosul vary by DEGREE, not kind. Ali and others try to use the scale of the evil to counter the appeasers. I think this is a terrible argument, as it obscures the continuity.
Before I would ever give Tom Cotton the benefit of the doubt, I would have to see some evidence – anything! – that indicated that he ever once said or done anything that deserved the benefit oft he doubt.
@Bluntnose: Ali doesn’t have a duty to agree with anyone except the facts. The statement that the worst thing that the Christian community can do to American gays is deny them cake is false. It is not true. That is not a matter of opinion. it is a matter of basic fact.
Ali is using the atrocities committed against gays in Iran (which, incidentally, does not actually affect her, as she is neither gay nor living in Iran) to argue that we should stop focusing our efforts on gay rights at home, where our biggest concern is cake, and instead focus them on her pet cause. Whether or not she believes in said cause, that’s exploiting the suffering of gay people in Iran to make her case.
@johnthedrunkard: Right, the Muslim world is a homogenous group with a uniform history of barbarism, not affected in any way by western meddling.
Regardless of history and nuance and whether or not we should consider the causes of things before blundering in to fix them, Ali could still have made that point without downplaying Christian atrocities here. If her point were to push back against western progressives, it doesn’t help that point to do the same thing she’s accusing them of doing. It might help for her to even allude to that being her goal, which she does not do in any of the transcripts I’ve read of the talk.
I do find it quite amusing (aka frustrating) how all those defenders of Ali (in this particular case) are rather clearly proving the OP – no charitable reading or benefit of the doubt for PZ and other critics while demanding all sorts of stretches for their favorite.