It’s one thing to have an opinion.
Sometimes we arrive at our positions through cold, hard logic. Sometimes they are dictated by passion, arising from what we grew up believing, what we studied, what we became exposed to or experienced.
Everybody is entitled to his own opinion, and here there is no correct or wrong one. The right is inherent to any person, whether one is informed or misguided. Individual preferences reflect on the person who makes them—nobody else.
What makes the difference is the belief that only you are in the right, and everybody else must agree with you—or they will perish in hell or meet some other horrific ending.
To be a homophobe, for instance, is a characteristic nobody begrudges a boxer-turned-nonperforming congressman who now has the gall to seek a Senate seat. For his statements that homosexual couples are worse than animals, the boxer drew flak from citizens online and off. The backlash, both from the LGBT community and from others who simply think we must live and let live, was so bludgeoning that the boxer had to issue an apology immediately.
We hope it was clear to the boxer what he was apologizing for.
People seethed at his statements because it was made from a supposed moral high ground. He has only recently affiliated with a religious group; this has perhaps inspired him to mouth those damaging word.
But let’s not go the boxer’s route, lest we ourselves become the bigots we despise.
There is no need to harp on the fact that he is no expert on the matter, that his own choices in his personal life demolish his credibility, that his sport probably addled his thinking faculties and that he gives too much credit to his so-called advisers. He is who he is—there is nothing we can do about it.
Where we can do something is on the ballot. There, we get to decide who gets the privilege of bringing their advocacies—and yes, biases—to the halls of Congress.
If we allow this to happen, they will officially impose their bigotry on us, not through careless words but through laws and other official actions paid for by the taxes we bleed.
Let’s take our fighting words somewhere else.