The misunderstanding of "prejudice" itself

There's a thing about "homophobia", and a general dislike for the use of the term, that's been in the back of my mind for a while. The brouhaha over race that's been simmering in the US sort of expanded that in my mind to the whole concept of prejudice generally. It comes down to two things.

First, I believe that the vast majority of people who engage in poor treatment of another on the basis of race, sexuality, gender, any difference like that at all, do it completely unconsciously. In fact, such people would get insulted at the very idea that they might want to behave in such a way, stating quite accurately that they never intended to do so. Even when they did. This applies even to people who go out of their way not to be prejudiced: there is an unconscious aspect to such poor treatment which is hard to overcome unless it can be consciously perceived.

Second, and problematically, the way we talk about prejudice utterly fails to recognise this. My perception is that using the phrase "racist" or "homophobic", or even "prejudiced", to describe a person's attitude or behaviour always implies a deliberate intent: people accused of these things supposedly want to treat a group as inferior, and think it wrong to treat them as equals. Worse, there is a significant moral sting to the words: "racism", "homophobia", "bigotry" and the like imply not just misguided ideas, not just a lack of familiarity which breeds misunderstanding, but an actual evil act.

An argument can be made that the plain definition of these words don't include these implications of a deliberate choice to commit an evil act on the part of the accused. But I'm talking about how these words are used, not some idealised definition. In actual practice, the words we use to describe prejudice, racism, homophobia and so forth all carry this moral sting: they are an accusation that a person is intentionally evil.

So how should the majority of unequal treatment that is not motivated by evil, and not deliberately chosen, be described? A phrase like "unconscious racism" is inadequate I think, as the intentional aspect of the idea of "racism" is too entrenched in the use of the word. After some thought, I think the best way to describe such attitudes and behaviour would be "thoughtless". So, to take an example from my own life, a person who might say something like "bisexuals are just homosexuals who still have one foot in the closet" isn't "biphobic", but is exhibiting a thoughtlessness about the experience and life of bisexual people.

Thoughtlessness about a group of people is not intentional, but it is difficult to overcome: the opposite of thoughtlessness if thoughtfulness, which is a conscious process. It takes effort, all the time. This fact also helps explain how a person who themselves is in a group that gets treated poorly, homosexuals for instance, can still potentially treat a different group poorly, like, say, bisexuals. In this case, a gay person is thoughtful about their own poor treatment (well they'd have to be, wouldn't they), but may remain thoughtless about the way they treat bisexuals.

None of this is to say that there are no genuinely prejudiced people out there: some people can and do deliberately and intentionally view some groups as inherently inferior to others. The task then becomes one of separating the two: of knowing who is prejudiced, and who is simply thoughtless. There is no ready-made, easy way to do that, but it needs to be done.

Otherwise, much poor treatment towards minority groups will remain impossible to solve because the description of the people engaging in it as "racist", "homophobic" or "prejudiced" will, quite legitimately, prompt an outraged defense that they see all people as equal. Many people who engage in such poor treatment genuinely do see all people as equal, and want to treat all people as equal, but won't realise that they're not treating all people equal unless it's pointed out, without rancour and without being accusative, that they are engaging in such unequal treatment unconsciously.

Are opponents of homosexuality working against freedom?

Claim: statements made against homosexuality by anti-gay activists sometimes encourage their followers to believe that they themselves will personally suffer for the actions of homosexuals, and for the beliefs of those who have no moral qualm against homosexuality. Such people are therefore compelled by their own sense of self-preservation to deliberately interfere with the actions and beliefs of others by any means necessary. This goes completely against the ideals of self-governance and self-responsibility that characterise a free, open society.

Exhibit A: Pastor John Hagee's statement that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment on everyone in New Orleans, regardless of their personal viewpoint towards homosexuality, because a gay pride march was going to be held there.

Exhibit B: Sally Kern's statements, specifically "Studies show no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted for more than a few decades" and "If you have cancer in your little toe, do you just say that I'm going to forget about it since the rest of you is fine? It spreads! This stuff is deadly and it is spreading. It will destroy our young people and it will destroy this nation."

"Live and let live" means either punishment by God or the complete destruction of the society in which you live? No wonder some people can't leave gay people alone.

