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Swimmer963 comments on Positive Thinking - Less Wrong
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Sure. There's a reason I talk about support for my family here, rather than support for me.
I mean, something like "Hey, Dave, we think you're awesome, and it's a real shame that you're caught up in this relationship, and we want you to know that whatever we can do to help you get over that, we're here for you, buddy!" is perhaps supportive of me, but it is certainly not supportive of my family.
(I actually had someone say essentially this to me once, upon discovering that I was queer. We'd met professionally, and she made me a job offer to join her on a startup, and had commented that she was a devout Christian and that was very important to her. I commented in turn that I was indifferent to her religion, but it might make her reconsider the offer upon knowing about my sexuality. Which indeed it did. I thanked her for her concern, let her know that I didn't consider my family to be at all inappropriate, and offered my assistance should she ever choose to get over her religious affiliation, and we haven't spoken since. But I digress.)
That is...fairly horrible. Good comeback though.
(shrug)
She believed that the way I lived my life wasn't in my best interests and wasn't moral/ethical, and she therefore offered her assistance should I wish to change the way I live my life. She did that without trying to impose herself into my life or take away my freedoms or damage me or etc.
I actually endorse all of that, as far as it goes. The world would be a far better place if more people responded to that situation that way.
And given the number of people in the world who do try to impose themselves into my life, take away my freedoms, damage me, etc. based on their beliefs about my interests and/or the morality of my life (or do the equivalent for people in my reference class), I feel it's important to calibrate my reaction. If I get bent out of shape by people like her, then I don't have a way of dealing with people who would, say, beat me up and hang me from a tree, or remove legal protections from my marriage, or force me into a behavior-modification program.
I consider her evaluation of my interests flawed, of course, but that's just as true of the many people who offered to, or informed me that they were, praying for my recovery after my stroke. And I really appreciated them.
I...guess. Maybe I'm just spoiled by living in a country, and belonging to an age group, where the people who are okay with homosexuality say so loudly and the people who AREN'T okay with it don't talk about that. The church I go to (the Anglican Church of Canada) officially accepts homosexuals into its clergy, and that's kind of what I'm used to. So to me, a response like hers does seem pretty awful, but not to you because you're used to worse...
I still think what you said was a good comeback. Not helpful, maybe, but snappy and funny, and it might have made her think...
Don't get me wrong: in my actual life I don't have to deal with much of that stuff.
I go to friends' religious ceremonies with my husband all the time, for example, and nobody blinks... or if they do, they keep it to themselves. More generally, people who don't consider me a social and moral peer are cordially invited to get the hell off my lawn, and I have enough social power to make that stick, enforced by an awesome community in which my basic humanity is simply never in question. (Well, at least not because of my sexuality. I do get a certain amount of "What planet are you from, Dave?" but that's different.)
I suspect that if I didn't have those advantages, I would rapidly lose my sense of perspective.
All of that said, I think it's the correct perspective, and would remain so even if I lost it. It makes no sense to judge people against my social context rather than their own.