Background Check
As I’m sure most of you will remember, a few days ago at the Fox News/Google Republican Presidential Debates, members of the audience loudly booed a gay soldier’s question to the panel with regard to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
A conversation about this on a Facebook wall led me in to a really disappointing and disturbing conversation in which someone else attempted to defend the ban on gays in the military. The various statements made by this person in defense of his position are well-worn and common. Paraphrasing:
This is the “real world,” some people are uncomfortable with homosexuals and don’t want to serve in the military with them, so they shouldn’t have to.
Not everybody who is uncomfortable with homosexuals is a bigoted homophobe.
I support “civil unions,” but not “gay marriage.” We shouldn’t force churches to perform services that violate their beliefs.
It’s not that I have a problem with it, but people do and they shouldn’t be forced to serve with gays if they don’t want to. I fully support the right of gay people to serve…but others don’t, and it’s about keeping up the morale of the service.
You’re a bigger jerk for telling people they aren’t allowed to be bigots than they are for being bigots. They have the right to feel whatever they feel.
I had to block the guy to save myself from creating big drama on a friend’s wall…but the things that were wrong with this conversation really made me angry, disappointed, and frightened. Not just this one person, but the realization of how often I’ve heard these lines of “reasoning,” and how badly flawed they are.
The Real World
Yeah, let’s talk about “the real world” for a minute. Here’s “the real world” – if you spend so much time thinking about what other people do with their genitals that you cannot function in your job, you are not fit to serve in a military force. You cannot be trusted. What if your job entails saving the life of a homosexual? Isn’t that, in the larger sense, everything that your job is about? Nobody’s asking you to sleep with them – and you know what? If they do, that’s a compliment. Somebody finds you attractive. If you don’t feel the same way, you politely say so and move on.
In the key western democracies which are at issue, military services is not compulsory. Nobody’s forcing anyone to be there. But even if it was a draft situation, there is simply no rational excuse – not one, not one single rational excuse exists, in no way in no shape in no form – that justifies refusing to serve with a homosexual.
That’s the real world.
What You Think It Means
This is important: we have to stop playing games with words. If you are “uncomfortable” with homosexuals, you are a homophobe by definition. Homophobia is a type of bigotry. There is no nice way to say this, but that doesn’t give anyone the right to refuse to hear it. If you don’t want to think of yourself as a bigot, then good for you, it means you have some kind of conscience.
Here’s how to avoid being a bigot: stop being a bigot.
That’s not always easy. I was a child of the 70’s and 80’s, and my parents were of the 40’s and 50’s – casual bigotry (and sometimes not so casual) were part of my world growing up. I understand how tough it can be to look yourself in the eye and say “I’ve been wrong. All this time, I’ve been wrong.”
But you have to do it. Because you’re wrong, and your wrongness, whether the passive-aggressive “it’s just the way things are” wrongness or the active, Westboro Baptist Church wrongness, is destroying us. It’s destroying our communities, our culture, our nation, and our way of life. If our thinking in these matters doesn’t change, it will eventually either destroy our species or reduce it to prehistoric population levels. Children are killing themselves over this, and the thinking that lies beneath this attitude is what has kept us killing each other for thousands of years.
It’s time to stop. We can’t always go back and make things right, but that’s no excuse to keep getting them wrong.
If we’re going to end the suffering and pain in this world to the best of our abilities, we can’t go around hating each other because of what color our skin is or who we love. There are real problems to be dealt with. This tribalism and “othering” is a holdover from a past time, a time when we didn’t understand just how completely interconnected we all are on this planet. Now we do, and we have to change our thinking to reflect that.
Separate but Equal
It stuns me that I even have to point out the flaws in the “civil unions” argument. This is the same half-hearted compromise that has plagued ever important civil rights advance in human history. “Well, okay, you can kinda play games, but you do it over here. Away from the normal people.” “I don’t mind [insert minority], but I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one.”
In the real world, “separate but equal” is neither. That is just as true about the place you eat, the place you learn, the place you work, and the place you live. The world is getting smaller, and we are all getting to know each other better. Each of us forms a strand in a web of unimaginable complexity. Each of our actions have effect on all of us.
And when one of us hurts, we are all hurt. It is in your personal best interests to do everything in your power to end the hate, anger, violence, selfishness, greed, apathy, and ignorance in the world around you. You bitch about paying for the costs of welfare, just imagine how much you’d have saved if you’d got off your butts and paid for the costs of proper health care, child care, and education for all those people on welfare, twenty years ago when we had the money in hand to do it!
The big lie of “separate but equal” is the lie that you can separate yourself from other human beings. You can’t.
Passive-Aggressive Enabling
I started really getting angry when I saw the self-righteousness of this person’s attitude start flowing. “I am a minority myself, I have no tolerance for bigotry! I don’t have a problem with gays, but other people do and we have to do what’s best for the morale and performance of the unit. That’s just how it is. I live in the real world.” No, you live in a world gone by. As the eminently quotable Pope Snarky hath proclaimethed:
Tolerance of intolerance is not, in fact, tolerance; it's merely passive-aggressive enabling of intolerance.
