Over the years my gay friends have taught me that people who struggle with issues of sexuality can be extremely unhappy and do disastrously hopeless things as a result. "They need patience, understanding and compassion. " they tell me.
Elsewhere on the net I’ve read some pretty hateful things about Pastor Brock posted by avowed homosexuals and I scatch my head and wonder what happens to that message when the shoe is on the other foot. Is it a reflexion of the self-loathing some gay people develop because of their social frustrations? A desire to punish? A forgetfulness of their own struggles to attain personhood?
Complicated subject.
And I sometimes wonder if it’s an absolute that everyone who is antagonistic to homosexuality automatically has to be gay. Sure seems to be a common factor. Yet I cringe sometimes when thoughtless voices jeer at antis and accuse them of being gay in a manner which implies insult or some defectiveness on their part.
It looks like children taunting, “You’re a bad person!” “Oh yeah? Well, so are you!” Puzzles me.
Why? Why does he have to divulge this personal issue in order not to be a hypocrite? Does he have to tell his parishoners about every single sin he commits in order not to be a hypocrite? I don’t see it.
The anonymity of the support group shouldn’t have been breached. The guy isn’t a hypocrite, he’s a sad self-hater. Should he have been outed? I think so: his self-loathing doesn’t give him license to make hateful proclamations (and untrue ones at that) about others. But this wasn’t the way to do it – not because of the breach of his anonymity, but the breach against the other members of the group. Deluded though they may be, they deserved to have the intended sanctity of their meetings upheld.
The article didn’t breach anyones anonymity except Brock (and the priest that ran the group, but I don’t think he attended anonymously, as we was apparently the organizers of the group and the person who people who were interested in joining contacted).
That said, I agree with peoples reservations about the ethics of joining an anonymous support group to out Brock.
Almost entirely unrelated to the thread, but seeing the term “GLBT” I couldn’t help but think “BLTG”. Someone needs to market Bacon, Lettuce, Tomato, and Gravy (G?) sandwiches.
If anything along those lines, it’s a war between gays and the religious traditions that have poisoned the minds of a lot of people. Some of whom are also gay.
You know what? To me, Brock’s hypocrisy is irrelevant. Brock makes a living taking money from people by playing to their worst fears, advancing an abhorrent point of view, and contributing to the dehumanization and discrimination against an entire class of people that have never done anything to him. The fact that he may belong to that class of people is, to me, beside the point. He could be the straightest guy on the fucking planet who never had a gay thought in his life and he would still be lower than a snake’s ball bag as far as I’m concerned.
IOW, fuck that piece of shit. He deserves whatever happens to him.
Fear mongering and dehumanizing for money, power, “respect” or any other reward from a Lutheran is hypocrisy. The fact that he was condemning gays and hated his own gayness only makes him non-hypocritical on that one issue. He is and was generally a hypocrite and a purveyor of hatred.
As for the “confidentiality” of the meeting, 12 step meetings are not confidentially privileged under the law and reporters don’t impliedly promise confidentiality, they may explicitly do so, but that wasn’t done here. If you are a famous person who goes to Alcoholics Anonymous, like Ringo Starr, it gets all out over the internet, and Ringo isn’t all butthurt about it. That Kennedy cousin who confessed in a 12 step meeting was wrong about confidentiality too.
Could it possibly be that the venn diagram of your gay friends and avowed homosexuals on the internet may not, in point of fact, overlap?
Anyway, my thought is that if he wants to be all conflicted, that’s his business. But if he takes an anti-gay stance in public then I don’t particularly care about him being outed.
Perfect! I could never think of a food that started with G to round out the sandwich ingredients, but now I know what I can serve if I have a Pride party next year.
Whether or not twelve-step groups are confidential under the law is irrelevant, I think. And as to whether “reporters imply or promise confidentiality”, that also is irrelevant as I don’t believe that the reporter identified himself as such. The confidentiality is a matter of understanding among the participants and I think that violating that confidence to get this story is a shitty thing to do.
It didn’t breach their anonymity, but the acts of the reporter breached the understanding that allows people to freely share in these types of meetings. Anyone who’s been to a 12-step kind of thing knows that the only reason why people are willing to open up about whatever it is they’re dealing with is because there’s a social contract involved, everyone there is going through the same thing, and that commonality creates a certain respect for privacy. No matter what sort of support group I was in, I’d be very disturbed to learn that someone who was meant to be my peer was actually an infiltrator, who has demonstrated no respect for the privacy of those involved in the meeting, and might discuss what I said there next.
It’s not about him implying or promising confidentiality as a reporter, it’s about the fact that his undercover operation to sting one person over their secrets gave him consequential access to the secrets of others to which he was not entitled. Lying and prying into the life of the target of your exposé is one thing, involving bystanders is another thing altogether.