It’s come to my attention, courtesy of more than one person
(some quite close to me), that my online presence has shifted subtly from being
that of an atheist secondarily concerned with the issue of marriage equality to
a gay man secondarily concerned with that of secularism. I’ll not name these
people and am quite convinced they meant nothing by it, but I’ll still take the
opportunity, given that this is my own greatly neglected blog space, to deny it
as vehemently as I can without – perish the thought – inadvertently coming off
as (unduly) confrontational.
The political landscape in Australia, as it stands, is going
through a bit of an exciting phase. It’s not up to me to say whether or not
this phase has any legs – suffice to say that I hope it does – but it is, nevertheless, undeniable. Gay marriage,
marriage equality, is getting more and more mainstream attention. So much
attention from our National Broadcaster, in fact, that it has earned a new nickname from at least one (although one could assume this implicitly means
more than one) Liberal MP. Don Randall is not the only one to have noticed
this. Allow me to digress to personal anecdote for just a moment.
I work in a fairly unremarkable industry performing a fairly
menial job with fairly average Australians. That is to say I believe I work
with a decent cross-section of the community that have an interest in politics
equal to, or perhaps slightly above, that of your average Aussie. One of the
more communal activities we enjoy is, of a Tuesday morning, deconstructing the
material discussed during the ABC’s Q&A from the previous night*. I recall
a recent conversation with my boss over the final episode of Q&A, during
which the topic of gay marriage was raised once again. My boss – a father of
four, twice married – lamented that he was quite tired of the issue being
brought up week in and week out, in his opinion derailing important issues more
worthy of our attention than this ‘no-brainer’, as he puts it (though I
strongly suspect his idea of ‘no-braining’ it is to dismiss the issue out of
hand altogether). It was a personal opinion, not one that I took too personally
or to heart, but it stuck with me. The previous post on this blog, posted some
months ago now, referred to the irksome argument against gay marriage that goes
along the lines of the following:
I’m sick of this issue
constantly coming up when we could be talking about more important things. Why
don’t gays ever discuss THOSE issues?
I invite you to peruse that post for my response to this weak
argument. For the purpose of this post, it will suffice to note that it seems
for many straight people the issue of gay marriage is more a bother than
anything else. It’s that troublesome side-issue that will not go away. That
polarising topic that can’t be brought up around a dinner table or water cooler
without someone getting offended or
self-righteous, and as such is best avoided altogether.
The conversation continued. ‘I think,’ my fellow average
Australian continued, ‘that Tony Jones must be gay. He does, after all, give
the gay marriage issue a lot of
press. It comes up every week on Q&A and he will not let the issue drop. I
just get the feeling that he must be gay.’
Fellow average Australian is not quite net-savvy enough to
check Wikipedia for the definitive answer to his musings. However, his comment
highlights something that I think could be instructive to everyone. What he
did, without realising it, was illustrate the exact reason why the gay marriage
debate does not have a slew of straight allies lining up to speak out on its
behalf. In a nutshell, he demonstrated exactly how pervasive bullying can be in
our everyday, rational, adult lives. He didn’t realise it, I must stress, but
he had just handed any bully looking to tread on the lives and rights of the
gay community all the ammunition they need to conduct a standover campaign that
has stunted, and continues to stunt, acceptance and progress right across the
world.
It Gets Better. Sort
Of.
Anti-Gay bullying has been in the news for quite some time
now. As a direct response to this, Dan Savage launched the invaluable ‘It gets better’ project for gay youth. I made a video for it myself. I’ll not hear a
negative word said against it – had I stumbled on a resource like this on
YouTube in my youth, things might have turned out differently. I may have been
more confident, more outspoken, more comfortable. Happier.
But it does fail to address one particular thorn in the gay
community’s craw that, as far as I’m aware, is not really dealt with by anybody
in the mainstream media. The fact is that, as much as people like to trumpet
their acceptance (or, as a compromise, their tolerance), and for as much as I
can point people to poll after study after poll that indicates 70-odd percent
of Australians are in favour of marriage equality, the bullying that most of us
went through during our school years has never really left us. It’s still
there, and it’s more subtle, and it’s affecting us in a way that we might not
be properly dealing with.
Straight people, and straight men in particular, are
reluctant to declare their support for gay marriage in an open and up-front
way. I have tried to analogise this for others when it comes up in debate, and
the best way I found was to think of it as follows:
Imagine that a poll exists that definitively gauges support
for gay marriage. There are three options. ‘(a) I support gay marriage’. ‘(b) I
am straight and I support gay marriage’. ‘(c) I do not support gay marriage’.
Can any of you envisage a straight male – to a similar extent, a straight
female – that would be willing to select option ‘a’ over option ‘b’? Unfair,
you might claim. The wording is misleading. In fact you might consider that a
straight male choosing option ‘b’ was being yet more selfless than he selecting
option ‘a’ by declaring that he has no vested interest in the outcome of the
poll. ‘Though I do not stand to benefit,
I support the rights of others’.
But I suspect I know the real reason that they would not
select option ‘a’. I’ve already mentioned it. It is because most people in this
country – most average Australians, male and
female – are terrified of the bullies.
To elaborate:
Recall the assumptions made by my, I must insist, overwhelmingly
open and considerate boss about Tony Jones. A man shows a little support for
gay marriage and you can see the suspicion begin to creep in to the thoughts of
the undecided or unaffected. To the mind of the average Australian, support is
not the default response. It becomes easy and comfortable to rationalise support
away as being driven by a personal stake. ‘His interest in the topic is so
strong – by virtue of the fact that he holds an interest at all – that he must
surely be batting for the other team’.
