This is a companion piece to yesterday’s entry about the recent passage of Proposition 8 in California banning same-sex marriage. While yesterday I came at it via parody, today I’m going to speak to the issue directly, because I think it’s important that we talk openly when faced with an act of hatred on such a large scale. We need to look it squarely in the face and try to understand how so many people can be capable of such an act.
First of all, a full disclaimer: I don’t have the stomach to pretend to “argue both sides” on this issue. Both the proposition itself and its passage were, in their effect, acts of hatred against innocent members of our society. Even worse, people were willing to attack their own friends, family members, neighbors and coworkers. I’m not talking here about the story people were telling themselves while pulling the lever. Rather, I’m talking about the real harm that has been done to innocent people. Whether you’re talking about Chinese, blacks, gays, Jews, women, or any other targets of hate, the wholesale denial of equal rights to a group of people, simply because you have some purely metaphysical notion that they are “not like us”, is effectively an act of evil, no matter what story or excuses you tell yourself while doing it.
At the same time, I am sure that many of the people who voted for this monstrous proposition think of themselves as decent and kind, with strong love of community and a sincere desire to do good in the world. How do we reconcile it all?
I have a theory.
Human organizations are like any other organisms – their first order of business is to survive, and they develop mechanisms to ensure this survival. The reason is simple: Any organism that does not develop effective mechanisms to ensure its own survival will soon disappear. And so, like any other organism on this planet, a religious church is subject to the rules of Darwinian survival of the fittest.
Those mechanisms may at times not seem to make rational sense, but they always serve this core purpose. Unfortunately for the tender sensibilities of humanists, one of the most effective such mechanisms is the identification of an “Other” – a designated outsider – and the encouragement of members of the group to attack that Other.
In the relatively short time that our nation has been in existence we have seen many such designated Others branded and duly attacked by one organized group or another. The victims of such organized attacks have included african americans, Catholics, chinese, hispanics, homosexuals, irish, italians, japanese, Jews, labor unions, native americans, women … the list goes on almost endlessly.
In the case of Proposition 8, religious organizations were the key organizers of the attack upon the innocent, and the attack helped to ensure that people will continue to be loyal to the church. In this case the proferred pretense is that gay marriages will somehow pose a threat to straight marriages – but it’s clear that nobody really believes this.
Rather, this strange bit of nonsense is used as a shallow cover for the real mechanism of attack, the mechanism religious organizations generally use to demand loyalty. This mechanism might as well be called “attack by ghost”. Here’s how it works: A religion asserts a spectral view of the world, in which all-important invisible forces that we can neither see nor hear (which is, apparently, how we know that they exist) will be offended if certain people are permitted to have the same rights as everyone else.
The beauty of such an assertion is that it doesn’t need to make any logical sense. Religious organizations have been playing exactly the same game for many thousands of years. As long as an organization phrases it properly, by saying: “the invisible ghosts will be offended if others have the same rights that we have”, then people will agree to follow that organization in denying the rights of others.
I do understand that people need to feel that they are part of an organization. People need that feeling of safety, that sense of connection. Religious organizations can and do help people and communities in many ways. I also understand that people need their ghosts. For most people, the idea of death without an afterlife is just too frightening to contemplate, and a church offers a way to avoid that existential horror.
But I find it unbearably sad, even though I realize it is a part of the human condition, that such an evil might be built into us, that our organizations, in order to ensure their own survival, need to goad their members into systematic attacks upon innocent people.
And most of all I feel sad for my many friends, relatives and coworkers, good, decent, hardworking people, who are the victims of this latest such attack.
I have a theory that prop 8 is about bigotry and that bigotry is about power.
So all of the justifications, that gay marriage goes against the bible, that it hurts heterosexual marriage, that it leads to polygamous inter-species blah blah blah, etc., all of that’s just a load of hooey. And all of the self-righteous disavowals that I’ve heard and read, that voting for prop 8 was a moral choice, I’m not buying that one either.
The truth as I sees it is that a religious group orchestrated an attack against the rights of innocent people. Using millions of its tax free dollars it broadcast vile propaganda to gin up fear and animosity in a cynical power grab. Those that voted for prop 8 did so either because they believed the lies, or because they felt that their power over marriage was threatened, or both.
It was politically cagey to mount this proposition during the cover of a distracting presidential election. I wonder, though, if the hand has been over-played. As I write this, I can hear through my window the sounds of people shouting in protest, and car horns blaring, and police sirens, and helicopters circling above my apartment.
Lo and behold It turns out that this long presidential campaign, capped off with its almost unbelievably righteous storybook result, has put people in the mood for activism. This campaign is being framed as the death knell of bigotry in America. Prop 8 may have unwittingly provided a meaty target for a public that is primed to fight for just causes.
If so then thank you Mr. Bush, and a big thanks also to all the supporters of prop 8. Whether intentional or not, you’ve done more to inspire this country and to promote the just cause of gender neutral marriage than years of activism ever have.
Andras, your theory about how and why such ugliness and hatred became California law seems to be essentially the same as mine – it is indeed a power grab. It’s particularly creepy that anyone would describe an attack on innocent people as a “moral choice”.
The difference is that your anger leads you to say “Yes we can.” I am more than happy to go there with you: Yes, we can.
I am writing this on the 9th of November in my office in Germany, exactly 70 years after the ‘Reichskristallnacht’, where the synagogues were burned and all those ‘decent’ people were watching. And all those ‘decent’ people after the end of WWII, were only followers, afraid and no knowledge about what was going on, not responsible…
But getting to the point here, what scares me most is people not getting out on the street, shout and protest, but watch.
I remember a brief encounter I had with my former philosophy professor, it was just a chat at a reception, asking how are things and so on. I told him I was trying to help a friend in the US to promote his fight against HSPD12 http://www.hspd12jpl.org/.
This friend while fighting open against HSPD12 as an employee of JPL (a contractor of NASA) was risking his beloved job after nearly 20 years.
My philosophy professor asked me, do you really think that leads to anything? I started laughing, because he was the one who taught me about individual ethics and that we are responsible for everything we do or don’t do and the consequences coming out of our actions or non actions.
Just have a look at the website above and you will see that taking the risk was worth it.
Getting back to the ‘attacks by ghost’, you may read “The Authoritarian Personality” by Theodor W. Adorno, in spite this is hard core sociological science, it gives you a good look at the mechanism of such ‘attacks’ and how ‘decent’ people can believe in prejudices.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personality
And, yes we can, we can stand up straight, we can take responsibility for our global society.
What also happened here was that many African American communities received robo calls with an audio clip of Obama’s voice saying that he opposed gay marriage. What the calls left out, was the other half of his sentence, which was that people should have the right to choose. It was dirty pool and it worked and was revealed in many exit polls.