The majority of Star Trek fans are everything that the philosophy of IDIC could possibly want. But every so often, the exact sort of intolerance that is antithetical to the world of Trek rears its head. Witness the following letter to author Andy Mangels, and Andy’s scathingly witty reply. Obviously, as the creator of the bi-sexed Burgoyne in “New Frontier,” I’ve found the letter particularly interesting. Although the letter is reprinted with Andy’s permission, I’ve taken the liberty of mercifully omitting the author’s name.
Dear Mr. Mangels,
> Thank you for writing stories that reside in the Star Trek Universe. I have
> enjoyed quite a few of your offerings in the past and am a very loyal fan of
> the series ever since it originally aired.
> While trying to catch up on a huge backlog of Star Trek reading, I finally
> got around to reading your Enterprise novel, ‘The Good That Men Do’. I
> really enjoyed the novel, as it very nicely intertwined various broadcasts of the
> series and added a few twists. However, I am very disappointed in your
> creation of a gay couple, Trip Tucker’s brother Albert, into the story near the
> very end. It soiled an ‘up to that point’ excellent read and was totally
> unnecessary.
> This is the first time that I have ever felt the need to comment on anything
> written in the Star Trek genre. But please keep your activism out of the
> Star Trek Universe.
> Sincerely,
(NAME WITHELD BY PAD)
>
>
(ANDY’S RESPONSE)
Thanks for your support in the past, and glad you’ve enjoyed some of our
writing. I suspect that will now change.
I’ve forwarded your email to my HETEROSEXUAL co-writer, Michael A. Martin,
who created and wrote the scenes with the gay couple in question, without ANY
prompting from me. I’ll let him respond to your bigotry.
Meanwhile, you can thank me – the fággøŧ with the agenda – for writing the
scene with Trip praying early on, and the scene where he discusses church and
faith in God with Phuong. Not the first faith-based scenes I’ve written for
Trek, and won’t be the last. I just don’t believe that God condones hatred.
It’s sad and pathetic that fans of a series based on the principal “Infinite
Diversity in Infinite Combinations” — and who regularly read and enjoy books
wherein characters of DIFFERENT SPECIES engage in romantic relationships — get
their bigotry hats on when faced with gay characters.
I don’t doubt that people who express ideas exactly like yours were similarly
objecting to Uhura and Kirk kissing, but thankfully, such anti-black bigotry
has been beaten back mostly. I look forward to the day when people who hate
others for loving are as unwelcome as a fart in church.
Best,
Andy Mangels
• 
Freedom to believe other people are lesser does not stop such beliefs from being bigoted and quite frankly incredibly stupid.
“Free speech” has nothing to do with anything. People are free to be bigots. The rest of us are free to call them such.
There doesn’t need to be a point for having a character in a book be gay any more than there need to be a point for them to be straight. The fact that people have no problem accepting the presence of non-human characters but flip out when they encounter non-hetero characters is their problem, and no one elses.
Having said this, now maybe you understand why I was reasonable to call you on your bigoted assumption atheists could not logically be homophobic.
Except that was not what I said. That was not what anyone has said.
No one can be logically homophobic, because it is an illogical ideology. Those who examine their beliefs logically, whether religious or secular, invariably turn away from homophobia.
And again, it is telling that arguments against mindless hatred are nitpicked while you give the moron who wrote the letter that started this all a pass.
You literally portrayed homophobia as dependent on religion. The notion that atheists cannot be homophobic is an unavoidable inference of this portrayal to anyone with any fidelity to logic. I’ve simply been going by the fidelity to logic you’ve been taking credit for.
Jesus Christ you are a pedantic ášš, not to mention your single minded defense of bigotry.
What I fûçkìņg said, to those not so intent on defending the charming practice of writing letters to openly gay authors just to politely let them know you think they are subhuman scum, is:
Plenty of religious people are not homophobes, but it is disingenuous to suggest that the vast majority of homophobes don’t base their bigotry on religion.
And, of course, the fact you are more upset by the supposed anti-religious bigotry demonstrated by the author pointing out his own positive portrayal of religious faith represents while ignoring the insulting letter that started all of this tells us nothing, does it?
You literally contradicted yourself, and now you’re trying to portray me as damaged goods for making a simple observation on display for anyone online. Like that isn’t predatory at all.
