Scott Lively, infamous LGBT hater, provides both an incredibly stupid and revealing analogy
"The natural family is the ecosystem of humanity! It must be preserved at all costs. How? By a populist uprising! The elites need to see the angry mob – liberals and conservatives together – surging through the streets, pitchforks and torches held aloft, ready to tear down Frankenstein’s castle with their bare hands if need be. For Christians it’s Jesus and the moneychangers time! Making a whip of cords like He did with His own hands, and letting these arrogant puppet-masters know we mean to use it (metaphorically speaking). The bottom line is this: The elitists always believe they’re smarter, wiser and better than you. They play the game of democracy to keep the peace, but they always follow their own agenda to the fullest extent the people will allow by their complacency. The only way to deter the elites is with the threat of the mob. They need to see the pitchforks and torches to know they’ve gone too far and need to back down."
http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2015/04/scott-lively-christians-will-stop-gay.html#disqus_thread
I wouldn't expect Scott Lively to be a a reader of classical literature, but with his stupid and ham-fisted analogy and barely disguised threats against gay people, he actually provides a rather apt metaphor for what this whole debate is about. See, I don't think Scott Lively is actually familiar with Frankenstein beyond maybe a bare knowledge of the movie from the 1930's. It was a good movie admittedly, but it failed to capture the nuance and real meaning of the classic book. In the book Frankenstein's "Monster" is actually an intelligent and articulate creature who is well versed in both history and literature. However, everywhere he goes he is rejected by the ignorant and fearful because of his grotesque physical appearance. All he really wanted was to be accepted by society or at minimum to find some level of human companionship. Instead, he is driven essentially mad by the torment and isolation that an unaccepting society fosters upon him solely due to circumstances of his birth and innate characteristics. All the destructive acts the creature does in the book, both outwardly and inwardly focused, are the result of this irrational rejection and the resulting isolation. Again, Frankenstein's Monster only becomes a monster, because of the rush to judgement that the creature encounters from a society that is too quick to judge and unable to understand.
Does any of this sound familiar to you? Scott Lively is the exact kind of asshole who would look at an intelligent, living creature and shout monster just because that creature has an ultimately meaningless difference from him. So with his idiotic call to "rally the peasents" to destroy the creature, he is feeding into what the ultimately was the actual major theme in the book. It wasn't really about playing god, it was about how we create monsters by acting unkindly toward others, merely because they are different. Again, the message was that tolerance of differences is the way forward and by forsaking these virtues we eventually reap the negative consequences. We have been reaping these consequences for years with things like the HIV epidemic, destroyed families, bullying and elevated rates of LGBT suicide. We'll only move beyond these and stop this cycle when we recognize people like Scott Lively for what they are. Individuals who would gather an angry mob to murder a creature he doesn't understand.
Never has an analogy been so accidentally revealing.
TLDR: It takes a special kind of hateful stupidity to make yourself sound like the bad guy in your own analogy.
= new reply since forum marked as read
