Puzzled bigots

Why bigots are so puzzled when they get called "bigots".

Anyone who has spent any time perusing readers' comments under online Daily Telegraph articles may know that the toxic racists and homophobes who post there are often at a complete loss to process the accusation when they are called "bigots" in response to their poisonous remarks. 

Words often accrue a meaning from their public use that is generally understood, but that does not lend itself readily to verbal exegesis. Most people seem to have a pretty clear idea of what is meant in our public language by the word "bigot", and most people feel confident using the word in the correct social context. The word does also seem to assume a common value system, as it is clearly a pejorative term, and it seems to be applied to people who cause real or potential suffering to others - usually a class of people - by attributing to the people they vilify some negative qualities on the basis of no, very little, or very selective evidence, and that is impervious to all rational counter-argument and evidence because the judgment is based on negative emotions and malice, or because the judgment has at its root a stubborn adherence to the teachings of a dogmatic religious system.

Those who the majority of the population might feel are appropriately termed "bigots", might themselves be fused with a very different definition of bigotry. For them, the "bigot" is someone who criticises them for making negative judgments about people or groups of people when those judgments are based on a religious faith or other set of beliefs that they deem to be immune from criticism. Or the "bigot" is someone who accuses them of prejudice, of having made their judgment on the basis of inadequate or of selective evidence, and of being impervious to counter-arguments and evidence, where they themselves disagree that these accusations are based in fact.

There is always going to be disagreement about who is, and who isn't, a bigot. He who harbours prejudice and malice, and bats away all evidence of the falsity of his beliefs, has a very different perception of the world from the person who does not. For the former, what most of us call "bigotry" is simply normality - the perspective that every right-thinking person should have - and there is nothing wrong with it.

There is room for people to disagree about who is, and who isn't, a bigot. But it remains the case that someone who is a bigot will regard his mindset as a perfectly natural and reasonable one, and is never going to admit to the condition.

For such a person, the "bigot" is simply the person who presumes to challenge the legitimacy and validity of somebody else's perspective, no matter how offensive that perspective might be perceived to be. This is a self-defeating concept of the word "bigot", of course, as it prevents the real bigot from challenging those who accuse him of bigotry without ensnaring himself in his own peculiar definition of bigotry in the process.

© Gary Powell, 2013

Pro-gay bus ads.

My imaginary pro-gay bus ad: "Thank you for supporting gay equality."

We are all human beings in a state of transition. Many of us have held and expressed prejudiced views in our past that we are now embarrassed about and regard as in error. Such views need to be challenged, but it also needs to be acknowledged that they arise from specific causes and conditions, such as social programming, a rigid belief structure, a lack of exposure to counter-evidence, or difficulties in processing evidence and thinking logically. 

When people are locked in to prejudiced mindsets, they themselves will benefit from liberation, as well as the people they wrongly denigrate. Challenging their beliefs, and making them feel uncomfortable about their beliefs, should be a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Yet so often, political activists write off the offender, and are satisfied with causing him depression, anger, humiliation, or some other kind of disadvantage, as the end in itself, apparently without any concern as to whether a different approach might be more likely to change his mind, or whether it might accord with the generosity of spirit with which we would all like to be treated when we make mistakes about our interpretation of the world that lead to undeserved suffering by others. We all have something in our lives - even if it is in the distant past - to match the ignorant callousness of the homophobes. Who is to say we would not have the same views they hold if we had been born with the same genes, into the same families, and had their life experience?

The person who has shifted to the bleakest part of the moral spectrum is not the ignoramus, but the hypocrite: this person expresses or acts in accordance with a view he knows to be false and to cause suffering, for the sake of personal advantage. This person secretly commits actions that are in the same general category as those he condemns, and includes those who condemn equal marriage yet have affairs. The hypocrite is joined in this acrid moral sludge by those who are simply venomous and sadistic: those who gain satisfaction simply by trying to cause other people unhappiness and by denigrating minority groups they regard as fair game. Even here, none of us knows how many of the venomous and sadistic are simply sociopaths who lack the empathy that informs the moral insights of the vast majority.

