more galliano, for some reason:
The lead judge stressed that the court’s job was not to decide whether someone was racist or anti-Semitic deep down. But she invited the designer to elaborate, if he wished, on a comment he had made about having been discriminated against himself to explain he couldn’t be a bigot. “I was born Juan Carlos Galliano,” he began. His family moved from Gibraltar to south London when he was 6 years old, he said, when he already knew he was gay. He went to a typical English school for boys, he said. “And you can imagine that children can be very cruel.”
putting it mildly, the argument that you yourself have felt the sting of bigotry, and hence can't be a bigot, is obviously fallacious. it would follow from this that there aren't any racist women, or any homophobic or anti-semitic black people, etc. being the victim of discrimination or bullying ought to make you more sympathetic to others in similar straits, but it often does not have that effect.
