IF HOMOSEXUALS involved themselves in the affairs of heterosexuals as much as heteros harass homos, “normal” people might learn a bit about tolerance.
Two letters to the Nation appeared in response to recent columns: one pretty, the other ugly, neither answering my major points: that Jesus Christ would have washed the feet of homos the way he did whores’; and that to say you “hated the sin but loved the sinner” was the same as saying you had nothing against Africans, just against the colour black.
The first letter To Disagree Is Not To Hate illustrates several types of fallacious or invalid arguments, including the writer’s assumption that what is to be proved is correct. Other invalid approaches therein included “emotive argument”, “argument by authority”: (biblical, which I specifically reject), “red herring” and more.
Nothing in the letter is a reasoned argument. It relies entirely on the assumption that the writer’s own belief is right, so nothing deserves argumentative response; but I will reply to the fallacious argument known as “straw man”: the letter writer sets out a position I never put forward, denies that non-existent position and claims to have demolished, by association, what I said, which is in no way related.
Whether or not Jesus counselled an adulterer not to sin has nothing to do with homosexuals. To assume, from that, that Jesus would have counselled homosexuals not to sin is to assume your view – that homosexuality is wrong – is correct without proving it, and goes against the biblical “evidence” of Christ’s behaviour.
Adultery is not homosexuality; one can choose not to be an adulterer, but one cannot choose one’s sexual orientation, as the science clearly shows; but the language of that letter was at least well put together.
The other letter Nothing Gay About Slavery contains all the invalid or fallacious arguments of the first letter, and several more, and isn’t even well written. It relies heavily on emotive argument by distastefully lumping it with homosexuality, paedophilia, bestiality and incest, and then drops the straw man that I equated lesbianism with slavery and uses that to accuse me of racism.
I did no such thing. I used hyperbole – exaggeration for the sake of emphasis – to point out that the disingenuous/hypocritical assertion that you could “love the sin but hate the sinner” would have, applied to slavery, asserted that there was no hatred of black people, only of the colour black.
That letter writer’s “argument” is also fatally flawed in assuming her position is correct; she might as well have stated that Earth is flat; which she may well believe.
The suggestion that “the human anus is not intended to be a used as a sexual orifice” also reveals ignorance of what might be called the modern state of affairs: if Internet space dedicated to it is any guide, anal sex is far more common between heterosexual men and women than anyone else, despite the obvious medical dangers involved.
Nor is it a safe assumption that homosexuality must involve anal sex; first, that leaves out lesbians, which I would not countenance; and, second, by the writer’s own “reasoning” the necessary implication is all heterosexuals engage in oral sex, which the letter writer herself might find offensive; the suggestion, not the act.
•B.C. Pires does not believe in the whip –in any sense.