When I first saw the Stonewall bus advertisements saying, "Some people are gay. Get over it!" I felt gratified about this very public challenge to homophobic attitudes. But before long, the slogan started to jar with me, and although it had stark appeal to what remains psychologically of the radical gay activism of my early 20s, I came to the view that the advertisement was ill-considered.

Many people do brave and determined battle with their homophobic social programming, especially when they have been raised to respect the tenets of their parents' dogmatic religion. It can take a long time before they have processed the cognitive and affective obstacles to the liberalism and fairness that the deepest part of their psyches wants to embrace. Barking "Get over it!" at such people does not seem to me to do justice to their good will and their own personal struggle in this respect.

There are also, in my view, many people whose aversion to homosexuality, or to expressing publicly a liberal attitude towards it, derives from their own homosexual feelings that, because of the prejudiced society or parental home in which they grew up, they find themselves unable to come to terms with. Exclaiming "Get over it!" to such people seems a little akin to telling someone with clinical depression, "Pull yourself together!" or "Snap out of it!" Perhaps the slightly less abrasive approach that reflects the circumstances beyond their control that led to their personal predicament, that may well have involved quite a lot of suffering over the years, is the one that will best help them on their journey.

Of course, there was an attempt by a Christian group to retaliate by running a bus advertisement that very misleadingly implied homosexuality could be cured. The "Not gay! Post-gay, ex-gay and proud. Get over it!" posters were rightly banned by Transport for London, chaired by Boris Johnson. This advertisement could have contributed to psychological harm suffered by lesbian and gay young people who are exposed to the false messages that their sexuality is something defective that needs to be cured, and that it is possible for their sexual orientation to be changed. I wrote an article for Pink News about how such religious homophobia caused me to develop a serious clinical depression in my teens.

The ban on the Christian advertisement was followed by the inevitable protests from dogmatic religious adherents that people of faith should have the right to criticise homosexuality. What these protesters did not grasp is that Transport for London should equally have the right to deny them a platform for their ideas. Person/ organisation A having a right to "freedom of speech" does not entail that person/organisation B has any obligation to provide a platform for it.

Quite apart from my view that the Stonewall bus ad is juvenile and badly crafted, I have to say that I don't regard the side of buses as a good place for any advertising that could be considered contentious: and that includes pro-gay or anti-gay advertisements, and advertisements for religious conventions. A thought should perhaps be given to the feelings of the people who drive the buses all day. Someone who is strongly opposed to fundamentalist Christianity might feel very uncomfortable driving a bus advertising an Evangelical festival. A gay or pro-gay driver might feel similarly about driving a bus with an ad suggesting that being LGBT is something that needs to be cured, and can be cured. A driver who has religious misgivings about homosexuality (as misguided and unfortunate as they may be) might similarly have a crisis of conscience about driving a bus with the Stonewall advertisements. In fact, there is at least one documented case of this happening.

There is a sense in which bus drivers are agents for the dissemination of the advertising on bus posters. I don't think it is fair to force them to choose between losing their job or suffering the discomfort of promoting ideas with which they might strongly disagree. In addition to the discomfort caused to the drivers, forcing a homophobic person to help advertise the acceptability of homosexuality on pain of losing his job, is hardly likely to make him or her feel less resentful towards LGBT people: on the contrary. There are plenty of other places where contentious advertising can be located instead.

Changing hearts and minds is a subtle business, and although using blunt instruments might feel very satisfying to those who wield them, we need to remember that we are supposed to be trying to make friends of the people who are about to be clobbered. Winning over a homophobic person, rather than being satisfied with simply telling him he is a jerk, might make a great difference to the life experience of any gay or lesbian children or grandchildren that former homophobe might have.

