Montana Cowgirl has had a bit of a shitstorm over a man-purse reference involving candidate Roy Brown.
I’ve had a lot of correspondence with Cowgirl over the past few months, and I think she gets it- she’s expressed a willingness to be educated AND expressed remorse at her regrettable comment. Cowgirl has never presented herself as anything other than an ally in the struggle for LGBT Montanan’s rights. She’s entitled to a little tongue-in-cheek humor as far as I’m concerned- and I’m not naive enough to believe that everybody or even anybody agrees with me.
Pseudonymous commentary is almost as old as writing itself. It has it’s place. She’s not doing her job the way I would do it, but there’s got to be room for her here. It takes all kinds doing their jobs (as they see them) the best they can- and I believe it’s my job to try first to educate rather than picking up the “Offended” stick and responding in outrage.
There are a lot of us out there, great people who are passionate about the same issues- activists, bloggers, reporters, letter writers, commenters, etc. We won’t always agree, but we all deserve to be heard and, conversely, to try and respectfully hear each other. that means taking responsibility for our words and actively working to educate each other about the power of some of those words.
It’s not a perfect system, but we can make it better by first calmly pointing out rather than screaming in outrage- unless of course, the calm pointing is continually or habitually ignored….
Then it’s on.
From Eternity To Here 