As much as I agree with your interpretation of the DoI, I can’t get on board with the idea that anyone who doesn’t apply it to gay rights is automatically a hypocrite. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are pretty broad goals, and there are a lot of groups whom we prevent from following one of those goals because we believe it’s to the social good. The easiest example is convicts: we’re depriving them of their inalienable right to liberty, because we’ve decided that it’s harmful to society to allow criminals to run around scot-free. It’s not at all hypocritical to support the DoI and to support the incarceration of criminals. Similarly, I think someone can believe in the principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence, and also believe that giving unfettered equality to gays will be harmful to the public good. Needless to say, these people are, by and large, idiots. But that doesn’t necessarily make them hypocrites. I don’t agree with their reasoning. In many cases, I find their reasoning detestable. But it’s not necessarily internally inconsistent, or contradictory with their other beliefs.
Similarly, there’s really nothing at all hypocritical about a black person being opposed to gay rights. The principle behind the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s was racial equality. Opposing sexual equality does not contradict the principles of racial equality, because sexuality and race are very different things, and while I think there are lots of valuable parallels to draw between the struggle for racial equality and the struggle for sexual equality, my reasoning is not some inarguable logical axiom. One is not required to violate their own internal logic to disagree with my reasoning on the similarities between the two issues.
Not really. I assume most blacks are somewhat familiar with their own struggle for civil rights and support civil and equal rights as part of that heritage. To say you support civil rights and equal rights while actively opposing equal rights for a different minority is hypocrisy. To deny it is a civil rights issue is only furthering the hypocrisy. They may adamantly refuse to see or acknowledge their hypocrisy but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
A debate is not telling people they’re “getting off on” calling black people hypocrites either, if they want to discuss the topic, and you know it. That’s just needlessly inflammatory and accusatory.
I can offer two possible answers. One is that much of the history you’re citing is incorrect. To say that “similar moral and religious beliefs were used to justify slavery and discrimination against blacks” is a gross oversimplification. The vast majority of blacks who’ve lived in America have been Christians and black churches in general have followed conservative theology coupled with a strong connection between their religious life and social justice issues. That religious life helped sustain generations of blacks in the face of abuse from government and business, and that’s so many civil rights leaders were ministers.
Further, you should study who exactly drove much racist legislation. You say “interracial marriage was not recognized until recently”. This is flatly wrong. It was recognized for almost all of history, including American history, until the early twentieth century. That’s when certain members of the intellectual elite started spouting theories about black people being a sub-species, stuck somewhere on the evolutionary ladder between apes and humans. Those theories were used to justify the policies of eugenics, which included laws against interracial marriage. (In some states; about 20 states never had such laws.) Given that history–and numerous other examples of discrimination–it’s quite understandable why many blacks would have a distrust of authority and a preference for their own traditions and institutions.
The other is the misunderstanding of the black condition in America right now. Many people think that racial discrimination ended in the 60’s. It did not. It is still alive today. Blacks are overwhelmingly the poorest racial group, the least educated, the most likely to go to jail, and so forth. While the courts no longer allow legislation that specifically targets one race, the basic idea lives on in many ways: drug sentencing guidelines, lopsided school budgets in districts with a high black population, and so forth. Moreover, the ruling elites in America barely ever bother to notice these problems, much less address them. All of which might well generate some resentment among some blacks towards the rest of society.
And this is through no fault of their own? Really? You have free high school education there, don’t you? And are you saying that most blacks in jail are there because of racism? They didn’t do anything at all to be there?
Your questions are good ones but, when it comes to the institutionalization of ‘isms’ it’s not that simple. Again, another thread. However, some clues to this complexity is right in ITR Champion’s post.
Does this mean that blacks have to be on the libertarian side of every “rights” debate? For example, are we to condemn as hypocritical any blacks who advocate strict gun control laws, on the basis that a people who were so long denied liberty should not be on the side of restricting liberty to others?
It’s pretty suspicious to me, these efforts to lock down the “black community” into supporting only one side of potential political debates. It seems fundamentally unreasonable to expect them to monolithically side according to some historically-influenced algorithm, and I see in this debate plenty of self-serving opportunities to lecture a group that happens to disagree with you.
I await, for example, someone berating a group for agreeing with their ideology, arguing that they should hold the opposite view. I don’t think anyone will, and self-serving arguments will carry the day.
No cite I’m afraid, but I’ve seen it argued, on this board, by atheists, that liberal, pro-gay, ecumenical Christians are being hypocrites for not hating people who are different from themselves.
