Wednesday, August 07, 2013

Gays deserve discrimination because . . .?


According to former chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt, gays should be discriminated against. I ask you, does his logic even make sense in Bizarroland?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I would say it does. However, it is a self-defeating conclusion. If he supports discrimination on all 'behavior'-related grounds, he should support religious discrimination as well. His conclusion could also be used to support racial discrimination on ethnic grounds (i.e. I don't care about your skin color as long as you don't "act black" or "act Indian", etc.). This, of course, assumes he is consistent; his argument does not offer any justification for discrimination specifically against LGBT people, even assuming being gay or trans is just a matter of behavior. If he were Libertarian, he would, of course, oppose any restrictions on the ability of employers to discriminate. Since he clearly opposes discrimination based skin color (and probably other readily visible immutable traits), we know he isn't. Unfortunately, he didn't provide enough information to determine what other groups of people he is OK discriminating against, we can't immediately determine the consistency of approach.

Finally, he is clearly being disingenuous with the MLK quote. I don't think King would have used the word 'discriminate' for the "content of their character" portion. Discriminate carries a connotation of being a blanket condemnation of everybody possessing a particular characteristic. By hoping for people to judge each other based on character (i.e. how you treat other people), he is calling for an end to such blanket judgments. However, our pro-discrimination friend is calling for the right to condemn LGBT people. If we ignore the inaccuracy of his confusing LGBT identities with sets of behaviors reflective of our individual characters, he is still on shaky ground. Just because I run every day or smoke a pack a day says little about my character or how I would be as an employee. So our friend is still engaging in the blanket judgements MLK was condemning. What's more, it shows a degree of inconsistency. LGBT behavior, to him, is sin. But we are all sinners. He cannot pick one sin and say "this proves they are bad people who don't deserve jobs." We are all bad people, by that standard; to be consistent, he must refuse to employ any sinner. But if that what he were preaching, he would have a hard time getting air time.