Day of Silence, its opposition, and information leakage

The things you find online...

The Day of Silence has an opponent in the US, in Snoqualmie Valley school district to be exact, calling itself the Coalition to Defend Education. Someone's apparently figured out that objecting to the Day on the basis that it's "pro-homosexual" isn't working out. This group bases their opposition to the day on the claims that "it creates unsafe conditions for students, disrupts teaching, and contributes to a biased environment at MSHS[Mount Si High School]."

Since I've yet to see a group that objects to this Day that doesn't have an anti-gay agenda tucked away somewhere, I decided to have a look at what was out there on this group. Besides their love affair with the man who proudly advocates that "God hates effeminate men", Pastor Ken Hutcherson, I haven't found a great deal about them.

Strange what I have found, though:
Here [UPDATE: I have voluntarily removed the actual hyperlink to this page as a gesture of goodwill to the Garding family, after someone complained about me "publishing that family photo on my site"] is a fairly cheesy photo of what may or may not be the members of this CoDE organisation, courtesy of a family website maintained by the Garding family.
Here is a public listing of when CoDE has booked out a Meeting Room at North Bend library on March 12th, from 6pm to 8:30pm.

Nothing particularly useful. But it is kind of personal. I know it's standard among heavy net users to view all information that a person or organisation chooses to make world-readable as fair game for the rest of the world to read, but still..

The whois data comes back with a private registrant called Oneandone private registration. No leads there.

Not much more I can say unfortunately, except I'm impressed that a day intended to highlight the problem of anti-gay harassment is successfully attracting so much public harassment. Kind of proves the point I think.

Does the American Family Association think anti-gay violence is acceptable?

A few weeks back, the ever-insightful Box Turtle Bulletin questioned the supposedly "loving" attitude that anti-gay groups claim to have towards gay people, noting that in the wake of the murder of 15-year old Lawrence King, any suggestion of compassion from these "loving" groups towards a person who was killed for being gay was nowhere to be found, anywhere.

On April 25th, many high school students in the US will be participating in the Day of Silence, a day that seeks to draw attention the dangers that many gay high school students, such as Lawrence King, face.

This really upsets a lot of "loving" Christian organisations. The American Family Association, for instance is urging parents to keep their children home from school on April 25th. It appears that they are unable to conceive that a day intended to oppose anti-gay violence can entail anything other than, as they put it, being "taught that homosexuality is a worthy lifestyle, homosexuality has few or no risks, and individuals are born homosexual and cannot change".

What message does this send? Is there any form of opposition to anti-gay violence that does not somehow "promote the homosexual lifestyle" in their eyes?

If not, can it not reasonably said that an organisation which opposes "promoting the homosexual lifestyle", and which thinks that opposing anti-gay violence is "promoting the homosexual lifestyle", is opposed to the idea of people thinking that anti-gay violence is wrong? In other words, does the American Family Association think anti-gay violence is acceptable?

Some people might think this is hyperbole. I would point them to the fact that the AFA is praising the "bold example" of Pastor Ken Hutcherson in opposing the Day of Silence. Here is what he has had to say on how to treat gay people:

“God hates soft men” and “God hates effeminate men.” Hutcherson went on to say, “If I was in a drugstore and some guy opened the door for me, I’d rip his arm off and beat him with the wet end.”

Lawrence King was killed because "he began to act in an effeminate way".

Pastor John Hagee, homosexuality and collective punishment

John Hagee, Christianist pastor, whose endorsement John McCain was "very honored" to receive, has stated, among many other things, that in regards to the destruction of New Orleans

there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came.....and I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.

Plenty has been said by others about Hagee's many statements, but I think it's worth highlighting this particular one and how it influences thinking on homosexuality.

Why do some Christianists insist on interfering in consensual sexual practices that don't affect them? The standard answer is that they're doing it out of concern and love for the "poor" homosexual caught up in their "destructive" "lifestyle". Yet if you accept Pastor Hagee's comments as a valid statement of how God works, another answer becomes apparent: they interfere because they fear that the actions of homosexual people will affect them, and in a very bad way.

