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My Son Was Never Really a Bigot, But You…

The only folks more annoying than the ones that thought I was defending bigotry are the ones defending bigotry

Chris L. Robinson
3 min readAug 11, 2021

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[Someone finally goaded me into a long response on the “My Son, The Bigot” article that I wrote last year about my very young son casually dismissing things he didn’t like as “gay”.

I don’t want to devote a lot of energy to it, but since I typed something up, I thought I’d put it where you all could see it.]

Because your comments deserve a thoughtful response…

“Well at the moment your son has the ability to realise that smack talk is unrelated to his actual feelings about some minority.”

My son’s comments weren’t “smack talk”. They were not directed AT people. He did not call someone that he didn’t like gay as an insult.

Because I would have nipped that shit in the bud instantly.

And he hadn’t reasoned his way to using gay in a derogatory fashion, either. In fact, he wasn’t using reason, at all. Which was a big part of the problem.

The “feelings” I care about in this situation are two-fold. First, I care about his feelings — about how he thinks. I don’t want my son to, even casually, associate gayness with…

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Chris L. Robinson
Chris L. Robinson

Written by Chris L. Robinson

Top Writer in Parenting, and Food. I write about masculinity, fatherhood, family, and relationships.

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