The above video is a perfect demonstration of the phenomenon I referred to in my other post on bigotry. Watch as the woman interviewed contents with her genuine hatred and revulsion for homosexuals (to the point of agreeing that they should be killed), while simultaneously recoiling at the suggestion that she's a vicious bigot who thinks gay people should die. Anderson Cooper is shrewd enough to not use that terminology, which always gets those to which it applies into a bull-headed defensiveness. Instead he just putting her own words (and her pastor's) before her and letting her indict herself, which leads to results that would be comical were they not so sad. The defensive, passive-aggressive response demonstrates just how profound the conflict is in this unfortunate woman's head, and that conflict need not be there. She knows perfectly well that it is not ok to want to kill homosexuals, that such a position is anathema to much of her own society, but she also knows (or at least, Deeply Holds the Belief) that her god really doesn't like them. And thus she doesn't like them, and yet is in a world that doesn't like her because of her willingness to go along with the eradication of entire groups of people. And considering she apparently has never heard of the Holocaust of World War II (which saw not only Jews, but homosexuals, gypsies, some Catholics, the disabled and countless other undesirables put behind fences and killed), what chance does she have of truly understanding the ramifications of her contradictory position?
It's true she appears quite ignorant, but there's no point saying "she's just stupid", because it's not as if generally intelligent people don't fall into the same trap. The problem is she does not seem willing to accept what her own words (and those of the pastor, which she defends) actually mean. This is not borne out of ignorance or stupidity, because it's not as if she is unaware of the words she just spoke, and from the ripple of revulsion across her face every time Anderson Cooper points those words out to her, there is clearly an internal struggle going on that prevents her from truly backing them up without caveats and excuses about how everything is being taken out of context. Except it's not, and it's abundantly clear that she's defending the position that homosexuals should be executed and that this is, for some reason, such a primary driving force in her life and the life of her pastor and at least part of his church community that it has to be defended to the point of arguing that, yet again, words don't mean what they mean.
Round and round we go. Here it is, your palate cleansing moment of zen:
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