Believing that God would level an entire city, everyone there regardless of the inhabitants' own individual attitudes towards homosexuality, means accepting that God judges people for actions that they did not themselves perform. It isn't possible for a Christian to believe that this judgement is wrong since the judgement is being made by the entity who Christians believe is the One actually responsible for setting out what is right and what is wrong. So Christians who accept Hagee's comments as valid would view themselves as, for the sake of their own safety from God's wrath, personally responsible for stopping the homosexuality of others.

It's a statement that compels a True Believer to interfere in the personal lives of others. It seems to me also to be an exhortation to behave in a way that is completely at odds with a free society.

I actually can't fault True Believers for doing what they sincerely believe they have to do in order to avoid God's punishment on their lives. I'm not nearly so understanding towards Pastor Hagee, though.

Gay marriage:The Australian Christian Lobby on Lateline

Lateline last night had some reporting on same sex marriage and civil unions last night as the ACT government once again presses ahead with its plan to introduce civil unions in that Territory. Jim Wallace from the Australian Christian Lobby was on, arguing that gay people did not deserve to be married because their relationships did not compare to heterosexual relationships in the slightest.

As so frequently happens from people opposing homosexuality, he spouted a lot of incredibly precise-sounding statistics, not a single one of which can be readily verified by anyone ("Various studies show that..." was the phrasing he used to avoid anyone noting his dearth of real evidence,if I recall correctly). I have from time to time managed to track down some of these wayward statistics to find that they are distorted, misunderstood, and one occasion outright made up (and yes, I can provide sources for that accusation if asked). Other people have also tried to expose this deceptive practice, but it's hard going. For one, most people are statistically illiterate. For too many people, numbers that sound exact, references that appear voluminous and charts that look professionally created count for far more than statistics that are actually accurate. For another, even when the actual reality is presented, it's all too easy for people to ignore the evidence by discrediting the person presenting the evidence on the basis that they're a homosexual who "has an agenda".

I've tried to track down the sources for Wallace's scientific-seeming numbers, with very little success. I've only found one. It's a statistic that occurs relatively frequently in anti-gay propaganda. Anti-gay activist frequently claim that a study in Holland showed that homosexual relationships only last an average of 18 months. The usual tactic when quoting the study is to then compare this to a study which grotesquely overinflates the average duration of heterosexual marriages (note: not heterosexual relationships, heterosexual marriages. I leave it to the reader to figure out why any such comparison between homosexual relationships and only those heterosexual relationships that are heterosexual marriages is inherently dishonest). Jim Wallace in this case spouted the unsourced statistic that Australian marriages last an average of 33 years. I can't find that one at all, unfortunately.

The "Dutch study" in question, though, is called "The contribution of steady and casual partnerships to the incidence of HIV infection among homosexual men in Amsterdam", and is available online. Jim Wallace of Box Turtle Bulletin has already done a fairly good job of demolishing the idea that this is a representative sample of homosexual couples:

We have a study population that was heavily weighted with HIV/AIDS patients, excluded monogamous participants, was predominantly urban, and under the age of thirty. While this population was good for the purposes of the study, it was in no way representative of Amsterdam’s gay men, let alone gay men anywhere else.

Perversely, Wallace went even further than most anti-gay activists in his denunciation. He didn't just say homosexual relationships only last an average of eighteen months, he said homosexual marriages only last an average of eighteen months. From the Lateline transcript last night

JIM WALLACE: And our experience is, that where homosexuals are given marriage, for instance as in Holland, that the average length or duration of those relationships has been eighteen months between two gay men. Now that's not marriage.

The study he's misrepresenting had absolutely nothing to say about homosexual marriages in the Netherlands whatsoever. Why does he think he can get away with such dishonesty? It appears to me that the depressing answer is: because he can. Anti-gay activists spout too many lies, and it takes too long to explain why they're lies, to ever be able to effectively catch them all.

There are reasonable questions to go into here about not just gay marriage but marriage itself - whether longevity is necessarily the best measure of a relationship's quality, whether marriage has any effect on the longevity of a relationship, whether this kind of collectivist reasoning about "average duration of a relationship" for a part of the population is a valid reason to deny relationship recognition to all members of that part of the population, including those who fall outside the average - but it is impossible to reach those points of argument when the debate is forever being poisoned by so-called Christians who see nothing wrong with basing their entire worldview about homosexual people and homosexual relationships on a foundation of lies.