As stated above, I do not regard the sides of buses as appropriate places for pro-gay or anti-gay advertisements, any more than I regard them as appropriage places for pro-religion or anti-religion advertisements. But if there are to be pro-LGBT advertisements on buses, let's have one that does more than bark at anti-gay people. Let's have one that speaks to far more people, and that carries a positive and optimistic message. 

Something along the lines of, "Thanks for supporting gay equality."
 

© Gary Powell, 2013

Homophobia in the 2013 German elections.

Below is a translation of an article that appeared in the German online LGBT magazine "Queer.de" on 16.9.13. (The original article in German can be read here.)

Homophobia in the 2013 German General Election.

The BIG Party: posters opposing equal marriage.

One of several BIG posters opposing equal marriage in Bad Godesberg, Bonn. It reads: “Every child has a right to a father and a mother.”

Not for the first time, this small Islamic party is campaigning on a homophobic platform.

“BIG”, a fringe party founded by migrants to Germany, has continued its homophobic campaign in the German parliamentary elections, leading to the appearance of posters that declare, by means of photos and an inequality sign, that a gay couple is something different from a heterosexual one. To this end, the poster states: “Every child has a right to a father and a mother.”

The message is that only the BIG Party stands up for heterosexual couples, whereas gay couples have the SPD, the Greens, the FDP, the “Linke” (Democratic Socialists) and the Pirate Party on their side. Only the CDU (Conservative Party) is missing: arguably, for good reason.

This year, the "Bündnis für Innovation und Gerechtigkeit" (Alliance for Innovation and Justice) is standing in the German parliamentary general election for the first time: in Berlin, Nordrhein-Westfalen and Baden-Württemberg. However, since the party was founded in 2010, it has never gained more than 0.5 per cent of the vote in several regional and local elections. In the 2011 elections to the Berlin House of Representatives, the Alliance already conducted a homophobic campaign by warning in a leaflet that "being gay" could become a school subject.

Parallels to the "AfD" (The "Alternatives for Germany Party").

The BIG Party was not alone with its faux-outrage about a new sex education programme. First of all the Springer press got worked up about it, and then Catholics such as the k-tv chief editor Martin Lohmann on the “Free World” website, and the similarly popular talkshow guest Hedwig Freifrau von Beverfoerde as the spokesperson for the "Initiativ Familienschutz" (Family Protection Initiative).

The “Free World” news website and the Family Protection Initiative are run by Sven von Storch, the husband of the conservative activist Beatrix von Storch, who has second place on the Berlin federal state elections list for the “AfD” (Alternatives for Germany) and could gain a place in the German national parliament should the party succeed in gaining over 5 per cent of the vote. Von Storch, who as an also-ran takes up the issue of homosexuality on her campaign home page, asked the chairperson of the German Bishops’ Conference a few weeks ago to warn people about the Green Party’s and the Pirate Party’s support for equal marriage.

The homophobic advertisement by the Partei Bibeltreuer Christen (The Bible-Believing Christian Party).

Leaving aside the public rejection of LGBT equality from the German Chancellor, the Bible-Believing Christian Party is certainly conducting the most vocally homophobic election campaign at the moment, thanks to an advertisement that is also being broadcast on television. 

In the advertisement, we see a child being led through a park by two men, and we hear the comment, “and in this way, man has disgraced himself with man.” Later, the girl says, “But I need a dad and a mum.” However, the PBC has also never achieved more than 0.1 per cent  in a general election. 

In last week’s ARD documentary, “Der Kampf der Kleinen” (“The Fight of the Small Parties”), we were treated to activists from both BIG and PBC who made anti-gay comments on camera. Although the BIG Party Chairman, Haluk Yildiz, said he had no fundamental problem with same-sex relationships, he did say he was opposed to their being treated equally. However, when the issue of homosexuality was raised, the Party Treasurer soon started to talk about child abuse.

Translated by Gary Powell, and published with permission from Queer.de.

Fundamentalism and slavery.

