Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kilgnad 1197 days ago
> If you think it would be ok for a school to fire a teacher merely for being gay (as suggested by “it makes perfect sense for organizations to spend money to get rid of these people”), then you don’t support gay rights. In some instances US courts have even ruled against religious schools that have done this:

I suggested no such thing, it's just more manipulation from you. This is what I suggested: I suggested that it's extremely strange for a gay man to be teaching at an all boys school and it's highly reasonable to suspect that his intentions are unethical.

If I could read the mind of such a teacher and I can see his intentions are good, by god I will fight for that teachers right to work there. Barring that I can only make the best logical judgment given the information that I have and that judgement is either the teacher leaves or I put my kid in another school/classroom.

>If you absolutely insist on making this a discussion about pedophilia (even extending your unpleasant insinuations to gay men who are boy scout leaders),

I never insisted on such a thing. I am simply clearing my name on the accusations you continue to pile on to me one after another. You accuse me of using pedophilia as some sort of deliberate inflammatory weapon, all I did was point out that I AM NOT. There is no insistence that we continue the conversation along those lines.

I want a discussion but apparently I can't have one because your attitude is combative and accusatory. It's characteristic of activists of gay people and many many activists nowadays. They use accusatory tactics of boxing people into horrible labels like "racist", "misogynistic". It's largely an effective tactic, but it's so effective that many times it's used as a mechanism to gain power and dominate others.

Activists like you don't want to engage in meaningful discussion, you just want to dominate. To achieve these goals what you do is misconstrue your opponents intention, you throw away all nuance and deliberately try to simplify your opponent and his actions so that he or she will fit into the box you want him in. When you successfully do this then you execute your main weapon of calling him "racist", "sexist" or any other horrible term that carries a history too horrible to justify using such words with such frivolity.

So what I'm doing is I have to continuously CLARIFY what I am saying. I have to reemphasize the nuance behind what I am saying so that I protect myself from being nailed onto that label. You literally attempted to do this to me earlier.

>Even if a significant number of mainstream Catholics think that being gay is equivalent to being a pedophile (which I doubt), then that is still no reason for the rest of us to make such an association.

I never said the "rest of us" have to make that association. I am simply saying why it makes sense for Catholics to want to root out their leaders who engage in homosexual behavior. Personally, I don't care if a gay man is elected mayor but it makes sense to me why a catholic doesn't want a priest to be gay. I am also saying it's justified for such priests and leaders within the catholic community to be fired.

1 comments

> I suggested that it's extremely strange for a gay man to be teaching at an all boys school and it's highly reasonable to suspect that his intentions are unethical.

Your suspicions are unreasonable. As I mentioned before, heterosexual male teachers are not automatically viewed with moral suspicion in all-girls schools (second example: https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/the-perils...), so it is unreasonable to automatically suspect that homosexual male teachers in all-boys schools are unethical. You are applying a double standard to homosexual males that society does not apply to heterosexual males.

> As I mentioned before, heterosexual male teachers are not automatically viewed with moral suspicion in all-girls schools (second example: https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/the-perils...),

There's nuance in this you're not seeing.

Those teachers may be married and/or have daughters. A single male SHOULD be questioned.

> You are applying a double standard to homosexual males that society does not apply to heterosexual males.

Again simplistic logic. A double standard does not preclude it from being true. You have to see motive. Your link isn't evidence for anything. Can you read the minds of those teachers? Do you know if anything happened behind closed doors?

By virtue of once being a young single heterosexual male with no children I know how these men think. A high school teacher at an all female school is not only fighting external forces of how he's perceived but the internal forces of his instincts. If an attractive female HS student makes a move, the temptation is real.

Typically for males, though, the consequences of such violations are a hundred times more severe then if a female did it so you tend to see female teachers violate this rule more regularly.

> Those teachers may be married and/or have daughters.

Homosexual male teachers may also be married and/or have sons. Your entire line of reasoning is invalidated by your refusal to consider homosexual males in the same light as heterosexual males.