In which gay marriage opponents appear confused on the issue

I can't be the only person who's noticed this...

In California, the State Supreme Court has scheduled a hearing on whether the state's ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional. One of the arguments in favour of the ban is that

the domestic-partner laws [of California] satisfy California's constitutional requirement of equal treatment for gays and lesbians.

That gets argued a lot, that a domestic partnership, civil union or something similar which gives the same legal rights and responsibilities as marriage should be good enough, even if it isn't specifically called marriage. Many supporters of gay rights find it persuasive, even. Who thinks that a "domestic partnership" is different from a "marriage" in anything except name?

Well, as it turns out, gay marriage opponents do - but only if it's heterosexual relationships at issue. In Maryland, US legislators introduced a Bill that

would abolish civil marriage ceremonies now confined to heterosexual unions in the state and replace them with domestic partnerships for all couples.

"Marriage" would be a label applied by religious institutions only. In secular law

The word "marriage" would be replaced with "valid domestic partnership" in the state's family law code.

The opposition's response? Derision.

"What they're talking about is an even more radical departure from traditional marriage than even advocates for gay marriage are talking about," said Del. Christopher B. Shank (R-Washington), the minority whip. "They're creating a situation for one special interest group that basically diminishes the value of marriage for everyone else."

So, an arrangement that for gay people is supposedly so similar to marriage that it makes gay marriage itself unnecessary is for straight people a departure from marriage so "radical" that it's demeaning for straight people to be limited to it.

Conclusion? "Separate but equal" never is.

Gay in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe: Gay activist goes into hiding.

How many people use the global nature of the Internet to actually examine the rest of the globe I wonder? Here's an article from Zimbabwe, where scarcity of resources has apparently led to a comma shortage. But I shouldn't sneer - not until I'm capable of understanding what the non-English parts of the comments say I guess. I find it a stark reminder of conditions for people in other parts of the world, particularly gay people in this case.

The anti-gay perception of homosexuality

Leaving aside the actual morality of "outing" in general, and Ted Haggard's "outing" in particular, the responses from some of the anti-gay Right highlighted for me a distinction between the anti-gay perspective of homosexuality and homosexual people's perspective of homosexuality. It's a distinction which I think many supporters of GLBT rights miss.

I think most people know the story so far, but in any case here's a video summary of the Ted Haggard situation courtesy of Jon Stewart of the Daily Show. The online reaction of arch-conservative David Frum to it all was...interesting, to say the least:

Consider the hypothetical case of two men. Both are inclined toward homosexuality. Both from time to time hire the services of male prostitutes. Both have occasionally succumbed to drug abuse.

One of them marries, raises a family, preaches Christian principles, and tries generally to encourage people to lead stable lives.

The other publicly reveals his homosexuality, vilifies traditional moral principles, and urges the legalization of drugs and prostitution.

Which man is leading the more moral life? It seems to me that the answer is the first one.

Naturally many people around the blogosphere took great exception to the idea that it is better to go behind your wife and children's backs, publicly condemning the very behaviour in which you're engaging to millions, than it is to live as an openly gay man. But Frum's perspective is partially understandable - in his understanding of homosexuality at least.

Note the phrasing he uses: not "homosexual", but "inclined towards homosexuality". Further down in the same article Frum says this:

If a religious leader has a personal inclination toward homosexuality - and nonetheless can look past his own inclination to defend the institution of marriage and to affirm its benefits for the raising of children - why should he likewise not be honored for his intellectual firmness and moral integrity?

Again, not "homosexual", but "a personal inclination toward homosexuality". And it's better to marry and try to embrace even a semblance of a "heterosexual lifestyle" than it is to "give in" to homosexuality.

See, in the anti-gay perspective, everyone is innately heterosexual. Homosexuality isn't an alternative sexuality that exists in a person instead of heterosexuality, but a fetish that stems from a distortion of the true (heterosexual) desires that God instils in everyone. Dr Joseph Nicolosi of NARTH summed up the perspective like this: "there are no homosexuals, only heterosexuals with a homosexual problem". For a man "inclined to homosexuality" to marry a woman isn't, as the pro-gay perspective would have it, an imprisonment of both man and woman in a loveless sham, but a valid and worthwhile attempt for the man to overcome his temptations and express his innate, Godly desire for a woman who, by God's law, he must marry.