History is littered with examples of how dogmatic, fundamentalist religion can make the human condition much worse than it needs to be. 

This was perhaps best expressed by the physicist Steven Weinberg, who said, “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.”

He went on to give other examples where dogmatic religious belief had made people’s behaviour worse:

“Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will.”

In 2013, the former Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, who is a Christian, was challenged by a Christian pastor for his liberal stance on equal marriage. The pastor objected to same-sex marriage because he believed the Bible taught that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. Mr Rudd replied by reminding the pastor that the Bible treated slavery as a natural condition, and that St Paul instructed slaves to obey their masters. 

Now that slavery is considered an abomination rather than a natural, divinely-endorsed state in modern society, fundamentalist Christians tend to gloss over or ignore the many Biblical references that treat it uncritically or even approvingly. Perhaps, in the course of time, should Evangelical Christianity survive, Biblical homophobia will go the same way.

[Thanks to "Campaigns Worth Sharing", on Twitter as @campaignsworth, for drawing my attention to the Kevin Rudd statement after reading the first draft of this blogpost.]

© Gary Powell, 2013

UKIP: the repository for the ideological toxic waste of British history.

UKIP's behaviour regarding the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act speaks volumes for its regressive and opportunistic values.

The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) opposed the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act. Its central argument seemed to be that if equal marriage were legalised in the UK, then the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) would impose it on reluctant religious institutions.

During the equal marriage campaign, many religious adherents expressed support for UKIP on these grounds. The policy certainly attracted the votes of social conservatives, many of whom expressed belief in UKIP's ECHR warning, while others, in some state of confusion, stubbornly declared their conviction that the Act itself was intending to force places of religious worship to conduct weddings. 

UKIP was very serious about its opposition to equal marriage, and sacked its libertarian youth leader, Olly Neville, after he gave an interview expressing support for the policy of same-sex matrimony. 

Now that the Act has been passed into law, things seem to have gone very quiet on the objection front. Including from UKIP.

The arguments invoking the ECHR bogeyman might have seemed impressive to some at the time, and they were certainly repeated often enough. But they were very flawed arguments. Crying "wolf" is a very effective way of getting people's feelings stirred up and mustering allies. But if no wolf actually turns up, the rabble-rousers will suffer the longer-term harm of seriously damaged credibility.

There was no possibility of the ECHR imposing same-sex marriage on religious institutions in the UK or anywhere else. The evidence to counter the credibility of claims of an impending ECHR imposition was absolutely overwhelming. No-one making this claim made similar claims about the ECHR intervening in British law to force religious institutions to comply with equality measures that relate to groups other than gay and lesbian people.

If the ECHR had any intentions of imposing equal marriage on reluctant religious institutions in the UK, then it would already have intervened on behalf of other groups protected by equality legislation.

There has been no attempt by the ECHR to impose women priests on the Catholic Church anywhere in Europe. I have not heard a single campaigner against equal marriage who warned of the ECHR imposing same-sex marriage on churches, mention that he has any similar concerns about the ECHR imposing women priests on the Catholic Church.
The claim that the ECHR will impose same-sex marriage on English or Welsh religious institutions is no more credible than any claim it will impose women priests on the English or Welsh Catholic Church.

Neither has the ECHR imposed women bishops on the Anglican Church. Or forced the Catholic Church to marry divorcés. Or forced any church or other religious institution to host civil partnership ceremonies. And neither have I ever heard a single opponent of same-sex marriage say they fear that the ECHR would do so.

The fact that the ECHR has never behaved in this way, and that the opponents of equal marriage never announce that they expect them to do so, together with the fact that same-sex marriage has existed in the Netherlands for about twelve years without the ECHR imposing it on its churches, are very clear indications of the legal safeguards that protect the religious institutions of EU member states.

