On the Question: "How Does This Affect You?"

The previous post addressed one of the following questions by @TwainIAint (aka Casey the Communist):

@BorlandTully And how, exactly, does this affect you? Slippery slope much, Herr Philosopher?

I now will address the first question: How exactly does this affect you?  And I will begin by addressing what I think about "How does this affect you?" questions more generally when asked in a moral context.


Not being a mind reader, nothing I say here should be taken as applying to Casey, what he was thinking when he asked that question, or why he asked that question.

My first reaction, typically, when asked something along the lines of "How does this affect you??" is to say "Well, how does what I say or did AFFECT YOU??"  But that sort of game easily turns into an infinite regress and we don't need those (after all, life is short).

My second reaction is to wonder what the implicit assumptions are that led someone to ask that question.  One assumption might be that the only rational thing for one to do is whatever one sees in one's own interest.  So if one cannot see that something is in another's self-interest, one might naturally wonder why the other person is doing what he is doing.

But that assumption--though seemingly widespread, for instance, in sports media--is a bad one.  There are plenty of things that are in my own interest that I am completely unaware of.  Moreover, it is sometimes rational to do things that are not characterized in terms of one's self-interest.  This is especially apparent in the Christian religion.

So is it irrational to blog about things which I do not think will affect me?  Not all.  Is it irrational or illicit in some way to Tweet about the Israeli government vs. Hamas (or Israel vs. Hamas as the media would have it) if you are neither an Israeli nor a Palestinian?  No.  Is it irrational to post a Facebook message complaining about the Chinese pegging the dollar to keep trade imbalanced if one is not a foreign investor?  I don't see why.

In my case, even if I do not see myself as directly affected by "this", there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with blogging about it.

But what WAS the "this" which may or may not affect me?  It was the media coverage of transgender marriages.  Not only that but it was an instance of what is often a leftist tactic to normalize the activity or practice which has been taboo.   The normalization strategy is hardly ever talked about in the media but isn't hard to find 'LGBTQ...?' activists discussing it.  If you think, for instance, it was not part of the agenda of "Modern Family" to help normalize the gay lifestyle then you're kidding yourself.  If you think movies like "Million Dollar Baby" are made just to make money you're delusional.

So now to answer the question: How does this affect me?  It affects me when I turn on the TV or fire up the computer and I am confronted with another know-nothing journalist subtly trying to normalize the taboo without argument.  It annoys me.  It annoys me that none of them know anything of the natural law.  It annoys me that the people they interview seem to speak with authority on the issue when they have never read Robert George, Finnis, or Pruss, let alone Aquinas (or the Bible).  It bothers me to know that there are many uncritical people drinking the dregs of the deleterious pop culture who will find themselves believing things contrary to the common good.

Now, perhaps the "this" in the original question was meant to refer to that particular "transgender marriage" or to "the transgender lifestyle" or some such thing.  How do transgender or gay marriages affect you?  Why bother about it?  Why is this even a moral issue to be discussed at all?  Why object to legislation legalizing gay "marriage" if it doesn't harm you?  No harm, no foul.  Live and let live.

I'll save a response to that line of thought for a future post.