That's David Frum's perspective of Ted Haggard as I understand it. His attempt to justify the emotional pain that this could be causing Mrs Haggard, though, is curiously missing. Then again, she is a woman after all, and misogyny and anti-gay sentiment often seem to be fellow travellers in my experience.

Anti-gay sentiment

The specifics of current anti-queer rhetorical points include:

Homosexual=predator: This one goes waaaay back. There's a 1950's US government propaganda education film about it called Boys Beware warning kids that "you never know when the homosexual is about". It even survives today as seen in this op-ed on Mark Foley:

Where does post-modern American ethics place Mark Foley's homosexuality on a scale of 1 to 10--a 1 being just another gay guy and a 10 being a compulsive, predatory sex offender?

. That quote does make perfect sense to some people: since being homosexual is exactly equivalent to being a sexual predator, then accepting homosexuality is exactly equivalent to accepting sexual predation.

There's also the tendency for the Republican party flacks to claim that they took no action against Foley before the media hit shit the fan on the grounds that it would have come across as gay-bashing. Leaving aside the question why these ferocious culture warriors who've spent plenty of government time and money hating on "militant homosexual activists" suddenly had to run like timid gazelles from the Homosexual Agenda[tm] in this particular instance, it also shows the continuing tendency to conflate sexual predation with homosexuality: "Those damn homos wouldn't have liked us stopping a sexual predator, see? Because his sexual predation is what makes him one of them".

Attacks on transgender people: with homosexuality gaining increasing tolerance and acceptance in society, many of the old myths about homosexuality are losing ground in the face of visible reality (the Far Right's misrepresentation of Foley's actions as typical homosexual behaviour notwithstanding). The attacks on the "freakshow" aspect of GLBT people's lives now seems increasingly focused on the T: transgender. This includes the Daily Telegraph's attack articles on the childcare "scandal" which described transgender people as people who have the atttiude of gender as being something that they can "change as easily as a person change's socks". The op-ed above insinuates that accepting transgenderism as valid means being required to accept something as uncertain that is supposed to always be certain: "There is much in American life that doesn't seem "obvious" anymore. Call it the transgendering of reality." The message is that those transgender weirdos are trying to deny the "obvious" reality of "basic biology" when they claim not to be their "true" gender ie the one they were born as. It helps some gay and lesbian people may be less than comfortable with transgenderism as well. I know I have a certain amount of transphobia within myself. In my defense, it wasn't that long ago that I was homophobic as well. I'm working on it.

Then there's the more subtle conflation of transgenderism and homosexuality, to try and treat the two as exactly equivalent so that myths about transgender people can get tarred on to GLB people as well. The Traditional Values Coalition in the US recently released an anti-homosexual, anti-transgender polemic called Will Cross-Dressing Activists Come To Your School? which says this:

TVC has long warned that one of the next phases of the homosexual movement is to normalize cross-dressing and sex change operations. The ultimate goal is to blur all distinctions between male and female-and to destroy marriage as a God-ordained institution.

Transgenderism is all a homosexual plot, see?

Thankfully gay rights organisations haven't tried to distance themselves from transgender issues in the face of this shared smearing to my knowledge.

Breaking with gay rights groups on libertarian grounds

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Same-sex marriage in Australia

You know, I think the push for same-sex marriage in Australia might have been premature.

It didn't really evolve out of a societal demand from anyone in the Australian GLBT community personally asking to get married so much as get pushed out by political bodies looking to press what seemed to be an important issue elsewhere. That's my impression, anyway.

In fact the number of same-sex marriage activists who take the view of personally opposing the idea of marriage while supporting the concept of same-sex marriage "for those that want it" seems very high. Queer people should have the opportunity to do what they like, but trying to ape straight people's relationships is an inferior choice, seems to be the message.

I question the idea of one set of mores for opposite-sex relationships and another set of mores for same-sex relationships. I question why emulating opposite-sex relationships ought to be a thing best avoided.

