Michael McGough

My Apology to Michael McGough: Ghandi and the Jews

by Bedford Hope on March 11, 2010

Dear Mr. McGough,

I’m sorry about my post on your recent article in the LA Times. I could have read your piece in a positive light, but I didn’t. Sometimes supportive parents see slights when they are not there.

I had no right to be as testy as I was in my little rant; all you were saying was that anti-bullying and proactive parenting might not shield a child from a damaging level of peer abuse. And there are many places in this country where I’m sure you’re right.

LIttle kids are amazingly pliable; they can easily be taught to love, or hate. The social conservatives are correct to pull out of public institutions (by their own reasoning) if they want to maintain the status quo with regards to acceptance of sexual minorities.

We live in La La land and can get away with what we’re doing. This is why I’m trying to rhetorically carve out a place for parents to make accommodations with their local realities. But texts can be read in different ways, and I think you hit the raw and exposed nerve we all have, in this community: IF our kid end up like Lawrence King, then we are, suddenly, absurd moonbats leading our children down the garden path to destruction.

It’s like waking on fire without being burned; you become very sensitive to people jiggling your elbow. There’s no comfort zone, really; do you hurt your kid on the inside to police the outside, or try to strengthen his inside, to be able to withstand the hurt coming from outside?

I’m reminded of Ghandi shaming the British through non-violent means into permitting Indian independence. His plan for non-violence action in Nazi Germany, mass suicides to protest mass murder, was utopian liberal moonbatism.

The question for parents is, do they live among the British, or among Nazis?

Camtabridgians and San Franciscans are definitely British. I have no personal experience of the heartland or the South, though I get second hand reports from our network of families. We seem as a nation to be more largely British than you might imagine. Moonbat hyperbole aside.

but it’s a near thing.

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Responding to Michael McGough’s, Psychiatrists, ‘Sissies,’ and the Schoolyard

by Bedford Hope on February 24, 2010

Michael McGough questions the wisdom of supportive parenting in Psychiatrists, ‘Sissies’ and the Schoolyard from the LA Times:

… this connection informs a program at a Washington, D.C., children’s hospital that helps parents accept  their “gender-variant” kids. A brochure for the program advises parents that although most of these boys will be gay, many will “grow up to be masculine and conventional in their appearance.” Meanwhile, the program counsels parents to question “traditional assumptions about social gender roles and sexual orientation.” “The more that society and their peers may be critical of [these children],” it says, “the more important it is for them to have the support and acceptance of their families.”

The question is whether programs like this – or kinder, gentler medical manuals – will prevent other kids from tormenting outcasts with words like “sissy” or  “retard” — or “fatso,” for that matter. Children, unfortunately, are crueler than either parents or psychiatrists.

You know, I’m sure this guy’s heart is in the right place, but I catch in this piece the whiff of the notion that supportive parents are moonbat utopians setting their gender variant kids up for bullying on the schoolyard, when what they need to do is practice some ‘common sense’ and reign in their kid’s identities.

Teach ‘em to hide.

I have to say, I was this guy 10 years ago. And let me tell you how full of shit I was about a subject I knew nothing about.

The DC program and brochure (the CNMC program linked to in my sidebar) that amuse McGough understands that different communities have different levels of tolerance for non-conformity. It understands compromise, safety, dress codes, standards. What supportive parenting aims at is not making sure every GV boy gets a Hello Kitty lunchbox and a pink skirt; it’s trying to attack the root of self-loathing, self-hatred, which leads to highly elevated suicide rates and lives wasted icognito.

Yeah, a kid who hasn’t been taught to hate himself might get beat up, because he hasn’t internalized that he is less human than a normal boy; he might also not end up swinging from the rafters. Of course, that kid might be bullied so badly in either case that he takes his own life. In both cases, isn’t it the bullying that is the actual problem? Not the lunchbox?

Bullying victims, like rape victims, aren’t asking for it.

So I wrote an irate reply, which it seems like someone didn’t like, as it has vanished. So I’m posting this on my own puppet show.

We know what we’re doing Mike. Our kids will pay the consequences when we’re wrong, but you’d be amazed at my kid if you knew him. He’s fearless. Doesn’t wilt at the occasional epithet. Looks cute in the skirt, with the blond streak in his shoulderlength hair.

I saw him once, in second grade, turn on a kid who asked him pointedly why a boy would want to wear a skirt.

“BECAUSE IT’S A FREE COUNTRY, ASSHOLE!”

My son is doing fine in the Schoolyard, Mike. He’s the bravest person I’ve ever known. I like to think our support gave him some of that courage, but who knows.

All I know is, the CNMC pamphlet didn’t hurt him a bit.

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