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Agreed. The similarities between affirmation/esteem culture and guilt culture have probably been underinvestigated. I have a meta theory that many problems of human activity involve too much focus on what people ARE rather than what they DO. "Hate the sin, not the sinner" is once instance of moving in the right direction, but I think there are others, e.g. "Provide children - and people in general - approval for good things they accomplish, not for what they are."
(That's not to say that affirmation/esteem/guilt have no place in parenting, education etc.)
That's because it's the easy way out. You need to do intellectual or emotional labor to deal with people who DO [are aligned with your goals] but ARE NOT [aligned with the rules], and one way to deal with that is to turn your back and say you're not going to do it (doing this also gives you short-term power and sometimes people just get tired and want the easy way out).
Societies start to stop being able to do when the populace gets lazy like this. And while there is a place for identity, it must ultimately be subservient to activity, and when certain kinds of Christians/the Bible start talking about "women/the identity gender should not be in charge/operate unrestrained by men/the activity gender" I think this is what those parts are getting at.
Which leads to some interesting implications when you're talking about sexuality [and topically for this week, homosexuality], since "but what if my girl/boy grows up to be a woman/man incorrectly?" seems to me to be the driving impulse for the stereotypical swift parental overreactions to a woman who's more activity biased or a man who's more identity focused (regardless of how self-aware said child eventually becomes). And then, when that happens, is the implication more that two activity-genders or two identity-genders getting together is sinful (or is it just limited to "penis in the butt is bad", which... if the above is your understanding of gender/men/women that's going to seem immature at best and pointlessly angry at worst)?
But that, again, requires an unwillingness to be intellectually/emotionally lazy (which applies to both parties in that interaction; the sinner? has to also not be taking the lazy "they hate us 'cause they ain't us, so fuck you, I think I'll be as obnoxious as possible because I like being transgressive more than I like accommodating others" [which... right or wrong, it's that last part that condemns you more than anything else]).
Esteem/affirmation culture, in my view, lends itself far more to mere masturbation-by-proxy than a guilt or shame culture does.
Plausible and interesting. I shall look more into this issue.
Though I am not a Christian or against homosexual behaviour as such, I shall say this: their separation of (a) homosexual preferences from (b) homosexual behaviour ("It's ok to be born gay, as long as you don't do gay things" etc.) is already more sophisticated than many of the takes I hear from my students when debating this issues. Again, what people are vs. what they do.
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