I hope it got better

Yesterday, my girlfriend called attention to an internet campaign designed to tell high school students who are questioning their sexual orientation that "it gets better" if only they stick it out. This campaign comes in response to recent suicides by high schoolers who had been bullied for being gay or bi, and is an attempt to give perspective to people who might not see a way out of the bullying they undergo as teenagers.

This campaign reminds me of someone in my high school--I graduated in 1992--who was openly gay and who suffered much abuse. As far as I know, he was the only "out" student, and everyone made jokes about him. On at least one occasion that I know of, he was treated violently. On this occasion, he was apparently practicing for a school play as part of the school's theater group. He was in the auditorium and on stage, and someone hiding up in the upper row of the auditorium shot at him with a BB gun and hit him.

But this post isn't about him or about the one who shot at him. It's about me. I never did one thing to stop the jokes and verbal abuse. I realize now that I didn't even have to be a hero about it. I didn't even do the bare minimum, such as simply telling people that I didn't want to hear any gossip or jokes about anybody

Nor is it a defense that at that time in my life I believed homosexuality to be a sin and to be bad. Not that I believe that such a value system--that marks being gay as evil--can ever be a defense for the way he was treated, but my own value system at the time stipulated that one mustn't hurt another person for an arbitrary reason.

When we had heard that this student had been shot at by a BB gun, it was taken as a humorous thing by me and my friends. We had no role in the attack or in the planning of the attack, but we--and I would wager most people at the school--had a pretty good idea of who did it, and no one to my knowledge ever reported him. It was funny because, after all, the student who had been attacked was so openly gay he was "asking for it." Besides, BB guns are usually not dangerous and this student hadn't been physically harmed outside of a bruise that must have gone away after a few days.

A few weeks (or maybe a few months?) after the BB gun attack, one of the Denver newspapers--I forget if it was the Post or the Rocky Mountain News--published in its lifestyles section (if I recall correctly) on what it's like to be gay in the Denver Public School system, and this student was interviewed. His experiences with the BB gun attack were related. The publication of that story caused me to figuratively roll my eyes about the "liberal media" with their pro-gay agenda, and I probably thought to myself something like "why the hell do they give this f-- a story."

But then my aunt, who at the time was about 70 years old at the time (she actually just passed away a few months ago, at the age of 88), read the story. And she commented to me about how horrible it was that someone at my school had been shot with a BB gun just for being gay. The disgust with which she said it, with its obvious implication that it was inexcusable to bully people like that, filled me inwardly with shame that I, in my own way, had played a role in making this student's life at school at best miserable.

Incidents like that--my aunt showing me by her words and actions that it was wrong to abuse people for being gay--were part of a very slow process that started me thinking about homophobia and about why it was wrong to illtreat people just for being different and about my own complicity in perpetuating such treatment. There were other factors, too, and, again, the process, which I won't describe right now, was a slow one. But I gradually came to the realization that being gay is not bad and that it is wrong to abuse people for that reason or any other arbitrary reason.

But I do wonder sometimes, and again now, in light of the current "it gets better campaign": did it get better for this student? I do hope so. I know he had friends in the high school who stood up for him and offered him support, I hope they were strong enough to see him through to whatever he did after high school.

But again, this blog post isn't about him. I've done a lot of things in my life that I'm not proud of, and my failure to stand up for him, or at least offer him my friendship, is one of them. Now, from the safety of my desktop and my pseudonymous blogspot ID, I can write about the rightness, justice, and necessity of acceptance with almost no fear of negative consequences. If called in the future to take risks for others, I sure hope I would. But I know that in the past I certainly failed to do so.

Gay marriage and children's welfare

I've just read this excellent piece by Jason Kuzinicki at Positive Liberty in defense of gay marriage as it relates to raising children.

In contrast to a lot of what one hears from activists on either side of the issue, Mr. Kuzinicki does a great job at leaving aside the talking points and instead offering a well-reasoned argument.

Check it out.