So now I come back to the deafening silence from UKIP. If they were genuinely concerned that outraged churches, mosques, synagogues and temples would have same-sex marriage imposed on them by the ECHR, where has that concern gone? Why are they not now exploiting the situation as an opportunity to point to an impending human rights atrocity soon to make its way towards us over the Channel? And if religions are sitting on a cliff edge now, just waiting for this intervention to happen, shouldn't UKIP be pledging to campaign for the repeal of the Act, at least until they bring about their planned withdrawal of the UK from the ECHR?

If UKIP started to campaign for the repeal of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, which would involve the annulment of same-sex marriages, the impression of bigotry and heartlessness they created would chime with some of the worst of their negative publicity. If UKIP continued to warn that the ECHR was going to impose same-sex marriages on churches, mosques, synagogues and temples on pain of prosecution, their credibility when this didn't happen would be badly damaged.

UKIP's silence on this issue speaks volumes with regard to their true motives in opposing same-sex marriage. When votes are up for grabs, UKIP's libertarian and pro-gay equality supporters can go to hell, as far as their opportunistic leadership is concerned. 

Homophobia is fast becoming as unacceptable as racism in mainstream UK society. British society is continuing to evolve in a way that casts off fetters that have made us a less cohesive, enlightened and productive society. The question is whether the behaviour of elected UKIP candidates, and key UKIP policies such as opposition to same-sex marriage, actually reveal more concerning what UKIP is really about than the facade of the laissez-faire, chummy, chortling, man-of-the-people UKIP officers photographed and filmed with a beer in one hand and maybe a cigarette in the other.

In a decade, UKIP won't be able to use the ECHR as an excuse to oppose equal marriage any more, more countries will have legalised same-sex marriage, and there will be many more younger voters in the UK who oppose homophobic discrimination. In its current form, UKIP will become increasingly out-of-touch with the electorate, and with the modern world. And any party that treats its libertarian, progressive and LGBT supporters with the contempt and dishonesty UKIP has displayed recently, thoroughly deserves the demise that awaits it as history sweeps away the ideological toxic waste that divides and deludes otherwise good people. 

© Gary Powell, 2013

Archbishop Sentamu and difference.

Archbishop Sentamu: gay relationships are less "different" than you think.

On the Andrew Marr Show today, Archbishop John Sentamu was asked about the Anglican Church's opposition to equal marriage. His justification for the well-recorded opposition he has expressed was that it was important to acknowledge "difference", implying that the word "marriage" should not be applied to what has historically been an exclusively heterosexual institution. So equal marriage would be rejected because it is a campaign for "sameness" rather than for equality.

The point that the Archbishop does not grasp is that gay and lesbian people, in campaigning for equal marriage, do not want to be "the same" as "heterosexual":  we want to be "the same" as "married". Similarly, women priests do not want to be "the same" as "men": they want to be "the same" as "ordained". The point is that women should never have been excluded from being priests, in the same way that they should never have been excluded from voting. Correcting the injustice of historical exclusion puts right a historical wrong.

If the Archbishop thinks LGBT unions should be called by a different term, does he think that Anglican women priests should be called something different? Priestesses, maybe?

Black people who were forced to sit at the back of the bus did not want to be ‘the same’ as white people: they wanted to be ‘the same’ in terms of their dignity and recognition of their human rights. Black people did not accept that they had to put up with being forced to sit at the back of the bus when the reactionaries said they had to because that was the way it had always been, or because they were still able to make their journey regardless. By the same token, gay and lesbian people should not have to sit at the back of the bus with ‘civil partnerships’ because our relationships do not qualify for what is perceived by opponents as the higher status of ‘marriage’, exclusive to heterosexuals.

Although I have much respect for some of Archbishop Sentamu's views - particularly his stance on Mugabe - his position on equal marriage is discriminatory. Which is hardly surprising, as the form of Christianity he embraces is intrinsically homophobic. Disguising this discrimination with subterfuge about respecting "difference" just underlines the fact that he doesn't get how the potential of LGBT relationships is intrinsically no different from the potential of heterosexual relationships, except in the minds of those who do not approve of them.

© Gary Powell, 2013