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News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyApril 19th, 2007
One of the concerns I’ve had with the state of activism today is the tendency to literally “dehumanize” opponents — by that, I mean the process by which activists reduce those who disagree with them to caricatures which make them appear to be, well, not people.
Notice that in the above sentence, I said “activism” without any other identifying features. Sadly, this observation is all too true for gay activists as well as anti-gay activists. It’s easy to buy into preconceived ideas about your opponents and get your bile all worked up based on those ideas than it is to actually listen to them yourself. And actually interacting with them, for all too many, is completely out of the question.
That’s why I went to Love Won Out in February. It’s why I’ll go to as many other anti-gay conferences and gatherings as I can. While I think many of the gay-rights groups do a lot of great work, let’s face it — taking their word for things on faith makes about as much sense as believing absolutely everything you read from Peter LaBarbara or Alan Chambers.
One of the things I learned about attending Love Won Out is how very human everyone there really is. Surprise! — no nonhumans anywhere. Not even seeing-eye dogs. These are people you run into every day. People who go to these events aren’t particularly hateful (I’ve said that before, and it never fails to rile up some readers when I say that.), and dismissing them as ignorant leaves open the possibility of minimizing their skills. If anything, it’s more about fear than anything else, a fear that is consistently reinforced by anti-gay leaders.
Tom Lang, cofounder of Massachusetts marriage advocacy group, Know Thy Neighbors, had a similar experience when he decided to attend a VoteOnMarriage.org meeting that was held at a public library in Rockport. Yes, he lived to tell about it:
As the meeting progressed, my husband and I whispered to each other that the people in the room plotting to take away our rights looked just like the folks who attended a recent meeting of MassEquality held just days earlier… We were also struck by the similarities in planning. … They talked about how to write letters to the editor that would get published. They offered tips on how to effectively lobby lawmakers. A table held boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts and coffee for attendees — we were all urged to help ourselves. I’ve always known that lobbying efforts follow formulas. But the similarities between the MassEquality and VoteOnMarriage.org meetings were so eerie that I felt as if I were trapped in a parallel universe.
Tom and his husband stuck around for small-talk afterwards to put a human face on the people the meeting’s leaders tried to dehumanize. And while he didn’t say it, it looks as though he too was able to see a human face on those who some gay-rights activists dehumanize in turn. We must never forget this. Too often, its the nonhumans who are the target of our ire, which is really silly sometimes. After all, last I checked, nonhumans can’t vote.
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Michael Ditto
April 19th, 2007
You haven’t met FOF’s lobbyists and PR guys.
Every time I encounter them at the capitol I have the opposite reaction, with their half inch of pancake makeup and Armani suits and all that hairspray… They look like they were all stamped from the same plastic televangelist mold. They’re always prepared for an on-camera interview, twice as dolled-up as the reporters.
Weirdest thing you ever saw in your life. How they keep that makeup from melting under the lights I’ll never know. I’d ask them for tips, but every time I get within five feet of them I have an incredible urge to go home and take a bath.
With regards to Dobson’s millions of followers, I’m reminded of something I hear occasionally from international interviews. Foreigners say it’s not the American people that they hate, just our leaders. The same dynamic should be true with the religious right. These people are being misled, and those doing the misleading are doing so knowingly and cravenly.
The leaders of the anti-gay right deserve every bit of our scorn, but as a group their followers deserve some compassion. Some are extreme bigots, but I think most are just sadly mistaken. They deserve pity for putting their trust in a bunch of charlatans, not anger.
However this in no way means we should be complacent, nor should it invalidate the anger and frustration that we feel. It just means that we need to channel it constructively and not let it consume us.
Lynn David
April 21st, 2007
I think we sometimes dehumanize those who see us as the lowest of humanity in the first place, it’s a normal backlash reaction.
At least that is how it was in my younger years. It’s supposedly changing. No longer hate the sin and the sinner, it’s become hate the sin, love the sinner. The mere fact that certain ministries have been started concerning homosexuality is a step in that direction. It’s a false form of love, but an emotion which falls short of the dehumanizing hate that seemed all-pervasive in the the 1960s and 70s (at least where I grew up).
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