Hate is Never Noble

I don’t see my dad very often. When I do, it either goes pretty okay or horribly bad. The latter was what I experienced last Friday night.
My dad is pretty conservative, I’ve known this for awhile. He listens to conservative talk radio and watches exclusively Fox News. As long as we don’t talk politics, the conversations usually don’t go sour.
Our most recent conversation lasted roughly four hours, and I learned a lot of things about my dad: he believes that the outrage over the priests molesting children is simply an attack on the Catholic Church. He believes that the majority (if not all) of gay men are or will be child molesters; he was not as clear on what lesbians do with children. He is not very well informed about evolution, and believes very strange things are “evolution,” when in fact those things are simply just events that have nothing to do with evolution. He believes that a person who molests a child is simply acting on their “sexual preference,” and it has nothing to do with control and possession. He has similar thoughts on rape; a man rapes a woman because he is very, very horny, not because he is a control freak with an entitlement complex. Oh, and the English language is the most superior language because…you know, because.

The conversation was toxic. I left feeling empty. And after that, I started thinking about hate, and how truly awful it is.
We feel justified in our hate, sometimes. Like, it’s okay to hate the racist assholes who just yelled “nigger” from the safety of their speeding cars. It’s okay to hate Nazis. It’s okay to hate Rush Limbaugh and his, super funny jokes about how women shouldn’t be able to vote. (Unless you like Rush, in which case you agree with him, or you’re annoyed that he said something so asinine.) It’s okay to hate the Westboro Baptist Church (they probably hate you, anyway.) It’s okay to hate that guy who just beat the crap out of his wife, or Yeardley Love’s horrible, abusive boyfriend. We feel justified, because these are not good people. I mean, it’s not like we’re the racist/sexist/whatever assholes spewing our garbage for everyone to hear, right? It’s okay to hate someone if that someone is all ready deserving of hate, right?
Oh, logic. How I miss you sometimes. See, the Westboro Baptist Church does not organize all of their protests with the awareness that they are crazy. No, they believe they are right and good, regardless of what anyone else thinks. The Nazis believed the same. As do white people who talk about niggers and spics and how awesome Arizona is now. (Disclaimer: not all white people think this way, thank god.) So how is their hate wrong, but ours is justified? To the Westboro Baptist Church, Nazis, even my father – I am wrong. My lifestyle and opinions are a threat to normalized society, a society which must be protected at all costs.
At this point, it just turns into an elaborate game of us versus them. We are convinced of our moral superiority, so therefore (logically) our hatred is justified. Who cares if we hate someone, as long as the people we hate are assholes?
This is what hate gets us:
The death of Matthew Shepard.
The beating of Rodney King.
The genocide in Rwanda.
The lynching of African Americans and other People of Color during the early 20th century, and Congress repeatedly rejecting bills to criminalize the act. (Yes, it was technically legal. I know.)
Kiana Firouz, a lesbian Iranian filmmaker, who is terrified to go home because she is faced with the death penalty – for being a lesbian.
And then there’s people like my dad. Who think that all poor people are only poor because they’re lazy, or reacts with violent disgust when the Pride Parade is mentioned. Now, I love my dad, and I certainly wouldn’t want to prohibit him from forming his own opinions, but he didn’t create these opinions from critical thinking. He feels contempt for anyone living in poverty because he grew up in poverty, and he had a pretty terrible childhood, in part because of it. He reacts with disgust to anything gay-related because he accepts only the forms of media which justify this hatred.
For all of his hatred, and huge leaps of logic, I can’t hate my dad. I’ve seen what hate does to a person, and I never want to be that person.