Free xone
Michael appears not to think anything interesting or important is being addressed here. I do. His current position on gay-directed charity work doesn’t very obviously flow from what he said here, where that “color-blind” part seems to me to imply that he wanted no distinctions made at all. If he thinks it’s okay to have relief efforts that are publicized as gay-friendly as long as they’re not exclusionary, that seems sensible to me. That’s my position, too. But then, on the basis of Michael’s own reasoning about the rights of gays vis-à-vis those of ethnic minorities, I think asking him whether and why it’s still wrong to say “we’d be especially happy to help other white folks” is pretty shrewd.
To me the distinction is, as social conservatives never tire of saying in a lot of other contexts, about behavior, not who you are. If someone offered room to refugees and included the line “We welcome Orthodox Jews,” I don’t think most people would find that inherently discriminatory. Orthodox Jews run their households according to certain constraints and could hardly be faulted for looking for help from (or offering help to) someone with whom they won’t have to have lengthy discussions about expectations.
I don’t agree anymore with what I said in the second post. After I thought about it, I understood why they were doing it.
And you know what? I’m more interested in helping people than debating the issues with you and others anyway. I’ll save the bickering about it for later. You know – when people aren’t looking for places to live after losing everything they have, I’ll sit down and argue with you and Robert about whether helping them specifically was the right thing to do.
Till then, I’m done with it. Although it may be yours, arguing is not my priority right now and I don’t know why I bothered to respond to Robert in the first place (or why I’m writing this now, in fact.)
I can sit down and get into a big intellectual argument with you about whether targetting people who might not be able to get help as easily as their straight white or black counterparts is the right thing to do. But right now, I’m trying to find an organization that will take the names and addresses of the people who posted on my site.
I’ll argue with you later. And if you know of anyone that can help me match up these offers with victims, that would be more productive and helpful.
Thanks.