Prudence
Christian Grantham and IGF have interesting comment threads going over GayPatriot’s precipitous exit from blogging. Of course, some of the back-and-forth is little more than “You suck!”–“No, you suck!” stuff, but most of it is pretty thoughtful. Michael, who e-mailed GayPatriot himself about the whole thing, has a post of his own. I agree that the real story is not GP’s identity. What most deserves attention is the vileness of Michael Rogers, which isn’t new but has yet again manifested itself in a way that any honorable person should condemn. May I point out, briefly, though, that there really is a lesson or two to be learned in the other direction?
First, don’t strike out at someone if you’re not prepared to deal with his counterstrikes. You don’t have to defend the behavior of a knife-brandishing rapist to point out that someone is stupid take him on with nothing but a squirt gun. As it happens, through dumb luck I clicked on GayPatriot when the original post with photographs and “terrorist” accusation was still up. I thought it was just his being overheated again and forgot about it; but I do not think like people who practice outing. It is not exactly unheard of for a miscreant to try to work vengeance through an enemy’s employer, even if it’s not Rogers’s usual MO.
Second, when you routinely proceed from a Pharisaical stance of uncritical faith in your own rectitude, you are eventually going to get yourself into a pickle. Leftist gay activists do a lot that’s destructive to our interests and those of society as a whole; there isn’t a thing wrong with GP’s wanting to rant about them and having a sense of mission about doing so. But that sort of operation requires a sense of proportion. It simply isn’t true that gay activists cause every hangnail. (Not that they wouldn’t if they could, especially if someone convinced them that hangnails were somehow transgressive.) He seems to have gone so far off the deep end in enthusiasm for sticking it to the gay left that he didn’t realize, before pushing “Publish,” that it might not be the wisest idea to post about the “terrorists” in our midst with a vague exhortation to strike back against them. I blame Michael Rogers for being outrageous, but I regret that GP gave him an opening.
Added on 30 March: Eric agrees that we should all post limeshurbert’s newly laid-out adaptation of GP’s original post. Fine by me:
One final thing: I find it thrilling to be able to look at comment threads and see so many gays debating outing under their own names, purely out of a desire to protect the privacy of others on principle. I can’t imagine such a discussion here in Japan.