Unconditional Love

Bah Humbug

There’s a lot of discussion about the concept of “unconditional love.” It’s usually a recommendation for parents to accept their children regardless of their sexual orientations, disabilities, and/or politics.

I firmly believe that love for human beings—whether as parents, siblings, other kin, friends, and public figures—does need to be well-expanded to include DEI. Remember Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations? That was a popular 1960s mantra taken from Star Trek. I think it was Spock who said it.

However, unconditional love makes me think of its sister concept: blind faith. I prefer the term “unseeing faith.” Many of us have grown to disavow unseeing faith. We realize that therein lays the dangers inherent in religious fanaticism, whether it be in a cult or even mainstream religion. Instead we try to embrace as many belief systems as we can. Yet, we also reject those that go against our values. We reject extremism.

And now I come to unconditional love. What loyalty or feeling might we owe to a serial killer, a rapist, or a child abuser? How about people who deliberately absent themselves from our lives? Or those who choose to embrace ideologies that violate our values and totally disgust us? Isn’t that kind of love simply beating our heads against the wall and watching the blood that flows from the bruises we sustain?

I reject the concept of unconditional love. Expanded love, yes, love that lets people be their authentic selves yes. A better encompassing love and empathy that allows differences in sexual orientations or cosmologies, different races, different genders, transitioning to new genders, disabilities—all the many parts of us that make us human beings—I say a resounding YES. But loving haters and people who do harm to others—that’s a whole different ball of wax.

I’m not prepared to love homophobes, racists, religious fanatics, killers, indifferent family members, guilt trippers, cannibals, terrorists, bombers, misogynists, ableists, and other folks who represent the worst of humanity. Like or not, the human race does include such horrible beings. I don’t have unconditional love for them and I don’t care whether or not they share my DNA.

I submit that perhaps we should have unconditional love for our values. And when those values are questioned or violated, we need to care enough to ask why that happened. Do we, perhaps, need to grow spiritually, emotionally, intellectually? Do we need to change? Or should we remain solidly grounded? We should always be prepared to question ourselves and remain open to new views. But let’s not be so open that our brains fall out of our heads.

Unconditional love. Nope. Not on my watch.