Monday, May 25, 2015

Human Rights Victories, Lemons, and Punchbowls: A Question for All of You



I have a question for you, dear readers. I ask it because I have no answer for my own question, and hope that some of you might have plausible answers to propose to me:


When something wonderful happens (wonderful for all of us) like the recent referendum in Ireland, why is it that some of us who might be expected to celebrate choose to suck on lemons, instead? And worse: why do some people predictably seem intent on insisting that all of us suck on their lemons, as they twist and turn to find the downside to the wonderful event the rest of us are celebrating?

I'm not talking here about the folks who want to put turds in the punchbowl. Those people I understand. As I've just said in a comment to hrh in a thread here, they've been busy-busy at various websites lately, plastering discussions of the Irish vote with bizarre snippets of patristic texts ripped out of context, or babbling on about the pathology of homosexuality (they themselves exhibit no pathology, bien entendu), or thumbing their snooty noses at the many young Irish citizens who spent their hard-earned salaries to come home to vote.

I understand the need to poison the punchbowl, since that's what that ilk of sadly sick human beings have long sought to do when the subject of humane responses to those who are gay is being discussed. They need to poison such discussions, since these discussions appear so to threaten a pathologically homophobic slice of the human community to the very core of their being that they're intolerable and must be shut down at all cost. 

But for the life of me, I don't understand the ilk of people who, one might think, should be celebrating a hard-earned and game-changing victory that implicates their own lives in a positive fashion, but who prefer, instead, to fill the punchbowl with lemon slices, and to demand that we all take our slice from the punchbowl and suck the marrow of bitterness from it along with them.

What explains such behavior? Any ideas? I'm baffled by it.

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