Banning the Marriage Banns

Last night at a restaurant with some friends, the topic of conversation moved to the recent Proposition 8, which passed in California on election day and, if it stands, would forbid gay marriage within the state. Such a topic was not particularly controversial at this particular table, since we are all roughly of the opinion that banning gay marriage is a form of discrimination against gays and that discrimination against gays is wrong.

But one of my friends, an avowed Marxist-Trotskyite, advanced the further opinion that all marriage should be banned because marriages are merely--or at least ultimately--state sanctioned property relations that have their basis in the subjugation of women. He then cited what "we all know" to be the history of marriage and the vows which command the woman to agree to "love, honor and obey." He finished with an anecdote of someone he knew who "bought" a wife in Palestine/Israel (apparently that one example proves the general rule).

He stated his views so categorically and he gave such an impression of believing his views that I knew it would be difficult to talk with him. When someone's philosophy is so reductionist, they can't be talked to. So I offered only some minor objections and listened to the rest of the table opine on what they "knew" marriage to be.

Isn't marriage at least a little more complicated than as a vector for the subjugation of women? Sometimes, marriage can work to protect women in their property rights. Consider, for example, alimony requirements in cases of divorce. Of course, one may object that such requirements merely underscore the degree to which marriage is a set-piece of property relations; and also that celebrating the protections, such as they are, that women receive in marriage is merely buying into the rules behind those property relations . And one would be right. But it is not such a one-way street. Each of us lives in a world not entirely of our own making. We take the tools we have. Revision, reform, might be necessary and, where possible, desirable.

To the objection that one need not follow the property prescriptions of marriage and that marriage operates as a public affirmation of one's dedication to another in addition to (and in spite of and in contradiction of) any coercive property relations, my friend stated that doing so was akin to trying to improve slavery by being a kind master. (Those weren't his exact words, but his analogy was to slavery and involved the notion of someone trying to put a kind face on it.) Again, to this objection, I say that none of us lives in a world completely of our own making. For example, we were spending the evening at a restaurant that employs wage workers--a situation which my Trotskyite friend would heartily agree is one fraught with power relations meant to exploit the surplus value of one's labor--the mere fact that we were "nice" to our servers changes none of that.

The fact that he was as full-fledged a member of this property relation does not make him a hypocrite nor does it make him insincere. But it does illustrate that we cannot extract ourselves completely from such relations.

When it comes to marriage, as when it comes to a lot of things, there is simply a lot that we don't know.

The False Debate: Sexual Orientation and "Choice"

One discussion that came up often when Colorado's Amendment 2--the anti-gay rights amendment--was up for consideration in 1992 was the debate over whether people "choose" to be gay. One still hears echoes of that debate (although it seems to me less salient than it was in the '90s) in respect to the prospect of same sex marriage laws. The debate is a false one that does not represent the real agenda of either side of the issue.

The debate goes like this: pro-gay rights advocates insist that no one "chooses" to be gay while anti-gay rights advocates insist that people "choose" to be gay. A variant of the pro-gay rights argument is that no one would choose to be gay because of the stigma, etc., attached to being gay. A variant of the anti-gay rights argument is the notion that homosexuality can be "cured."

Now, let's assume that incontrovertible proof emerged that people are, indeed, born gay. That being gay is an immutable trait just as skin color or biological sex is (I'll bracket the obvious counter-examples to immutability, such as sex-change operations). Let's also assume that anti-gay righters accepted this evidence as valid and conclusive (yes, I am positing a hypothetical). That doesn't answer their objection that homosexuality is immoral; that only underscores the degree to which preference is unavoidable.

Now, let's assume that incontrovertible proof emerges that people do, at some point, make choices that pre-dispose them to "become" gay, or let's assume that a discovery is made about a pill that can be taken one time to "cure" homosexuality. Such a proof would not answer their objection that discrimination is unfair and unjust.

For the record, while, as a speculative and philosophical proposition, I have my doubts about the assertion that absolutely no choice or act of will affects a person's orientation, I believe that if someone can find happiness with a person of the same sex, then homosexuality is a positive good. Homologously, I believe the state has no business sanctioning discrimination against gays.