Tag Archives: homophobia

Toxic Times

I returned to Indianapolis after a week of being blessedly unconnected to “the usual suspects”—otherwise known as the media/chattering classes/punditocracy—to find that the National Organization for Marriage had been through town. Some forty “pro-marriage” demonstrators had promoted loving relationships with signs suggesting that gay people should be murdered. One particularly nasty poster featured a picture with two nooses.

Lest the gay community feel singled out, our local Tea Party crackpots have added anti-Semitism to their toxic brew of pique and racism, handing out materials about the Jewish Bankers Who Control Obama, among other pleasantries. And I won’t even revisit the much-publicized and despicable effort by Andrew Breitbart and Fox “News” to demonize Shirley Sherrod, the African-American civil servant with the Agriculture Department by twisting her words to make a plea to get beyond racism sound like an endorsement of racism.

In short, these are not the best of times.

I know the drill: we are hurting economically, and at such times, intergroup tensions tend to be high. There is a desire to find someone to blame for what ails us, and that must be the person or persons with the different color, religion or sexual orientation. Choose your “Them.”

I have my own pop psychology take on what ails so many people these days. As I noted in last month’s column,  I think a lot of people who have fewer resources—emotional, intellectual, fiscal—find themselves a bit like Rip Van Winkle, waking up to a world that has changed while they slept. Suddenly, there is a black man in the White House. There is a woman (a strong one) running Congress, another one heading up the State Department, and it looks like there will be three women on the Supreme Court, all time-honored bastions of male privilege. Turn on a television set or go to the movies, and there are all these openly gay people acting as if they were entitled to be treated like everybody else. The local weatherman or news anchor has a name like Huang or Sanchez, and at the office, there are brown and black coworkers of various genders and orientations.

The whole world is different, and those without the ability to cope with the changes—or even understand them—are fearful and angry and confused.

What we are seeing right now is analogous to the tantrum a two-year-old throws when he is tired and frustrated and not getting his own way. That’s why the Tea Party doesn’t have a coherent complaint or policy agenda, why Fox “News” and the right wing blogosphere disapprove of anything Obama does—even when it is the same thing they approved when Bush did it—because that usurper did it!

Most of the anger and hateful behavior we are seeing is really just lashing out at a world that isn’t behaving the way it is supposed to—at least, in the reality inhabited by those who are angry and frightened. It doesn’t help that there are political actors with a personal stake in fomenting that anger and stoking those fears.

The question we are left with is: what do we do? What do those of us with a more inclusive worldview and a less apocalyptic agenda do to tamp down the ugliness and defuse the hate? I wish I had a quick and pithy answer to that question, but I don’t.

I do know one thing. Until our political landscape settles down, until cooler heads prevail, we all need to speak up: to call the hatreds out, to advocate for understanding and acceptance, and to remind the people who are still able to reason that all people are entitled to be treated as individuals and judged on their behavior, not their identities.

I Will Never Understand

I always thought that advanced age would bring wisdom—or if not wisdom, at least a greater understanding of the world and the human beings who populate it. I was wrong. There are things I will never, ever understand.

A month or so ago, a federal judge in Mississippi ruled that the rights of high school senior Constance McMillen were violated when her high school refused to allow her to wear a tuxedo and bring her girlfriend to the Itawamba Agricultural High School prom. The school promptly cancelled the prom rather than allow Constance to attend. Federal Judge held a trial on the matter later and reaffirmed his ruling, but stopped short of requiring the school board to reinstate the prom, as parents had already formulated their plan to hold a private prom.

As one report put it, “There was a private prom all right.” On the Wednesday before the Friday prom date, the school’s attorney announced that “the prom” would be held at the Fulton Country Club. Constance, her date and seven other kids (two with learning disabilities) showed up—only to find that the “real” prom was being held elsewhere. The parents had moved it to a secret location out of the county.

What is wrong with these people? What on earth would cause these parents, who are presumably adults, to do something this cruel and hurtful? Are they that terrified of difference? That devoid of human compassion?

All I could think of when I read the stories about this event was a photo taken at Little Rock High School, when National Guard soldiers sent by President Dwight Eisenhower escorted an obviously terrified young black woman through a crowd determined to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. In that famous picture, a young white woman of approximately the same age, her face contorted with hate, is spitting on the black girl.

And again, I ask the question for which there is no satisfactory answer: what makes people act like this?

The easy answer is fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the “other.” Fear of a world that seems increasingly unfamiliar. We can see this in the “Tea Party” gatherings, with their misspelled signs, the accusations of Nazism and Socialism (terms most of them rather clearly could not define if their lives depended on it), and the not-very-veiled racism. We’ve seen it in the American past, with the periodic emergence of groups like the Know Nothings, the Nativists, and others we’d rather forget.

The problem with the explanatory power of this theory is that we all are fearful from time to time. But we don’t all express it in such a hateful and destructive fashion. So what is the distinguishing characteristic? What makes one person decide to put her fears to use by working with others to solve our common problems, while the next person channels it into rage and recrimination?

In a related question, I have always wondered about people who engage in vandalism. Theft I can understand—you want something I have. (I don’t condone it, but I do understand it.) But wanton destruction? Smashing property just for the sake of smashing? That, I have never understood.

After five children and four grandchildren, I know firsthand how fragile all teenagers are, how easily their egos can be damaged and their hopes and aspirations dashed. I also have a gay son and a lesbian granddaughter, and I have watched their struggles to separate their self-images from the hurtful social stereotypes that are still a huge part of American society. I sometimes marvel that any gay child grows up undamaged and whole, given the often thoughtless cruelty of some of those attitudes.

I just cannot imagine purposely doing to any teen what those Mississippi parents did to this child. And I will never understand why.