Breaking the Spell: Rethinking queer community

[dreadgeek]

SA Ma'am;

This is one of those sad truths about our species that I wish were not true about our species. The *best* we can do is make certain that whatever the person's prejudice, they cannot make it *our* problem. Let us admit that unless we are willing to see society become extraordinarily *less* free--which I guarantee you would rebound to our sorrow--all we can do is make the discrimination illegal. After that, it is on a one-to-one basis. We win people over, one interaction at a time. It is illegal to discriminate in housing, education, employment and public accommodation based upon the color of one's skin or one's gender. Has that stopped people from holding bigoted or sexist views? No. Has it made any nation that has adopted such laws a paradise of racial harmony? Not hardly. It has drastically raised the stakes for behaving in a bigoted fashion in the aforementioned. As a *process*--and that is what I think we can change directly are processes--we can constrain by law whether or not someone can decide to not rent to transgendered person purely because they are transgendered. We can mandate that the relevant factors for, say, employment do not include race or sexual orientation or gender presentation or what-have-you.

We cannot make it so that those laws are unnecessary. Not without severely restricting the freedom of others to express beliefs that we might find abhorrent.

Tolerance, to me, is living in a nation of people where some non-trivial number of them believe, things that I might find either offensive or blindingly wrong, but not letting that get in the way of having good interactions with them. Acceptance is simply not allowing some trait to have unnecessary meaning. By that I mean, as I've stated when talking about 'color blindness' that the problem isn't that someone notices that I am black. The problem is caused when they attach *meaning* to my being black beyond what that characteristic can justify. My blackness gives no one any insight into my character, competence, intelligence, generosity, honesty or any other relevant trait. Bigotry is when someone takes my being black to mean that they *do* have insight into my character, that their insight is accurate *because* of my race, and to then treat me accordingly as someone lacking in one or more desirable character traits.

If my neighbors are giving me the stink-eye, then they are not tolerating me. What is happening is that they are restrained from making their feelings known to me in a more direct sense only because of the law and social stigma. If my neighbors invite me over for BBQ, say hello and generally treat me as just another neighbor, then they are *at worst* tolerating me and if they are not already accepting, then may very well be on the road to acceptance. Acceptance, to me, is when my neighbor, upon hearing someone make a derisive remark about queer people says "you know, the ladies across the street are nothing like what you say and given that they're really nice and you're obviously an asshole, I'd prefer their company over yours any day".

All the above can be true without, even once, us ever having a conversation on the topic of "do you accept homosexuals".

My forty-five years black in this nation has certainly taught me that bigotry cannot be legislated away. The direct expression of bigotry can be legislated away and then, slowly, painfully, never-fast-enough, people's minds are changed. As was pointed out by a couple of people, the *best* predictor for how someone feels about enshrining equality for queer people under the law is whether that person has an intimate who is queer. It cuts across most other demographics. Laws--or really just folding us into most existing anti-discrimination laws--can create conditions *enough* that contacts will happen. After that, what will happen is that people will start working next to the queer guy and he'll *stop* being whatever bigoted image the person was raised with and become the guy who helped them out when they were under the gun at work. They'll start living next to a queer couple and they'll no longer be the folks who are a threat to families but the one's who, when the kids got home and no one was there, contacted the parents and drove the kids to the babysitter. That makes them a neighbor.

Look, let us say that there are, essentially, three sides in the national argument about the place of queer people in society. There's our side. Their's the anti-queer people. There's the vast majority of people who hold no active hostility about queers but haven't really thought about us very much. The preference of the first two groups is to win by fiat. The religious right, if given half a chance, would simply make being queer illegal and be done with it. If given a chance, particularly after some infuriating outrage, we would take the easy route and simply pass a law making it illegal to be anti-queer or express such sentiments. The religious right can conceivably have their way. We *never* can. We simply lack any possibility of a majority. So we must win by persuasion. We must win over as many people in the non-aligned group as we can. We do not need ALL of them, we need enough that they are allies and we and our allies are then a majority. This is, essentially, the strategy any numerically overwhelmed group must do--win the argument.

That means that while our opponents *never* have to be realistic, we *always* have to be realistic. That means we have to determine not what the best world would be, but what is the best *achievable* world given the species we have to work with and the fact that we cannot impose our will upon the majority.

Cheers
Aj

Originally Posted by SecretAgentMa'am

I've heard quite a few people, even before this thread, say that tolerance is not enough and they will accept nothing less than acceptance. I'm sincerely confused by this. Why isn't tolerance enough? Keeping in mind that we're dealing with human beings, and human beings are notoriously fickle, ethnocentric, xenophobic, and hateful, how do you expect to ever get there? I honestly can't picture a world where everyone likes me. That's just not something that can reasonably be demanded of humans. There's always going to be some asshole who thinks his personal deity requires him to hate me and everyone like me. Unless someone invents a super duper mind control device to wipe out all dissenting thought, I don't think we're ever going to get there. And really, if someone did invent that device, I wouldn't want them to use it on anyone, ever. I really don't care too much if that asshole hates me, as long as my wife and I have the same rights he and his wife do and he doesn't get a free pass to make his hatred my problem.

It seems to me that "tolerance is not enough" basically means you're setting yourself up for frustration. It's kind of like saying "I will accept nothing less than an amusement park on the moon." That sounds fantastic, it would be the most epic vacation of all time, but if that's the only vacation you'll accept, you're never going to go on vacation.