There are a lot of issues to unpack here. I’m going to talk about what I think is the most important, in most likely a cursory fashion, and hope this conversation keeps going.
@wundayatta, @WillWorkForChocolate, and @Haleth all have some great and insightful comments here – and personally, I think @wundayatta deserves particular note where it talks about fairness as a nuanced concept.
I think that this article reveals, indeed, a profoundly upsetting double standard. I don’t think that there’s so much an issue of “groupthink” here as there is the central issue of who bears the responsibility for the image of a community. We can all in a personal and smaller scale end up agreeing that no Christian is the same as another, and that Christianity represents a diverse set of people and beliefs. We can say the same about Muslims. We can say the same about LGBTs.
The double standard comes into play, though, on the larger scale. In the U.S., the vast majority of people identify as Christians. Where someone, for whatever reason, speaks out about Christians generally, or talks about an example of Christians behaving badly, I see Christians stating, as they rightfully should, that such-and-such doesn’t represent all Christians. I also see, less rightfully, claims that whatever the bad example is is “not a true Christian.” It is, however, the job of the non-Christian to understand that, and not the job of the Christian to stand up and prove it, when it really comes down to it.
When we have the same situation above where there is a bad act by a Muslim, it seems further proof of uniformity. If the moderate Muslim community doesn’t immediately speak out, and constantly do so, and do so in exactly the way that the majority wants them too, then it seems Muslims should expect that people think about them as terrorists, because they are not doing enough to prove that they’re not. It’s so important, in fact, that we actually have Congressional hearings on whether the Muslim community is doing enough to police itself.
But trying to speak out every time someone who shares your religion does something wrong in order to have it accepted you’re not the same person they are, and not being allowed to step out of line in any way, or be silent at any time, is exhausting.
With the LGBT community, where there are bad acts, it’s again proof of uniformity. Where accusations are levied at the community, it seems the responsibility of that community to respond with profound proof that the accusation is false…even if it’s the same accusation that’s always been made, based on data that is decades old (the same data that has been used since the accusations began). If we don’t speak loundly, calmly, and with enough respect, all of us, then it must be true.
But again…that is exhausting.
This is what I see as the real double standard. Christians always seem to get to use the “no true scotsman” defense…and the rest of us don’t.
What’s upsetting is that, as the majority, in a religion that is about acceptance, tolerance, and peace, it really should be the Christian community’s responsibility to call itself to task for what is said in the name of its community. But they are not. Because we should understand that where Christians preach radical hate, they are not true Christians. And that is all the argument required.
Let me then say this: The people discussed in that article, who are being disrespectful, are not true members of hte LGBT community.
If that sounds odd…perhaps you see the double standard too. ;-)