By Paul Weiser
In the swirl of spin and response to spin, it’s entirely too easy to forget that both spin and response can be negative, the one begetting the other. This is negative feedback not in the engineering sense of a self-limiting control but the psychological and moral one: anger and hostility are negative emotions.
The clearest example is liberals’ party line concerning homosexuals (though the situation with race and illegal immigration is similar). The baseline conservative position is one of limited tolerance: sodomy is not alright, but so long as homosexuals don’t flaunt their perversion we can ignore it. Liberals would like to free homosexuals from the need to hide their nature, and develop a party line to that end.
One party line would be that homosexuals are whimsical, funny, and harmless - in other words, they can be ignored in plain sight just as well as in the closet. They have no interest in unwilling men, particularly young boys. Much of this is untrue, but it might have worked. Instead, the liberal party line is that straight people go out of their way to be hateful toward homosexuals and must be punished by forcing knowledge of sodomite practices upon them and their children, including homosexual “marriage.”
This, too, is fundamentally untrue: straight people mainly want to be left blissfully alone. Positive spin, leading to amusement, might have succeeded. Negative spin results in opposition and, finally, the exact hostility and intolerance the false negative message asserted - but with complete justification.
Yes, homosexuals decided their feelings were hurt and liberals pandered to this small minority. As with race and illegal immigration, angry lies beget anger in their targets - and the targets, being by definition not minorities, will eventually and justifiably crush both panderers and clients. Negativity begets hostility; negativity loses.
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