Anti-Climacus

LINK: Sara Butler has a quite good post on civility in politics, always a favorite topic of mine:

"I think Ampersand is right when he said in the comments below that "the most basic element of civil debate is being willing to give the other side the benefit of the doubt." But maybe you can understand my skepticism about how committed most pro-choicers are to civil debate when I have to first prove I'm not a murdering fanatic, when I'm refered to as "evil" in the casual conversations of our campus chapter of the Feminist Majority, when my professor expresses first disbelief and then shock and horror upon discovering I'm a pro-life. I can count on about two fingers the number of feminists who have ever given me the benefit of the doubt.

I know y'all pro-choicers have the exact same kind of stories. But, frankly, at the moment, I don't care. I don't care because at the end of the day, there's only one person whose behavior I can control, and that's me, and I know none of the stories you have are because of me.

There comes a point when I'm not willing to excuse the behavior towards me of people who disagree with me just because someone who does agree with me was mean to them. And it's nice that some of y'all feel bad that that's happened and I hope you can convince more people to feel bad about it, but that doesn't make me want to excuse it either. If we wait for everyone on both sides to stop being jerks before we start giving each other the benefit of the doubt, it's never gonna happen.

I'm part of a movement and therefore have a responsibility to help shape that movment. Believe me, I get it. But I'm also an individual who deserves to be judged by my own behavior, not by what someone else who agrees with me about some aspect of a particular issue does or says. I'm sick of the lame excuses people offer for not doing that. I'm sick of all my apologizing for other people never being enough. And I'm sick of giving people the benefit of the doubt only to have them spit in my face.

I will go on giving people the benefit of the doubt. But if you take that opportunity and just treat me like the enemy, don't surpise when I say forget civil debate and fight back."