On March 26, the Supreme Court began to hear arguments in Hollingsworth v. Perry, a landmark case in the same-sex marriage debate. Amidst much social media outcry (and lots of pink and red equal signs), the Indianapolis NBC news affiliate WTHR Channel 13 posted on its Facebook page asking people if they were in support of the gay marriage ban. Prepared to witness the typical banality and name-calling that ensue out of most Facebook debates, I was shocked at what I read.
Commenters were doing the thing that scares me the most in discussions: they were avoiding personal attacks. No one was accusing anyone's father of being gay or (for the most part) using offensive terms. People were actually talking about the issue. The same arguments for both sides arose with very little changing in how people perceived the messages, but they were...oddly cordial about it.
Why was this so scary? Because when people aren't using schoolyard tactics to demean their opponents, they use "facts."
One comment struck me: "The fact that homosexuals do not have the desire to engage in perfectly natural phallic/vaginal, procreative sex...is clearly a significant impairment of social functioning and persuasive evidence of a disorder (which disorder may have a genetic component)."
This is not someone who is merely misinformed. This is someone who is operating from fear. People are uneducated about the issue and what it means to be gay, but they can be taught. What concerns me, though, is this fear.
People are rationalizing fear with made up facts. It's happened before: the popular meme that made the rounds today was the one that compared anti-gay rights protesters to anti-black rights protesters. The same thing happened there. After Pearl Harbor, "leading experts" gave reports on the physiology of the Japanese mind and what made them predisposed to crime and evil behavior. This is a derivative of the same idea.
What we see in the above quote is someone talking in an elevated fashion but not making any sense. This is a word salad, a jumble of technical jargon and two-dollar words that attempt to mask fear of the "other" with pseudoscience. It is terrifying.
So, you put an equal sign as your Facebook profile picture. Good job. It's a reminder to all your friends that you're willing to hide your mug for a day to show support for basic civil rights. Want to really make difference? Never stop talking.
Every time you hear someone use a gay slur, tell them it's hate speech and that, while "words are just words" to them, someone else may disagree. Every time someone cites a medical journal that claims homosexuality is genetically deviant, send them on a credible Internet search to discover truth on their own. Learn the controversy so that you can teach it.
I have classmates, co-workers, fraternity brothers and lots of other friends who are gay. Some are creative and intelligent and some are dumb as a sack of hammers. Some are black, some are white, some are Asian. And yet, for all their different backgrounds, I see a pall come over them when we invariably discuss gay marriage.
A good friend of mine once said that she never felt lower than when Senator Lindsey Graham asked Piers Morgan in an interview if gays were allowed to marry, then could three people love each other? What of the man who loves his horse? Could they get married? How appalling that we allow others to be so dehumanized by that rhetoric.
What this movement really needs is champions, people who will change one mind at a time but who will not stop until every mind is changed. Because even if the Supreme Court gives a thumbs-up to gay marriage, people still have minds that need changing. Fears that need disseminating. And it's going to take more than a newsfeed full of equals signs to turn off that hatred.
- Shapiro is a senior from Southport, Ind. majoring in English literature.