Let me put this bluntly…

After a few of the comments on my post about certain responses to the Give a Fuck quilt out here in the Interwebs I think that perhaps I need to be a bit more direct, that my analytical approach left too much room for the misinterpretation of my words. So let me be as direct as I humanly can:

I do not care if you like this quilt or any other quilt.

I do not care if you want to tell the entire world that you dislike this quilt, or any other quilt. That is your right.

Seriously, your taste and opinion are yours. You have an absolute right to them and though I may not share your taste I really don’t care about taste at all, whether you share my taste or not. It is pretty much irrelevant to me in terms of genuine critical dialogue, which is what matters to me.

If you feel compelled to go a step further and question the validity of the maker as a human being, to question their value as a person of faith (or not), to question whether someone who would make such a quilt is fit to be a parent, or declare that such a quilt should never be made because you cannot see the possible reasons, then I have a problem.

Nobody is required to like anything, but how we express our opinions matters. There is a huge difference between saying, “I cannot stand that quilt; it is an affront to my sense of decency,” and stating that someone who would make this quilt, “shouldn’t be allowed to be a mother.” If we as a community cannot understand that difference I fear that we are a community in name only.

I hope we can indeed be a community, or at least reasonably decent human beings.

-t

For those of you who have yet to see the quilt in question, here it is:

thomas-knauer-sews-give-a-fuck
(photo via happenings on chaos ranch)

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