OBAMA! FUCK YEAH!

[thesummerqueen]

Would you care to guess where I have been living since 05? North Carolina, and prior to that Lynchburg Va, so I DO KNOW what people can be like and what the majority climate is down here.

But where I live we also have tons of elderly retireees from up north. My mom plays cards with one woman from up north who licks the cunt of Ann Coulter and she is originally from up north. And most of the WHITE people that live in her retirement community ARE bigots from up north. Not all of them, but most of them.

My father is a bigot from Ohio. I do believe I mentioned that it wasn't JUST the South.

If we are to defeat bigotry it has to be about the climate of the location and not lump every person who happens to live in it for what the majority in it thinks.

Pardon me, that seemed a bit contradictory - the climate would, I thought, mean what the overarching attitude is, which would constitute the majority, yes?

I am the only atheist I where I work, but I do not rail against my co-workers foaming at the mouth even if I find ALL god claims absurd. I live by example and when they see that, it dispells those myths they have of atheists.

As am I, as do I. I save my railing for here, and occasionally for Facebook. Who said anything about foaming at the mouth or treating anyone personally like shit?

You dont beat hate with hate. You can hate behavior and you can and should ridicule hatemongers. But you stil have to pick your battles and know who can be an allie and who you should fight. She ended up quitting for the same reason I did, because we both hated being bullied. I saw her weeks after that before she quit and she had a smile on her face when we talked about me getting fired when I called him a bully.

I think you're going from the same attitude I usually have, and I did say I understood where you were coming from. Have you seen my "Dear Atheist Forums" letter?

Do you also understand that some of us are getting just a wee bit fed up with having to stare in the faces of people who perpetuate the same shit over and over and over again in the hopes that it will produce something different? That's the definition of insanity right there.

I love my co-workers even if I hate what they believe. I love my mother who is Catholic who unfortunately voted for Romney. But we cant throw everyone who is a victim of a climate out if we can potentially make them allies.

I don't believe anyone would throw anyone out if there was a chance of that person being rational. Some people, unfortunately a lot of them, are incapable of it.

The saving grace about Lynchburg that I enjoyed was that Liberty was not the only college in town 2 other liberal colleges are a constant thorn in the Falwell family's side. Richard Dawkins did a speech at Randolf Macon Women's college which is in the sticks just outside the city. The college I graduated from also hates the Falwell Family and I have even met students whom I worked with from his college who hated lots of his embarassing crap.

A married couple my boyfriend and I are very good friends who met in Lynchburg while they went to school there and I drive through there every time I go to visit my mother in Manassas. I'm quite familiar with it. This isn't as if we're god and Abraham bargaining about there still being a few good men left in the city.

So while you do see my fangs from time to time here, I never lose my compassion. A fight is one thing, but our human condition as a species has never been differnt.

It is ok to hate bigotry. It is a moral mandate to fight it. But it is not ok to assume that a label will automatically mean that by proxy of label someone is bad. We don't like it when beleivers do it to us and I refuse to do it to others. So when I pull my fangs out, it is at claims. It is at bullies. It is at individuals, because that is all we really are in reality.

I'm really not understanding what you're getting so impassioned about then. Because we wrote off the ignorant fuckheads who go by bigot or redneck, who vote without knowing the issues or who know the issues and stay blind to them on purpose, who refuse education and culture?

Does Min have a problem accepting me as an individual for having lived in the South all my life? Manassas might be just south of DC and hardly a bastion of the Confederacy anymore but it IS a Civil War town and has its share of bigots.

I don't have a problem accepting any of you as educated, free-thinking individuals. Our only point is that the vast majority AREN'T. You should know that the first question out of any of their mouths is "Where do you go to Church?" Are you mad because we make a reasonable generalization? Some of us are capable of understanding both that it is a generalization and that it doesn't apply to everyone. Are you mad because we used strong language to describe a subset of people? Because you thought we weren't capable of seeing that there is some humanity even in the bigots? My father is a racist fuckhole who abused me and my family for several years, yet still loves me and pays for my school and occasionally expensive gifts. My boss is a devout, tee-totaling Christian who respects me as an individual despite our differences. No one seems to have a problem recognizing this, but you do seem to be having a problem recognizing that we're able to.