'LET'S NOT BRING HITLER INTO IT'

Alan Wilson, Bishop of Buckingham in England, writes in the Guardian on Alan Craig's despicable article in the so-called Church of England newspaper asking readers to "confront the Gaystapo", and which the editor of the newspaper says he didn't bother to read before it was published.

The worst of Craig's rant is not quoted here, because I did not want his words on my blog. Did you know? Alan Craig is today's Churchill, the lone voice against the "Gaystopo".

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. For years Winston Churchill was a lone voice against the burgeoning darkness of Nazi ideology and intolerance. In the wilderness and with few public friends, he was marginalised and dismissed as belligerent and a war-monger. He was scorned as a political has-been, out of touch with the then-modern mainstream.

We can only hope that Craig will suffer the same fate as Winston Churchill and be "marginalised and dismissed" for his nastiness, but without Churchill's comeback to a position of power.

Back to Alan Wilson:

I would defend, even on the beaches, the right of eccentrics to hold and publish their views, though I'd prefer them to read them first. May I modestly propose, however, that real debate would be served far better by ditching inflammatory second world war references, certainly those whose relevance cannot be established.
....

If we must bring Hitler into the story of the growth of gay rights, anyone who knows anything of the reality behind Craig's cheap imagery will tell you gay people were prime targets of the Nazi regime, who suffered and died at the hands of its real troops. This shouldn't be forgotten at remembrance tide.

But let's not bring Hitler into it. In the 1990s there was a whole wild west out on the internet, with usenet chatrooms in which no flame war was too hot, or opinion sacred. A general principle emerged that eventually prevailed, pretty well, down the line. In any debate, whatever the subject, the first person to bring Hitler or the Nazis into it automatically lost. Good idea.

Yes, please. Whatever point is being argued, let's leave Hitler and the Gestapo out as an analogy unless there is equivalency involving mass torture and killing? Honest. There really are ways to talk about injustices other than comparing them to to the Nazis in the WWII era. If you throw "Nazi" and "Gestapo" around casually, you lose the argument, so far as I am concerned. I follow Godwin's Law.

Godwin has argued that overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because it robs the valid comparisons of their impact.

Exactly. Thus endeth my mini-rant.

Thank you, Bishop Alan.

Image from Wikipedia.

"WE DON'T HAVE NAZI GROUPS EITHER"

From Xtra!:

With the world’s spotlight on the It Gets Better campaign and gay teen suicides, the urgency for schools to create gay-straight alliance (GSA) groups seems obvious.

But while the Ontario Ministry of Education thinks GSAs are important, the Halton Catholic District School Board (HCDSB) takes a different view.

The HCDSB feels the groups are harmful and has issued a ban on GSAs altogether.

“We don’t have Nazi groups either,” rationalizes board chair Alice Anne LeMay. “Gay-straight alliances are banned because they are not within the teachings of the Catholic Church.”

“If a gay student requests a gay-straight alliance they would be denied,” she says flatly.

“It’s not in accordance with the teachings of the church. If they wanted to have a club outside of school, fine, just not in school.”

What to say? For a school board member of a so-called Christian school to equate the Gay Straight Alliance with Nazis is not against the teachings of the church? Truly, I'm rendered speechless.

H/T to Rob Tisinai at Box Turtle Bulletin, who says:

Thank you Alice Anne LeMay, thank you. Not everyone can make our opponents look so ridiculous in so few words.