On reading homophobic writers

I'm covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival now, which is pretty exciting - that tent in Charlotte Square Gardens is like an alternate universe based entirely on books. :)

My first reading was a discussion with Tariq Ramadan. He's a Muslim scholar currently at Oxford, one of the best-known in Europe. It was a fantastic session - I'll post more about it once I've written my ThreeWeeks review.

There is much that we agree on, but I know, from reading elsewhere, that he believes that homosexuality is "wrong". I would like to read some of his work, but I will probably feel strange about it. It's a feeling Ramadan probably knows better than me - his Ph.D. was in Western philosophy, and I'm sure he has studied people he knows are racist. We pick and choose valuable points from work that we cannot be fully reconciled with.

I will never read a book by someone I agree with on everything. But there's something more fundamentally offputting about reading an author who would probably prefer that I didn't exist. All in all, it left me feeling a bit sad.