One of the more useful things about the Internet is its ability to make tracking down old friends and acquaintances relatively easy. Carol joined Facebook a couple of months ago and the rate at which she was able to reconnect with old friends from elementary, jr. high and high school was astounding. Unfortunately, stepping through the time machine and finding out how someone you haven't seen in thirty years grew up isn't always pleasant.
When you're one of the "smart kids" in school it's usually pretty easy to discover who the other smart kids are. You share a common bond of usually being ahead of everyone else in the room and receiving the unwanted attention that sometimes brings. Friendship comes naturally and it's very heady to discover other kids who are inquisitive and interested in learning. Years later, when you think of those long-lost peers, you think you might still share some common bonds.
Carol reconnected with one such guy recently, someone we had both known back in jr. high and high school. He was smart and a pretty good guy. I had nothing but good memories of him.
And then there's Facebook.
The other day he decided to have a go at one of the social problems we're grappling with in America. Something was bothering him and he wanted to share his views. He knew it would probably cost him some friends, but he couldn't hold his tongue any longer. He decided to come out of the closet to set forth his views on gay marriage.
Now it almost needs no saying that he has lots of gay friends and he would tell them his opinion to their face. He's not bigoted, he just knows what's right and won't be hushed by the forces of political correctness. He doesn't want to harm the gays, he just doesn't want any official recognition that they're human beings and have rights equal to him.
See, here in America, we are one nation under God, made that way by the Founding Fathers, and that means that God's rules, er, rule. Our rights come from God (obligatory cite to the Declaration of Independence), not from "We the People" as it states in the Constitution. And God doesn't like this gay marriage thing one bit. Why, if we allow gays to marry, we have to allow all other perverts (slippery slope argument goes here) to marry whoever or whatever they want!
He goes on . . .
Marriage in the U.S. is a covenant between people and God and in the U.S. that's a sacred covenant that only God can bless. He doesn't explain why atheists, buddhists and Muslims are allowed to marry, but that's a minor point, I'm sure. By extending marriage to gay couples, we're degrading the whole concept of marriage. Those perverts chose to be that way, in case you didn't know, and so shouldn't be rewarded with actual rights. He very cleverly suggests that he didn't choose to be gay because he's not that attractive and isn't very style-conscious. Wow, the boys down at the gay bar are so disappointed!
It was really a quite remarkable essay in that in four paragraphs he managed to cram in every half-witted, ill-conceived, stupid argument thrown out by the bigots. He then argued against himself by declaring that marriage was necessary to stabilize society without saying why that means we shouldn't encourage gay marriage. He ends by completely contradicting everything he wrote by insisting that government shouldn't sanction any marriage, gay or straight, because it's a religious thing.
The remarkable irony is that this paragon of right, this defender of straight marriage, is once-divorced and now married to a black woman, something very unusual even thirty years ago when we knew him, and illegal in many states not long before that. The very same arguments he used this week were used against inter-racial marriage before it became legal everywhere in the United States in 1967. He won't extend to others the very same consideration of human rights that made his current marriage possible.
So basically there's this guy we used to know thirty years ago. He was bright, funny, personable and a good person to know.
In the space of two minutes, he became a total asshole. The Internet is really remarkable.
3 comments:
Facebook can serve as an early-warning system for who you're best off avoiding... "Unfriending" is a simple and quiet process, and you can always use the "I had too many friends/wasn't keeping up/didn't want to neglect anyone/barely even look at Facebook anymore/had to trim a few off" excuse if questioned.
I keep getting friended by people I don't remember at all. I usually accept, to be polite. But I recently excised about a dozen people, most of whom I didn't know then. I actually kept a couple of the ones that I have vocally disagreed with, for those times when I feel like being angry.
I have noticed that many people from high school turned out to be right-wingers. I thought there was something wrong with that school.
The internet in general and the social networking sites in particular are really double-edge swords. I'm not so sure it's so good to have access to so much information about people or for people to be able to so easily broadcast their views. Some things are better left unsaid. I have a friend from childhood who I know is very conservative (and he had reprehensible views on things when we were in high school). But we simply avoid politics because all it would do is ruin the friendship.I'm not going to say my friend is an asshole even though I would (and did)find many of his views repellant. We remain friends, albeit not that close, because we have a 40 year history together and experiences that transcend politics.
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