Treating logic and political correctness as independent of each other doesn’t make me a bigot. Bigotry is not defined by refusing to treat logic and political correctness as synonyms. Why don’t you help your cause by abstaining from scapegoating people to pour your disgust on?
Wow, if the letter writer found THAT offensive, I wonder what he’d make of George Takei on Stern today discussing how he occasionally sampled a “glory hole” in a men’s bathroom before he hooked up with Brad, his current boyfriend. No doubt he’d never be able to watch an ep with Sulu in it again!
Of course, now it’s “politically correct” not to hate fággøŧš. And nothing could be worse than being “politically correct”, right?
Respond to the entire statement rather than picking out little soundbites that allow you to defend your fellow bigots. And don’t insult religion by trying to present your defense of bigotry as a defense of religious belief. Plenty of people who are religious reject bigotry.
On further review of your posts, they seem to be both completely compatible with what I’ve been saying all along. The urgency of your non-disagreement doesn’t seem to be based on anything going on in this thread. What is your problem? Who are you? If you aren’t going to invalidate anything I say, what is anything I say to you?
When is it ever politically correct to hate gays? My understanding is that hating gays and political correctness are mutually exclusive resolves. That’s a literal virtue of challenging the political-correctness-scare. Dude, are you not well?
My refusal to take orders from you doesn’t change the meaning of what I’m replying to. How convenient is it for you your name-calling — without referring to anything I say — doesn’t dilute your fidelity to logic in the least?
If I’ve left out anything you’ve said that changes the meaning of what I’ve been replying to, you are free to call me on it. If you can’t call me on it, I don’t see how that’s my problem.
“Political correctness” is simply a code word bigots use to rail against being expected to treat others decently. PC is nothing but plain courtesy.
The letter writer was incredibly rude. Pointing out in response that the author had included positive portrayals of religion does make an assumption, a not-unfounded assumption. It is not in any sense an “attack” on anyone or anything other than the initial bigotry.
I do take offense when people castigate the author for being “rude” in response to an unprovoked attack on his very existence. I think the letter response was if anything too restrained, and we should all hope that readers with views so antithetical to everything Trek stands for would either grow as people through being exposed to new ideas or at the least leave the rest of us alone.
We don’t need “fans” like that. I find it disgusting to have anything at all in common with someone who would hold such views, and wonder how anyone could reconcile being a fan of Trek with holding such anti-egalitarian views.
You keep saying this as if anyone is defending the letter-writer. You literally are not going to find any defense of him by me anywhere.
The assumption is unfounded if the compliments of positive portrayals of religion are absent in his letter — which they literally are. Try reading the post this thread is based on. Is there some kind of Vulcan proverb that says it’s ok to make šhìŧ up about people to make offensive people extra-offensive?
Contradiction: It’s What’s For Dinner.™
Then why do you have to make šhìŧ up to prove bigotry? Isn’t challenging those who take offense at Andy Mangels’s reply wrong enough for you without making šhìŧ up about people?
If by “too restrained” you mean “needed to make šhìŧ up about the homophobic commenter and posters here who aren’t even defending him” as you’ve done — I don’t agree.
You mean like access to a computer and the ability to grammatically attribute verbs to nouns? Should his healthy blood donations be refused by all institutions expect for those serving the most desperate and vulnerable recipients? Are separate water fountains in order?
No one here is saying that he can. It’s a wonder you feel the need to call any of the posters here bigots.
It’s not as though everyone in the secular world
is enlightened. Homophobia should not be attributed only to people of faith. Jesus Christ was not a homophobic bigot! Unfortunately, many of His followers have been manipulated over the years into believing any number of vile notions.
Religion-based homophobia is just another one of those.
You keep saying this as if anyone is defending the letter-writer.
I keep saying this because people are ignoring the fact that this áššhølë provoked the response. I keep pointing this out because people give the letter writer the benefit of the doubt while attacking Mangels’ response. People keep asserting that “The unnamed author never said WHY he took issue with the homosexual storyline, other than that he felt he was being subjected to unwanted activism.” While parsing any comment opposed to the idiots bigotry as being “an attack on religion”. And somehow the fact that Mangels in fact wrote positive portrayals of religious faith is part of this attack on religion…
If your reaction to a person who was attacked with no provocation is to nitpick their response rather than the attack, that tells us something about you.
