| fordy said:
The insults directed at the father were based on the outcome of his actions. Nobody is forcing him to keep contact with his son, but to many, the very idea that disownment of your own flesh and blood is a reasnable choice for ANY situation AT ALL is enough to put that parent's ability as a parent into question. This is why you see a lot of "bad father" insults. If you disagree, then I'm willing to listen to why you believe disownment of family would EVER be classed as a sensible decision. Also, keep in mind that the son is a victim here. How would you feel if your parents, the ones who are supposed to love you unconditionally, suddenly take that away? Yes, it can be justified that this may have been hard for the father to do, but the very idea of showing a family member that unconditional love is even being questioned is, in itself, a despicable act. I don't care what any book says about that. Now on top of this, imagine living in a society that has a good chunk of discrimination towards who you are. In that situation, anyone on the receiving end of this needs all of the support they can. Now, imagine how it would feel if the ones who should be providing the most support for you, the ones who should be standing up for who you are, decide "nope, we're no longer supporting who you are", then how would that make them feel? Say a child came to you, and claimed that they were being bullied. He is clearly distressed and scared. Do you see any right or wrong side to this? Do you perceive the actions of the bully as wrong because they go against your perceived limitations as to what a bully's role is? Maybe the bully's beliefs are unquestionable...the line has to be drawn somewhere. As I said before, I wish the son all of the support in the world. He came out, thinking that being honest with his father was the right thing to do, and the father showed him otherwise. The father, once again as I've mentioned before, done nothing legally wrong, but out of all the ways to handle this, he chose to disown his own son. It was approached in a way that showed no remorse whatsoever. No "I love you, but....", just flat out dosownment. Tell me, why should those who insult the father relax when he couldn't even provide the same kind of constraint and reasoning with his own son? In that sense, this is a father that cannot be reasoned with. I can forsee deep regret from this father on (or close to) his deathbed, that he spent all of his life hating, and it cost him a life with his son. You only get one chance at that... |
I don't believe in the notion of right and wrong. I believe that people define their notion of right based on their own desires. They define righteous actions as those with a favorable return. Naturally, there are more popular actions that are desired and we are conditioned from birth to see those as preferable. Often with popular opinions people begin to see the numerous occurrences of a belief as an indication that it is a normative belief and it is seen as the standard of right and wrong. The reasoning is that these these values occur so often because they are right. I do not believe the two are correlated (there have been many popular errant beliefs throughout history). You see your own beliefs as this normative, unquestionable standard. This is why you use absolutes and quantitative statements(ALL/EVER/NEVER/ANY). You seek to affirm your own sense of right by its quantitative correlation with the normative standard.
I have my own manner of living that I see as more preferable, but I would never be so egocentric as to say that is right for anybody but me. My life is not filled with lawlessness and rarely is there any need for consequence since I do my best to not go against other's wishes. I try to treat all other's notions of right and wrong as equal to my own.
As long as you continue to see your own notion of right as unquestionable then of course nobody will ever come up with any examples to the contrary, just as you may never come up with any examples as to why the father should have tolerated his son's lifestyle. It is not a very productive position when anything you can think to say is met with resistance no matter how reasonable it may appear to you. In which case, the father may have perhaps taken the better stand. He recognized that his son's position was not going to change and that he could not respect such a position without betraying his own convictions, so the line he drew was a line of disassociation. By not associating with his son he is not proving an obstacle to his son's chosen lifestyle; likewise his son is not proving an obstacle to his own lifestyle.
How do you breathe again?
