Tapping The Great Wisdom - What am I missing here?

[silveradept]

A couple of things have crosed my Internet terminal recently, and they've made me think about how the context of a piece matters a lot, along with the text. For example, a piece where a gay Mormon says that it's possible to be gay, Mormon, married to a woman with three chlidren, and that Mormons who have gay friends or relatives should love the person first and foremost, and possibly teach them about the religious part that says being gay is bad later. Surrounding that post, from the place hosting it, though, is the Editor's Note:

Homosexuality is one of the most challenging issues that we at LifeSiteNews.com deal with. In all of our reporting on the issue we seek always to integrate the principle of "love in truth" - that is, in all cases to love all people, but also to present them with the truth, which can be extremely challenging if they experience same-sex attraction, and especially if they have given themselves to the homosexual lifestyle. Sometimes the mere presentation of the truth is denounced as "hate" by those who advocate the homosexualist agenda.

However, there is a considerable group of people who present a challenge to both sides of the debate over homosexuality. Members of this extraordinary group of people admit that they have unwanted same-sex attraction, but also typically believe that sex outside traditional marriage is sinful, and homosexual attraction itself "disordered," and therefore seek to live a life of virtue within the framework of their moral beliefs.

One such individual is a man by the name of Joshua Weed - who says he is homosexual, but also a devout Mormon, happily married to a woman, and has three children. There are problems with Josh’s approach to the issue - and we encourage our readers to charitably express their opinions - but what is certain is that Josh is seeking the best way to honestly unite an aspect of his personality that he did not ask for (i.e. homosexual attraction), with his firm moral convictions about sexuality: and by his own account the result has been spectacularly successful.

The context of the post defeats its actual text. The post calls for unconditional love from anyone not a parent to a gay person. (The parents are afforded the luxury of talking about their spiritual beliefs in addition to their unconditional love.) The "Editor's Note" surrounding that call says "We love you, but only if you renounce being gay. This man has built for himself a life where he could pass as straight, excepting that he keeps insisting that he's gay and doing fine." In trying to put him up as a poster man for [Recordscratch - oops! Draft item snuck in!]being "ex-gay" how gay people can (and presumably should) live straight lives, they obscure his message with their own. And frankly, that does a serious disservice to the actual poster - why ask someone to guest post or if you can repost them if you're going to stomp on their post and make it seem like they endorse your way of life?

Another contextual issue came up in a comic and I'm not sure I understand all the implications, which could be due to a faulty grammar sense. In context:

Accusation: It's like you think men never get sexually harrassed.
Response: Of course they do. But realistically, women and LGBTQ people are at much greater risk. I mean, 1 in 4 women have been raped.

From the comments at the original post, the response of "women and LGBTQ people" separates both those groups from "men", with the unfortunate implication that neither of those groups have any members that can be counted as men, despite four of the five letters possibly applying to men.

Without the accusation, the sentence "Realistically, women and LGBTQ people are at much greater risk." wouldn't have a problematic component, as LGBTQ in this case would be inclusive.

I guess what I'm missing is how the context makes the "women and LGBTQ" stop including men. It could be parsed in the following way, and that seems correct:

1. Men do get sexually harrassed
2. That said, women and people who identify as LGBTQ are at a much grater risk to be sexually harrassed - for example, 1 in 4 women have been raped

What I want to know is what I'm missing, that the first example of attempted erasure pops out easily and clearly as such, but that the second one is not obvious to the point where I'm not sure it exists. I can't evaluate something I can't envision, which leaves me in the unfortunate position of having to claim ignorance. Which, in discussions of things like marginalization or Privilege, can mean a Bad End.

Help me out here. How can I at least see both of these instances, even if in the end, I don't necessarily agree as to whether they're really marginalizing or erasing someone?

Comments

[shenalia.livejournal.com]

*sigh* I hate to be the one saying this, but your use of statistics is wrong. I'm not saying you're not making a decent point with it - but the "1 in 4" statistic is a false stat that's been thrown around for years, and years, and years by the gender-superiority faction of feminist organizations. It actually started as "1 in 4 will be raped or sexually assaulted in their lifetimes" - not "has been raped" - and even that was worst-cased assumption based on projections on non-reported incidents, etc.

Yes, women are more often assaulted sexually in normal, day-to-day life. Yes, it's a problem. But repeating this statistic over and over does not help that problem at all.

[silveradept]

...that's not actually the point. That would probably qualify as a derailment, especially with the use of an inflammatory phrase like "gender-superiority faction".

What I'm actually interested in is how those two sentences in context can cause someone to claim that LGBTQ are being excluded from the category of "men". If you have an issue with what the original comic wrote and use of statistics, that might be best taken up with the person who drew the comic, or the entry that posted it that I sourced it from. Here's the link, although you probably won't get very far in convincing people if you want to go slinging phrases around that will make people focus on your tone rather than your content.

Or you could put it in your own journal and detail the logic and source your claim.

I don't particularly care, in this entry, whether you're right and things have been twisted or not. What I would like is for someone to help me out with the grammatical construction. If you can do that, feel free to comment further and help.

[shenalia.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm sorry that it's not your statistic, but you used it - and what I'm trying to tell you is where it's from, how it's been twisted from its original source, and hopefully one less person will stop repeating it.