Or to put it differently, since this type of reponse happens every single time some moron decides to harass people for being gay…
An appropriate response from religious types to homophobic idiocy:
I’m sorry, not all religious people are like that
An inappropriate response:
How dare you say something against religion, you bigot!
In other words, it’s not about you.
Until you have to spend the night in the hospital with a friend because some morons got it into their heads to beat the crap out of Christians, don’t whine about how terribly the gays are oppressing you.
How, and how?
And they shouldn’t say this why? Because he did say why he was a homophobe?
Isn’t there an exploitation going on somewhere you could be intervening in while you’re here selectively blaming religion for homophobia?
Yeah, it says Andy Mangals’s sincere reply was good enough for me without you trying to take credit for his ridicule of the homophobe by making šhìŧ up about the posters here or even the letter-writer Mangels responded to.
You won’t find a post by me that resembles your strawman. I’ve simply observed you are selectively applying a principle arbitrarily, and as long as you are here, since you reserve for yourself hypocrisy as a privilege, I can count on you doing so again. Why is it such a hardship to accept that the secular APA classified homophobia as a mental disorder until the 1970s? What’s with all this making šhìŧ up about people? If you’re going to make šhìŧ up about me, why shouldn’t I call you on it?
I mean, dude, take a look how what Mangels say compares to what you say:
The diversity you cite as a virtue in the Star Trek universe also includes diversity in religion. This includes seven seasons of Deep Space Nine with Sisko as an emissary to divine entities. I don’t see how citing themes of tolerance to justify your intolerance of religion doesn’t qualify you as a hypocrite.
I’m not asking anyone to take my word for anything.
Is this how you honor your injured friend, by taking him hostage, and using his misfortune as a justification to vent disgust on me?
More popcorn, anyone?
It seems as though Mike has ruined another thread, so we might as well get what enjoyment out of it that we can before we give it (or perhaps Mike) the Old Yeller treatment.
Thank you for your urgent non-disagreement, Craig. It lets me know, as my portraying your response as a non-disagreement implies, it’s obvious I’ve haven’t said anything for anyone to disagree with. Urgently.
I apologize for my post from last week. It was a knee-jerk response that came from my feelings on religion (and its state of decline) and had very little to do with the topic at hand. PAD, I regret taking you to task on this issue, especially when I messed up your original point as badly as I did. You shouldn’t have had to defend yourself from an idiot and I am sorry. I will continue to read the site and limit my posts to the Cowboy Pete segments from now on.
Boy, imagine how this guy would have felt if he’d read one of the Titan books and found out that Keru, the late Lt. Hawk’s lover, is chief of security! And serving as a father figure to a child whose biological father died in the line, no less!
Boy, imagine how this guy would have felt if he’d read one of the Titan books and found out that Keru, the late Lt. Hawk’s lover, is chief of security! And serving as a father figure to a child whose biological father died in the line, no less!
Looking at both of ChicagoDon’s posts makes me think. Especially the “state of decline” part. Now, it seems like most times in the news, religion gets it’s worst side shown, by the zealots and the holier-than-thou types, and by the people who want creationism taught in science classes, to say nothing of all the sex scandals. At my old church, Sacred Heart, Father Bob came in and cleaned up the neighborhood. There was a motel across the street that was being used for various not-so-aboveboard purposes. He led the neighborhood in getting it shut down. Now, for me personally, he really reminded me at my wedding just how lucky I am to have my wife, instant waterworks. But that kind of story doesn’t make good press, so it doesn’t get a lot of play. The media, especially the news media, love a sensational story. They don’t like a church-cleans-up-a-neighborhood story.
ChicagoDon, I’m not attacking you or your views on religion. I’m just saying they’re not ALL like that.
Sean, you aren’t attacking ChicagoDon’s comments at all. You seem to be providing the basis for the hostility against religion he is observing.
Peter portrayed ChicagoDon as aggressive for saying Peter mentioned his character at the beginning of his post when he mentioned hir at the end of it. That isn’t true if ChicagoDon simply commented casually, and ChicagoDon’s error didn’t make anything he said untrue — Peter even answered his question. If their was any aggression going on between Peter and ChicagoDon, it wasn’t from anything ChicagoDon said.
Craig, you got any of that popcorn without salt?