I didn’t see this when I penned my post above. Thank you, CinnamonBabka.
It’s a poor analogy.
First of all, as I mentioned in the other thread, girls are twice as likely as boys to be subject to pedophilic crime.
Victims of terror are more likely many times over to be attacked in the name of Islam than any other world religion.
These basic statistics show that attempting to use homosexuality and NAMBLA as a plausible analogy to Islam and ISIS is weak, at best.
(Not to mention an easy cheap-shot at a poster who admits to being gay.)
Heterosexuality should be the target, but then it becomes obvious that the analogy falls apart.
Not to mention, being Islamic is a choice and being homosexual is, by nearly all personal accounts, not.
Utterly irrelevant to the issue. NAMBLA and similar outfits are homosexual males preying on young males. The analogy does not say that homosexual males are specially required to work to eliminate pedophilia or that they are, in any way, associated with pedophilia. The analogy asks the question whether there is a specific compulsion on any large group (in this case, homosexual males), to take action to stop organized subsets of the same group from committing evil that is greater than the general compulsion on all humans to fight evil.
It is not a cheap shot. It is a very direct question calling attention to the conflicting positions he took on similar situations, based, not on the differences of the situations, but on whether he was or was not identified with one situation.
(And you owe Valteron an apology for claiming that he “admits” to being homosexual, as if it was something for which he should be ashamed and about which he should be forced to confess.)
No. All people should strive to eliminate pedophilia. However, following Valteron’s logic, (Salafists and ISIS etc. are recognized as members of the larger population of Muslims, therefore those Muslims have a specific obligation to fight the smaller groups), since NAMBLA and similar groups are organized members of the group of male homosexuals, the larger group of male homosexuals has an obligation to take specific actions to fight them.
Except that Valteron immediately tries to duck away from his own logic when that is noted.
I, on the other hand, do not hold Valteron to his silly logic any more than I would foolishly try to apply that logic to the Islamic world.
How do you get that? I absolutely agree that Christianity is also obliged to police itself and to denounce extremism in its ranks.
You can disagree with the basic premise that groups ought to police themselves, but you’re absolutely wrong in imagining that anyone is carving out a special exemption for Christianity. That’s simply not true.
Ergo, I stated that the added onus might be miniscule. For most Muslims, the amount they can do is not significantly different than I. But it is a non-zero insignificant difference.
It’s also ignoring that the extremist Muslims don’t consider the moderate Muslims to be Muslims. The extremists are Takfiris.
Back in the 90’s NAMBLA advertised in national gay magazines like the Advocate and they marched in gay pride parades in New York and San Fransisco. They tried to lump themselves in as just “another repressed sexual minority”.
But they gays felt the pressure and worked to stop that. The FBI later infiltrated and helped bring down the group.
As I said years ago if you’d look in the back of most gay magazines and you’d find their advertisement. And yes, they did used to march in pride parades.
I’m trying to imagine the look on the FBI agent’s face as his superior explained his next assignment. Clarice Starling had it easy.
There’s the problem. Neither the Westboro crowd, nor the jam-making grandmothers of your local anglican church have any notion that the other group is within their ranks. An outsider may group them together, but they have no association.
Well, okay, I’m willing to see that. I was mostly rebuting the idea that anyone here would somehow exempt one faith from a requirement that was being put upon another, which is absolutely false.
Still, given that major faiths are pretty vigorous about denouncing heresy within their ranks, they ought to be at least as energetic in denouncing violent extremism.
And…to be fair…many do. A great many Christian ministers, while speaking against abortion, have also spoken against abortion clinic violence. The same thing is true for anti-gay violence: many pastors, at the same time they criticize homosexuality, also insist that physical assault is absolutely wrong.
This isn’t something that is only an abstract ideal, but is put into actual practice with some frequency and consistency.
And so do many Muslim clerics and scholars, speaking out against terror tactics and the like in their sermons.
Which is fine and dandy, but doesn’t exactly accomplish much. Much like Christian preachers encouraging tolerance doesn’t stop other Christians in other churches from beating up gays or blowing up abortion clinics or torching mosques etc… Ultimately, what influence they have is generally limited to their congregation(s). Much like anti-terrorism imams.