Maybe I don't feel alienated by hetero-dom because I've never actually felt any kind of rejection over my sexuality from heterosexual people who matter to me. I'm pretty sure that some of them wouldn't even have a problem with me kissing a guy in front of them (assuming I currently had a guy to kiss of course, but anyway...), so I feel no real obligation to try and carve out some brand-new social space where I can "be gay" away from accusative heterosexual eyes. My view is that the problem isn't that we're in the wrong for publicly expressing our sexuality, but that the people expressing disgust at doing so are in the wrong for misunderstanding it, and it ought to be up to them, not us, to try and be more accomodating.

And there, I think, is the problem with same-sex marriage in Australia: the overall society here hasn't reached the point where there are that many pockets in which a queer person can "be gay" amongst heterosexuals. Without that ability to visibly be themselves in the heterosexual world, Australian GLBT people have no opportunity to get a personal feel for whether or not certain relationship mores stereotypically practised by opposite-sex couples are to their taste or not (and perhaps might occasionally even get a serious case of sour grapes about them) and see no need to try and fight for legal rights associated with them, and the Australian public at large can blissfully go down the uninformed path of homosexuality=sexual perversion to be tolerated, but not treated as equal to heterosexuality.

Same-sex marriage won't occur in this country until there are more LGBT individuals successfully integrated into and visible to overall Australian society. But do LGBT people in this country even want that?

Brief thoughts for the early morning: opponents of homosexuality will never be persuaded by arguments that try to show them that the emotional experiences of homosexuals are the same as the emotional experiences of heterosexuals because they don't consider homosexuality to be an emotional experience, but a purely sexual one. This preconception is built into the unjustified assumption, which I've harped on about elsewhere, that everyone is innately heterosexual and that a homosexual is simply a heterosexual gone wrong somehow: only heterosexuals fall in love, have emotional difficulties, what have you, while homosexuality is nothing more than a deviation from standard sexual practice, a sexual fetish rather than a sexual orientation.

My previous post on the concept of "human worth" was an attempt to articulate a concept I'd read via Fukuyama, who derived it from Hegel, who lifted it from Plato's Republic. Plato's reduction of the human mind into three parts (whose exact names escape me: reason, appetite and spirit?) seems vastly oversimplified to me, but the last of the three - "thymos" in the ancient Greek - which Fukuyama translated as "the desire for recognition" roughly equates to what I'm trying to call "worth". Regardless of my skepticism of how the concept was originally arrived at by Plato, I think that this "desire for recognition" or "sense of dignity" or "human worth" is a part of the human experience. Political systems which reduce human behaviour to a matter of pure economic need - pure socialism I think qualifies, as does pure capitalism - will therefore never adequately address human need as they don't account for the very existence of the need to be considered as having worth as a human being.

The concept of automatically granting innate negative worth to a grouping of humanity provides a moral framework for almost any atrocity seen today: terrorism, ethnic cleansing, anything that has one group of humanity committing atrocities against another grouping. Those of us living in societies where this doesn't occur tend to forget that only a minority of the world lives in such societies, and even there the atrocities have not faded far from history at all. Perhaps the question isn't "why do people do such things?", but "why has a minority of the world population just very recently started actively trying not to do such things?

I do have a major beef with Fukuyama: I'm with him on the concept that liberal democracies are good, and that there's nothing better currently on offer in the world political-system-wise, but in his latest book "after Neoconservatism" he makes the argument that "there is simply no other legitimating ideas besides liberal democracy that is broadly accepted in the world today", and that depots have to at least look like they support democracy if they want their people to not revolt against them. There are in fact at least two other legitimating ideas that exist for rulers besides "the people support my rule". The first is "God supports my rule". The second is "only my rule can protect you from your enemies". I don't know about "broad support", but I do know that support for these two alternatives to liberal democracy as a legitimating idea for rule is not just present, but is even getting accepted in one of the longest-standing liberal democracies on the planet. Look at the reasons some supporters of the current US government give for their support: the Religious Right in America has made it abundantly clear that God votes Republican, and a large swathe of the non-fundamentalist Republican support is based on the premise that only the Republican party can effectively protect America from terrorists.