Judgement is personal. In judging a person you embody your beliefs, your desires, and your impressions of the world around you, and this you do usually in a word. So someone who you do not like is not simply someone with red hair, it is someone who embodies everything you have ever thought about people with red hair; a person who believes in the afterlife is every argument you have had on the subject, every person you could not convince of your rightness, every bad day you ever had in some way involving the afterlife.

So a person who is gay is not just someone you dislike, it is someone who you feel represents everything that could ever not be right about anything to do with sexuality, love, religion, and any other connection you may make. The embodiment of so many of your personal convictions should be on your side, and never in striking contrast to them; therefore you are greatly upset that it would be so. But you, in your fury, in your desires, forget just one thing, something which is so very important.

You forget that a person with red hair is not red hair itself. A person who believes in life after death is not the only person with beliefs which do not align with yours. A person who is gay is not the embodiment of homosexuality and is not decided by that one specific trait. If you, in judging a person, do not consider every part of that person, you fail to give your beliefs the full life they have earned in defining you as a person. So your anger in being confronted with something you do not believe in may be justified, but your anger toward just the hair color, just one notion, just one tendency, is neither acceptable for you,  nor justifiable.

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13 December 2008