Beyond that, I don’t know about you, but personally I don’t feel particularly moved to vocally or repeatedly reject positions I do not hold, nor to distance myself from actions I never took nor encouraged. E.g. I may be French, but I don’t expect Interwebs people made aware of that fact require some sort of recurring “but I’m not with the Front National !” reassurance from me. I figure my speech is enough of a disclaimer on that (heh) front.
And since I don’t expect that much of myself, why on Earth would I expect Joe Moderatemuslim (of the Staffordshire Moderatemuslims) to spend any time or effort whatsoever denouncing whatever some of his religious “brethren” do or say or claim on the other side of the world and five culture clashes away ? “Brethren” who may or may not even think of him as one to begin with ?
Invade Iraq.
No, Italian-Americans are not tasked with wiping out La Costra Nostra and not obliged to even say anything more than any of the rest of us. We pay taxes so that police and prosecutors do that for us. Some members of some communities have taken extra steps in speaking out about crime from such community members, and bully for them. But all people are presumed to be law abiding and social contract supporting citizens until proven otherwise, Bill Cosby apparently being the exception that proves the rule about the presumption due to the weight of evidence.
And Bill Cosby is a good example. He lectured black audiences on what he felt was the duty to personally succeed lawfully in the black community and have strict standards of what to put up with. Turns out, he is a long time serial rapist. Black people do not have a duty to denounce him. Comedians do not have a duty to denounce him. His wife does not have a duty to denounce him. Eddie Murphy does not have a duty to denounce him. It would be desirable for all these people to denounce him and shun him, but there isn’t a duty. It is entirely understandable that his family members are utterly blind and completely biased in his favor. Like Mrs. Sandusky. It’s called denial. It is a well documented psychological phenomenon.
Don’t make me hurl one of my balls at you
But that very speech, which you say is a disclaimer, is pretty much all I ask!
It’s a really low bar here. If someone says in the presence of a moderate Christian, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,” (Ann Coulter) it seems to me that the Christian in question should say something to disclaim or denounce the idea.
I’m an atheist. I try to be moderate. Others aren’t. When one of them says, “We should ban all religion and dynamite their temples,” I almost always pipe up with, “Hm, maybe not. That’s too extreme.”
It would seem wrong to me to be silent when evil is declared in my presence. If a politician on a platform said such a thing, I’d boo.
But when, and from whom ? Does each of the billion and a half Muslims in the world need to start a thread whenever the Saudis flog some dude, to apologise on their behalf ? Do they need to make the disclaimer every day, to everyone they meet ? At the start of every conversation perhaps ?
Surely you can see how that’s not such a low bar.
As I said, there’s a billion and a half Muslims out there. On any given day, maybe 5% of them are directly involved in radicalism. That’s 7.5 million assholes who may or may not do or say something terrible on any given day. You can’t expect the 95%, across the world, to drop everything and issue statements each and every time one of them happens to. They’ve got shit to do with their day.
You’d think gay Muslim pedophile terrorists would use a somewhat more serious explosive device.
How about approximately as often as we do here? When Ann Coulter uttered her hate-filled diatribe, it was quoted on the SDMB, and denounced and reviled. Good!
It would be absurd to insist that every single member of the SDMB start such a thread, or even post in it. The fact that such a thread pops up pretty much whenever such evil pops up is…well, that’s all I ask.
It should just be part of the background conversation. That makes it part of the prevailing consensus.
And, again, this is already happening to no little degree. The public reaction in Jordan after the murder and incineration of their military pilot is a much greater outcry and denunciation than I would have dreamed of asking.
Back in the ‘80s, I was a member of a group of gay Libertarians. For one of our meetings, we invited a few members of NAMBLA to exchange ideas with us. Now, my “gaydar” is fairly accurate, and when these men entered the room, I got absolutely NO feeling that they were gay men. To me, they seemed like very strange straight guys. In fact, throughout the meeting, it became increasingly obvious that they were primarily attracted to children; their interaction with boys, in particular, was merely because of opportunity, not preference.
After they had left, I discovered that the others shared these observations. The NAMBLA members did not consider themselves gay, and none of us considered them gay. And in fact they “rubbed us the wrong way,” and we were glad to see them leave. Not one person had the feeling “they are like us”.
I absolutely do not consider it my obligation to police anyone advocating any kind of male/male relationship. I’m sure the powers that be already know more about them than I do. And if they haven’t found any cause for having them arrested, neither would I.