With all the hyperbolic whining about “Fake News” from both
conservative and liberal alike, I had the opportunity to witness a real-world example
of Fake News and see just how pervasive it’s effect had on witless people.
There
was a post going around on twitter advocating pedophilia and the inclusion of pedophilia
as a part of the protected status of the LGBTQ community that had gained the attention
of a "Christian" personality on facebook. The later shared this post, therefore
making it viral. Though it was not the post that I have below, it was something
similar to it, or at least in the same spirit.
When you
do some digging on the original twitter poster however, the user had less than
5 followers, and only two or three posts. It was the solitary post that was
picked up by this Christian blogger to be “exposed.” Subsequently the Christian
poster garners the attention of the most dank memes on the internet, gaining
thousands of shares and likes for this call to action.
Now I’m
going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the initial twitter post and
the poster’s account were fabricated. For one it seems odd that there would be
an advocate for pedophilia on twitter with little notoriety or following
suddenly being discovered. (Search engines use algorithms to find content based
on relevancy, which includes the amount of times someone’s page has been
accessed. This is why my twitter account of 150+ follower fame will be passed
up when someone google searches “Author” when there are hundreds more with
10,000+ followers.). Also, the fact that the post was engineered to spark moral
outrage was made so transparently clear, seems fitting for Christian advocacy
groups everywhere, which constantly are mining information for the link between
being gay and committing acts of sexual deviancy. And, lastly, Facebook can
only share links and pictures. Facebook, as of yet, does not allow the
embedding of twitter posts that you can interact with. So anyone can produce a
screen shot of something like Twitter and have people take it as the genuine
article, despite going through all the effort in my case to make the poster
seem legitimate.
The use
of moral outrage to polarize and divide has become so commonplace that seeing
this in action was almost banal. The fact of the matter is, however, that this “Christian
Advocate” (who could be a fake account as well) successfully polarized both Christians
and non-Christians, did not advance the gospel of Jesus Christ, and advanced a precedent
that is not true of any LGBTQ community. While there is a historical period of
Hellenism (a zeitgeist of Greek thought advanced by Alexander the Great prior
to the rule of the Roman Empire) that practiced and advocated pedophilia and
homosexuality as a virtue, advances in common sense across all cultures and
countries have uniformly decried it and outlawed it, despite Roy Moore’s most
recent attempts to make “Underage Sex Great Again.”
What I
think made my nose curl at this stench so intensely I can reiterate here. While
I am a Christian, and while I think that Homosexuality is a sin (just like
watching porn and being straight is a sin), I also believe that members of the
LGBTQ community are human beings deserving of respect and dignity. And while I
do not accept what they preach, their narratives should not be persecuted, if
not singled out, simply because they conform to values different than ours. (I
don’t ever recall a time when Hindus couldn’t be married because their values
and ideals strayed from the Judeo-Christian norms.)
Lastly,
I think that it’s silly that we (especially Christians) are not more equipped to
discern what is useful for building up and what is not. Given to how much we
read, cite, and source, yet cannot do this outside of the bible with accuracy or
conviction is confounding. Fake News is a real threat, and there is so much opportunity to be
kind and loving to everyone affected by it.
Happy Saturday Everyone!
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