Too much snark

I don't have time to be doing this, but I don't want to do what I need to be doing at the moment, so I will write a short post.

One of my on going writing projects has a working title, Criminology and the Culture War. Labeling conduct as criminal (or not criminal as the case may be) is inherently both value-laden & political. The politics often seem to trump any reasonable discussion about the values driving the politics. Consider, for a moment, the ongoing clamor about hate crimes. We have pretty good evidence to suggest that some victims of violent crime or threats are selected because of their affiliation with particular groups. The contemporary news (sorry, I'm too lazy to look up links right now) serve up example, after example, white on black, or black on white violence that is driven by racial tension. Homosexuals have long experienced beatings, threats, and intimidation directed at their identity. Insofar as Criminology is a science (and MY GOD there are days when I wonder about this) it should be deriving theories based on the empirical evidence at hand.

Yet, there are those that would seek to have such contextual data about crime stricken from the record. My friends on the Christian Right assert that the State has no business validating sexual orientation as a status of record. They are seeking to stamp out hate crime measurement laws where we might actually, I don't know, measure the extent to which people are targeted for violence because of their perceived sexuality. This leads GLBT groups to gather their own figures (cynically manipulated to maximize the impression of incidence; such is a standard social movement strategy covered in detail by Joel Best in several books). Thus, we have Christian-based no-nothing types covering their eyes and shouting that this problem doesn't exist, and GLBT true-believer activists jumping in our faces with contrived and poorly measured data yelling that is, and pundits partial to one side or the other, echoing party-lines. All, with snark. I'm sick of snark; it gets us nowhere. Yet, snark seems to have replaced reasoned criticism as the methodology of public philosophy.

I discovered this little bundle of joy this afternoon and became very depressed (and I hate using the word "very"). Why must social movement partisans attack their positions with disingenuous characitures? (blogger doesn't recognize that spelling, but it looks right to me). To my Christian friends, if all truth is God's truth? Why not confront the evidence that people are beaten and threatened and treated poorly because of their sexual orientation? Furthermore, why not recognize that your behavior on this issue as at odds with Christ's teachings from the Sermon on the Mount (see Matthew 5-7). (I'm not saying you have to condone the lifestyle, behavior, worldview, etc. I am saying, remove the plank from you own eye, and while doing so, allow the rest of us to consider the evidence).

To my activist friends on the left; please stop ridiculing and mocking people who act from principle. Sure, the principle might be corrupted beyond recognition by the most evil of evil people (I'm pretty sure that if there is a heaven and hell, Jerry Fallwell went to the warm place; Jim Dobson, my guess is that you're next). But, the corruption is not the fault of our neighbors who are just trying to live their lives according to how they believe they've been instructed to. The best way to convince them that their principles have been corrupted, is to model grace back to them.