Last month, friend of the blog Keltic posted over at his own blog about the phenomenon of anti-gay bloggers employing below board tactics when confronted with an opposing view. I’ve seen it before, and I’ve dealt with it before, but it’s happened to me again, and I’m a little ticked off.

On Monday, blogger Charlene Jamison (who goes by the screen name californialily) posted an outrageous entry about California’s Proposition 8 on this November’s ballot. You know, the anti-gay one that removes our right to marriage as guaranteed under the California state constitution.

Being the reasonable person who assumes the best in people (stop laughing), I replied with a fairly calm response offering to debunk all of the claims in the piece she’d cut/pasted in. I even provided a few links to get her started if she wanted to research it herself. I also attempted to explain why religion is irrelevant to Prop 8. Of course, she deleted my response and posted a reply to two small bits that she felt able to swat down. Both responses had been covered in the portion that she deleted. Funny, that.

Fortunately for me (and you, gentle reader), when I replied I checked the option to send responses to my email. So the whole thing still exists, and while Charlene Jamison has every right to censor whatever she wants on her blog, it’s a bit dirty pool, and I have a right to re-post it here. I worried a little last night about the possibility that I’m being petty, but I’ve decided that petty as it may be, I’m also refuting the outrageous claims that Ms. Jamison made on (and still hasn’t deleted from) her blog and that some people still believe are facts.

So here, in the form of screen captures, are the posts in question. They’re all pretty large, so I’m not posting them inline, choosing instead to link to the images.

First, there’s Charlene Jamison’s original blog posting. I posted a link to the live version at the top of the post, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she deleted it. I noticed while writing this that she’s now deleted her reply that can be seen on this screencap.

Next up is my reply, captured by my email. Also included is Charlene’s reply to the two snippets that she didn’t delete. Since they contain valuable information, the links in my response are as follows: “The Box Turtle Bulletin”; “For example”; “comes from Paul Cameron”.

Finally, here’s a second response I made, which I never expected to see the light of day. And I was right! Hooray for expecting people to hide from truth!

And that’s my real problem with this. Charlene posted something that was incorrect and when that was pointed out, she chose willful ignorance over accepting truth. That’s what’s behind a lot of the anti-gay bias in both the church and society. Willful ignorance permits people (Charlene’s far from alone in this) to go on believing that Group X is beneath them, and that Group X doesn’t deserve the same rights and privileges as they have.

What’s so bizarre to me is that this kind of thinking is antithetical to real Christianity.