This is not an unusual assumption. Hearsay and personal
experience ought to confirm it enough for any individual reading this, though
if you are still in doubt I can only refer you to the screenshot posted below
this paragraph. Adam Bandt is the Greens MP who has brought the issue of gay
marriage to the fore in the last 24 hours of writing this. I just had a feeling
that the question may have been asked before. Call it clairvoyance**.
To voice one’s support of gay marriage without some kind of explicit
mandate is immediately assumed to mean that one is of the gay persuasion one’s
self. The assumption can be as baseless as those made in regard to Tony Jones
and Adam Bandt – it’s still painting a target on the forehead of the person
voicing their support for the bullies to commence hurling their muck. For a
straight man or woman to announce support for gay marriage is to opt-in to the
kind of day-in, day-out bullying that gay people are subjected to constantly.
And why on earth should a straight person want to do that?
Before I raise too much ire: I am by no means suggesting
that there are zero examples of straight men and women who offer their
unequivocal, wholehearted, unconditional support for gay marriage without care
for the mudslinging they are signing up for. There are innumerable individuals
one might point to – Adam Bandt and Tony Jones being but two of them. Nor am I
saying that the support offered by those straight people comfortable enough to
declare their wholehearted but separate
solidarity is meaningless or somehow devalued. I do not think this. Any support for gay marriage is valuable,
appreciated, and above all moral. It is not the fault of any heterosexual
individual that bullying of the homosexual community is so steeped into
society, so casually accepted by legislators and social figureheads, that it
makes them want to distance themselves from it as much as possible.
I am saying, however, that if we do not acknowledge that
this is a major reason why there is not more
support for gay marriage from otherwise righteous and upstanding members of the
community then we are doing the bullies a favour by allowing them to operate
unhindered. We empower these bullies to continue to maintain their desired
status quo – that of unequal rights, social injustice and intolerance of
anything different to themselves. I have up until now refrained from identifying
these bullies and I don’t wish to implicate any one particular group as being
more responsible than the other. You can assume, however, that I am referring
primarily to groups whose morality is dictated by a higher power and who still
control a sizeable portion of the public discourse of what is right and what is
wrong. Churches. Religious lobby groups. You can nominate your favourite anti-gay
group here and the thrust of the argument will hold up.
Dan Savage was right. It does get better after high school.
But the bullying doesn’t so much abate as it goes to ground, shrouds itself in
moral umbrage and demands to be taken seriously. If you still doubt the
validity of this argument, consider the strong support that gay marriage receives
from the atheist and sceptical communities. Why so much stronger the support
from these quarters? Quite simply, it is because these people are used to
dealing with the bullies that presume to dictate to normal people what is and
is not acceptable. It’s what they (that is to say, we – I am writing with my
atheist hat on here, after all) do.
Disapproval from the church or from a group of people less concerned with
secular principles is part and parcel. The bullies, for atheists, are a mostly defanged
adversary because their disapproval means nothing.
The same cannot be said for many – dare I say most – average
Australians. The ones who hear Tony Jones speak out on gay marriage and
immediately assume he must be ‘one of them’. The ones who google ‘is Adam Bandt
a gay’. The ones who denounce both of those things, but would still make a business
of checking the ‘I’m straight’ box in that imaginary poll so that, if there be
any bullies about, they will be shielded from the worst of the thuggish,
subversive harassment and discrimination doled out for the gays. Disapproval
from friends, family and community has got to be at least one reason why some
straight men are reluctant to be strong supporters of gay marriage. It has got
to be at least one reason why several people have pointed out to me that I’ve
been extremely rabid in pursuing this gay marriage issue recently, whereas my
tweets used to be ‘more balanced’. It has got to be one reason why we still
find ourselves, in 2010, having this argument.
I’m Sorry
Having said all of these things, I do need to apologise if I
have offended any heterosexual readers who feel I’ve been harsh. I appreciate I’ve
taken a strong stance here, perhaps one that could be considered unreasonable.
In my defence I can only reiterate my intention in a more succinct way.
I have no wish to demonise, marginalise or dismiss any
heterosexual human being that is willing to offer their support to gay marriage
in any capacity whatsoever. Despite my words today, I’ve no expectation that
support needs to be all-or-nothing, or that partial support is worthless.
Likewise I do not believe that those who do not proudly break forth from
community bullying are somehow cowardly and need to ‘man up’, as it were.
People will support – or oppose – the issue of gay marriage in their own way,
and I’m not going to presume that I am in a unique position to judge whether or
not they are doing a good enough job.
The only people that deserve to be demonised, marginalised,
dismissed, ridiculed and shamed are the bullies that make this kind of thing
okay. The bullies that never quite got over high school, that spout their own
version of morality with the absolute authority of a zealot and foster an
environment that makes it difficult and, yes, in some cases, impossible for the
average Australian to support gay marriage as fully as they might like. My
intention here is to point out that these bullies exist and that their
influence is far-reaching and very strong. My hope is that if this kind of
bullying can be recognised – if we can spot it, and call it out, and not allow
it to dictate how we or those we are close to will respond to incredibly
important social issues, we might stand a chance of making it better after all.
It might be worth pointing out that Tony Jones is not automatically a
homosexual simply because he has pursued the issue of gay marriage on the ‘GayBC’.
Anti-gay bullying is not fine in high school. On that, we
are all agreed. But we’ve a fair distance to go before we eradicate anti-gay
bullying out in the big, wide, adult world. Don’t put up with it. You might be
straight, you might be gay, you might be anything in between – the bullying is going
to target you one way or another. Make your high school self proud and stand up
for yourself.
Even better, stand up for someone else.
* While it was on, obviously. It’s a crying
shame that Q&A should end so early, particularly given the political
climate we inevitably find ourselves in the lead up to Christmas every single
year.
** He isn’t,
by the way.