The idea that it’s somehow okay to accept intolerance because there’s nothing you can do about it, that’s just the way things are…again, there’s no polite way to say this: it’s cowardice on all levels. It’s tacit endorsement of intolerance while trying to avoid the direct consequences of being overtly intolerant.
This is the same attitude as the kid who stands in the crowd watching bullies beat up on the ugly kid with bad teeth. They aren’t do anything wrong, they’re just watching. They don’t dislike the bad-teeth kid. They’ll even hang out with him when nobody’s around. Same attitude as the millions of people around the world who looked the other way during the Holocaust. Same as the white southerner who continued eating at that whites-only lunch counter. Just the way things are, sorry. Can’t be helped.
It can be helped. You refuse to help it.
The Right To Bigotry
Some people will even go so far as to assert their right to be a bigot. “You can’t tell me what to think!”
You’re right. I can’t tell you what to think. But I can tell that your actions and behavior which are an expression of those thoughts is wrong. If you must cling to your unnatural hatred of people with a different skin color or sexual preference or religion, then I can’t make you stop.
I can, however, make it clear that your choice to act and behavior in accordance with your bigoted beliefs means that I do not wish to associate with you in any way.
We have evolved to the point that we understand this behavior is inherently wrong. We even understand what it is, how it works – basically a social appendix, a vestigial organ left over from a time when we lived in a much larger and more threatening world – and all around the world, in every culture, the changes are happening as we shed that organ from the body of our species.
If you choose to cling to the old way, that’s your choice. It is not your choice to inflict harm because of your choice. You don’t have the right to refuse service or employment to someone in your place of business because they are gay, or Muslim, or black, or female. Just like I don’t have the right to refuse service or employment to you because you are straight, or Christian, or white, or male.
You have the right to be a bigot. Nobody can stop you.
You don’t have the right to act like one. In any way.
Real World, Season 2
The Real World is this: tribalism is fading out. It’s a necessity of the growth of the species – it will fade. Has been for centuries already. Differences in religion, skin color, language, sexual preference…we are coming to understand that these things are all superficial in the face of the greater question of survival of the species. We are literally drowning in our own waste, siphoning the limited resources of the planet and allowing billions to exist in poverty for the convenience and comfort of a small handful of people and institutions at the very top of the wealth scale.
Every long-term challenge that faces us can be addressed with education and common sense.
Every. Single. One.
People are dying. Horrible, terrible, slow, miserable, unnecessary deaths. Each one of those people might have discovered anything you can imagine and lots of things you can’t, if they’d had a chance.
They didn’t.
Whether it’s a starving child in sub-Saharan Africa, a gay teenager in the US bullied into suicide, or millions of Jews, gays, Roma, and other “undesirables” during the Nazi holocaust, all of these things come back to all the excuses we make to dislike each other, when half the time it just comes down to “you’re different and that scares me,” and the other half to “you’ve got something I want and we can’t agree on an exchange.”
We are dying. We are killing ourselves.
We have to stop, and that means each one of us, individually, has to stop hating, stop separating, stop being afraid, stop making excuses, own up to what we’ve been and why it’s wrong, and set about changing it.
That’s the “real world.”
Conclusion
This is the reality that people are going to have to accept: not everybody believes the way you do. Being gay, or black, or female, or this ethnicity or that religion might be wrong to you, but it is not wrong to everybody.
Being gay, or black, or female, is not hurting anybody. It’s not wrong to be these things. This is the reality of how human beings are. Some of us are attracted to people of our own gender. Some of us have darker skin, or lighter. Each of us has our own concept of what lies beyond the limits of our perception, our lives, our identities as we understand them. Even if that concept is “nothing,” it is still a concept.
These things are also not a choice, even if they were wrong. One chooses one’s actions, but one chooses those actions based on who one understands one’s self to be. You don’t have the right to dictate the nature and scope of those actions, until and unless they are causing real harm to you or to someone else.
It’s been said – I can’t even find a source for it, but at least half of my late elementary, middle, and high school teachers said it, and it’s oft-repeated elsewhere – that “your right to swing your arm stops where my nose begins.” When you say “this person may not serve in the military because they are gay,” “this person may not work here because they are obese,” “this person may not eat here because they are black,” you are swinging the arm of your values past the point where those people’s noses begin.
When you insist on doing so, it is the necessary function of the broader society to say “no, you may not do this or you will be sanctioned.”
There’s nothing wrong with being gay, or black, or female, or Muslim, or any of the other silly groups we lump each other in and then decide if we love or hate it. It’s not a “choice,” but a matter of what each person was born as.
There is something wrong with being a bigot. It’s learned behavior – learned from a very early age in a million ways, some of which are incredibly subtle and all of which have roots as deep as our recorded history – but it’s still learned behavior, and it is wrong, and ultimately it is a choice.
I can’t choose to not be heterosexual, or half native-American, or to be four feet ten inches tall.
I can choose not to be a bigot.
Isn’t it about time you made that choice?