I agree with your premise, that there are some issues which a person’s position does negate the possibility of them being a “good and decent person.” Abortion isn’t one of those for me - I’m very pro-choice, but accept that it is possible to be anti-choice for (misguided) reasons which don’t make a person evil.
My problem is with you including Communist on this list. I’ve known a lot of communists who were good and decent people. Possibly you can accuse them of being naive, but there was nothing about their beliefs that made them “horrible.”
FTR, I’ve always found you to be good and decent, Sarafeena. But my opinion is just that.
This place has been a wonderful one for me because I’ve had some ideas changed and some ignorance fought and will continue to, even at the hands of people I disagree with if not on the basic stuff, as a matter of general principle, just because they piss me off doesn’t mean I don’t have something to learn from them.
You know in your heart you’re a good and decent person, stick with it. As long as you can effectively and honestly question your own ideas and beliefs to find the ground upon which you are most comfortable morally, you’re doing what I believe the board set out to do in the first place.
There are some Dopers here whose good opinion I value, including some with whom I differ greatly on religious & political issues. Then there are others whose vilification I receive as a badge of honor. But if a Doper I respected made a disparaging remark about a group I belonged to & I was convinced of the rightness of my group, I wouldn’t worry a moment about it.
I don’t read that post as saying that anti-choice people fall into the category, just that there are certain viewpoints which do mean an adherent is “a horrible person.”
Yes, I’ll agree with this. Back in Australia, I knew a lot of people who were one flavor of communist or another – including one girl-friend’s parents, who had finished up in the Moscow-line communist party after the original Communist Party of Australia had first gone Czech-line, and then dissolved itself. They were very decent people: I asked them why they’d gone with the Moscow-line party, and they only said, “That’s just what were are.” But it was an ideology for them, not a belief in Stalinist purges and the like.
Being a member of the Communist party reveals either evil or a level of stupidity indistinguishable from evil, as does membership in the Klan, or the Aryan Nation, or the Nazi party.
That doesn’t mean that I’d never forgive a former Communist, just like I can imagine forgiving a former Klansman or former Nazi.
Nazi and Klan ideology, as opposed to the results, are based on a premise I find evil. They are inexcapably racist philosophies. What is it about Communist ideology that you find makes an adherent a horrible person automatically, without consideration of whether they support the methods used by some to (allegedly) attempt to bring about the objectives of Communism?
Then the post doesn’t seem to have much of a point. Either being less than fervently pro-abortion means that you are a horrible person, or it doesn’t. If it does, well, then you misread his post. If it doesn’t, what is the point of the list of viewpoints?
I didn’t vote for Obama, and I think Islamic terror is a bad thing. If the second has nothing to do with the first, why mention it?