What if I had been straight, and I had gone really, really wrong? What if, given the privilege of heterosexuality, I turned against all the vulnerable and disadvantaged people, who, as a gay man, I inherently empathize with? As part of my job, I regularly read the writings of people in whom something has broken or withered—people who have lost the ability to see the humanity in others. I put myself in the mindset of people who dehumanize and vilify and hate . I become intimately acquainted with the twisted beliefs of those who, encountering a person they don’t quite understand, lash out with cruel loathing and immoral rage.

The effortlessly humble Mark Joseph Stern, who writes about homosexuality for Slate, wrote a Thanksgiving column saying how happy happy happy he is to be gay . Excerpt:

Because I am gay, it is basically impossible for me to become one of these people.

Yes, because he is gay, Mark Joseph Stern was born without original sin. Mark Joseph Stern cannot, by definition, dehumanize, vilify, and hate anybody. He could never lash out with cruel loathing and immoral rage.

Except when he’s savaging the interesting 23-year-old gay writer Brandon Ambrosino, when he was had been hired by Vox.com:

Yet Ambrosino’s main problem is not that he defends homophobia; the New York Times’ Ross Douthat does that too, but at least Douthat’s views arise from real intelligence and conviction. Ambrosino’s worldview, so far as he has one, is primarily comprised of crass opportunism and toxic narcissism. His writing is a quagmire of tedious ideas and sloppy prose; his angry jabs at the LGBTQ community reek of a writer legitimizing his insecurities by presenting them to an audience that should know better.

Andrew Sullivan took up for Ambrosino and called Stern guilty of “gay intolerance.” And he was right.

How completely unself-aware do you have to be to declare that you are immune from being a complete prick because you were born gay, or believe in Jesus, or anything else? You’re a human being, aren’t you? Being a homosexual does not give you special protection from being as big of a jerk as the rest of us (though given the media coverage of the past 10 years, it’s not hard to see how Stern got that idea). This must be the gay version of Spike Lee, 20 years or more ago, saying that black people could not be racist.

The oppressed becoming liberated then turning as bad or worse than their former oppressors is a very old story. Seems to me you’d have to be shockingly ignorant of human nature to write an essay bragging that you’re grateful to be gay because it means you cannot be a horrible person. I wonder what Mark Joseph Stern’s colleagues think of this piece.