Many are religious, their religion tells them that homosexuality is a sin, case CLOSED. You can argue it with them all you want but that’s what it boils down to. If you could reason religious people then there would no longer be any religion.
Yeah but that’s different. Those posters are trying to make Christianity look bad by radicalizing the moderates; that is not I think the goal of the critics in this thread towards blacks…
…and it only took two posts for the show of hands.
And please, people are reacting too touchily on the “spoiled kid” metaphor, I can understand the touchiness BUT, as mentioned before, it merely illustrates how there are people in the black community who feel it’s not just not the same thing, but not even comparable: whether their perception is wrong or not even reasonable, we need to work with that. I just don’t know if trying to “shame” them into changing the perception by calling them hypocrites will work.
And I have to agree that there is a difference between being wrong, being a hypocrite and being inconsistent, you can be all three or two of three or one of three. Though in this board I’m usually on the ideological opposition to athelas, I must agree that an expectation of “universal” civil libertarianism is unrealistic. People (of any group) are not ideal archetypes, they are individuals, and alas we all may suffer from the “I got mine, now who cares about you” syndrome.
My impression of the other threads I mentioned was more that they wanted moderate Christians to stop being Christians altogether, by demonstrating that their religious beliefs were incompatible with their concepts of social justice. It seemed to me that the most likely outcome, if someone accepted their arguments, would be for them to jettison the “moderate,” and not the “Christian,” so the entire tack came across as incredibly self-defeating. Luckily, given the quality of the arguments being offered, the odds of anyone actually changing their minds because of them was slim-to-none.
Only if you think that by simply being a minority means you’re entitled to what everyone has, does the hypocrisy shoe fit. But we live in a society where the rights and privileges of minorities are restricted all the time. Are black people who think restricting the vote to persons over the age of 18 hypocrites? Are black people who are against opening up the military draft to women hypocrites? A naturalized citizen can not run for president, neither can one under the age of 35. Is anyone in favor of keeping these policies in place being hypocritical? At a certain point it because ridiculous to argue against people in this way, and it especially looks ridiculous when blacks are held to a standard that no one else is expected to rise to all because they fought for civil rights.
I don’t get why there seems to be all this urgency in calling anyone (except maybe closeted politicians who get busted in men’s restrooms) hypocrites on this issue. Just because two groups are both “minorities” doesn’t mean they are comparable. If blacks were trying to discriminate against another minority on the basis of race and ethnicity, then it would make sense to call them hypocritical. But expecting a black person to draw parallels between themself and a gay person means assuming they believe one’s sexual orientation is comparable to race. Where’s the evidence that blacks feel that way?
Its hypocrisy to fight for equal rights for yourself and then deny someone else the same right that you have fought for. If non-blacks had the right to vote under the age of 18 and blacks had to fight for that equal right it would be hypocritical to then turn around and deny gay people that right.
People who believe they should have equal rights while others should be denied equal rights are hypocrites. Non minorities that deny equal rights while enjoying them themselves are hypocrites too, we just seem to give them a pass because they lack the sociological perspective of what its like to be discriminated against on a regular basis.
That said I save the word hypocrite for a more precise instances such as an anti-gay politician having a gay affair. People who simply deny other people equal rights I’ll stick with calling them bigots regardless of their minority status or lack there off.
It’s only hypocritical if you think that different groups are the same. If I think that being gay is evil, for instance, and I think that there’s nothing wrong with being black, I might well support equal rights for blacks while opposing equal rights for gays. I might be wrong in thinking that being gay is evil, or I might be callous, or something like that, but I wouldn’t be a hypocrite.
A person being ignorant does not relieve them of being called a hypocrite by others.
You can accuse a person of being a hypocrite of any variety. If they are one they will probably not consider them self a hypocrite and make an excuse based in ignorance why they are not
You mean like it’s ridiculous that you mentioned all that irrelevant stuff?
Maybe you failed to notice that nobody is holding blacks to a differentstandard. The question is why they seem to oppose SSM more than other groups. It’s not complicated. It’s about civil rights. Equal rights that blacks had to fight for within their lifetime. So, for some of us, it’s surprising to find blacks unsupportive of giving equal rights to others.
No it doesn’t mean that. It’s assuming they might see the parallels between humans fighting for equal rights and other humans fighting for equal rights. As someone mentioned up thread, at one point black marriages were not recognized, and after that marriages between blacks and whites were not recognized. Not that far of a stretch is it?
There’s nothing urgent about calling it hypocrisy. Just an honest opinion. If you don’t see it that way so be it.