[Vision2020] just sarcasm? no!

[keely emerinemix]

Visionaires,

I wasn't too terribly worried that my "why not ask a patriarch from the League of the South?" comment earlier today -- based on "Donovan's" question about why everyone gets so worked up about race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. -- would be seen as sarcastic to people.  It was; I think we all know that I do sarcasm fairly well, sometimes not with noble intention or honorable result.  I try to apologize immediately and publicly when I'm merely insulting.

This, however, was something different, and I'd like to address my offlist correspondent in explaining why I wrote what I wrote:

The question came from either the real Donovan J. Arnold of UI student government fame or a cadre of Dono-Wannabes using his identity to engage in debate without the backbone to so -- and I believe that to be the case, based on similarities in these and in the literary canon of Edna Wilmington, Shirley Pissedoff, etc., all puppets masterfully engaged by our skylarking Defenders of All Things Kirk.  Also, I'm pretty familiar with Donovan's rhetoric and style; this doesn't seem to be the guy I sparred with during the bond campaign.  Either way, though, the question bothered me in its quasi-innocence?  Why -- the plaintive questioner wants to know -- are we all so interested in the ethnic, sexual, religious demographic of an Interfaith group meeting?  Can't we all just get along, or something like that?

But it's the "real" Donovan who has rudely treated people who are different from him, whether by one of the above demographic categories or by holding to political or religious views, perhaps informed by those demographics, that he disagrees with.  He's made it an issue.  Further, if today's questioner is a Kirk defender (The Artist Formerly Known As Edna?), then he is a defender of a religio-political movement that thinks gender, race, religion, sexual orientation and political beliefs are valid -- necessary -- divisors in society.   No one could defend the Confederacy, call for the Southern states to secede from the Union, fly a Confederate flag, and explain slavery as a benefit to black families and seriously be expected to be seen as a "race-neutral" social thinker.  Few cling as mightily to "hard" ideas of male headship and female submission in the church and family, and someday in millennial society, as the all-male eldership of Christ Church.   I don't know of any other group that publishes writings that approve of death-by-stoning of homosexuals once they themselves are in control of society, and I've rarely read more smug vitriol directed against liberals than that produced by the paleo-conservative, Deo-Libertarian, paleo-Confederates of Anselm House.  Remember "liberal women are ugly," anyone?

But regardless of the true identity of the author of the original question, that person is indisputably a white male, and I find it more than a little annoying when white guys who trade in social division and benefit from it expect to be taken seriously when they ask why, by golly, are some of us so dang wrapped up in the gender, race, orientation stuff.  It's simple.  We like it when someone other than "you" (or my sons, my dad, or my husband) advance in society.  

It's really that simple, if a bit sarcastic.

Keely




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