When my parents moved to Arkansas last fall, only a two-hour drive away from the headquarters of the KKK in Harrison, I was ashamed of the history of racial intolerance in my adopted state. The image of the desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School that I had seen in so many history books, of a distinguished Elizabeth Eckford entering the school amid the vituperation of townspeople, was burned into my mind.
One time, my roommate asked whether I thought the white student notoriously jeering Eckford in the picture was ashamed of herself now that the law and most people support desegregation. I told him that although I didn't know for a fact, I thought she probably was.
Then he asked the important question. Did I think the values voters who oppose gay marriage would be similarly ashamed if the winds of fortune changed in favor of equal rights for gay Americans?
Yes, folks, yes I do.
To push for enactment of laws banning gay marriage, people evoke much of the same language called upon 50 years ago to oppose interracial marriage. Those who oppose gay marriage claim that gay love is unnatural, that God disapproves of homosexual unions and that our society will slide down a slippery slope toward apocalypse if gay people are allowed to raise children or form family units. In comparison, antimiscegenists of the '60s said that God placed blacks and whites on different continents to prevent intermixing, that it wasn't natural to raise interracial children and that intermarriage between the two races spelled the end of society as we knew it.
Although equal rights for African Americans is an issue that still simmers in the American consciousness, emotions have been reduced from the boiling point reached during the integration of Central High School to a point at which people can talk reasonably about their past biases. Now that Halle Berry is a well-known celebrity and interracial couples are featured on "Grey's Anatomy," we can talk about racism as if antimiscegeny laws were products of the time, unlike anything we would enact as a society today. Hazel Bryan Massery, the angry white woman in the photograph, was in fact so ashamed of her behavior at Central High School that 40 years later she apologized to Elizabeth Eckford. She has since appeared with her on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and has worked to prevent hatred.
With gay rights, however, emotions still run high and the current political clime prevents people from predicting a stable future in which gay people are happily married. Afraid of change and without societal consensus, many are swayed by doomsayers who are simply rehashing the rhetoric of centuries-old intolerance.
I say "centuries-old" because prohibition of black and white intermarriage wasn't the first season for intolerance. Before that there was an outcry against mixing of Jews and Christians. Before that? Nativist American prejudice against Irish-Catholic immigrants prevented marriages between Catholics and Protestants. In the 1800s, for instance, a Protestant pastor might protest marrying one of his congregation to a cute Catholic redhead as vehemently as a modern pastor might protest marrying two men.
The issue seems not to be so much specific to the minority group being abused, but rather a strong objection to changes in the status quo, changes that are often necessary to provide equal rights for disenfranchised groups. Interestingly, these changes from baseline are usually well tolerated after a few decades, and despite the now permissible intermarriage of Jews, Catholics, Protestants, blacks and whites, none of the predictions about the collapse of American society have yet come to pass.
Like Hermes handbags, hate is periodically reinvented to keep up with trends in society as a whole. People who allow themselves to be swept up with the times may turn out to be hopelessly lost when the fashion inevitably changes. We need to realize that interpersonal relationships are seasonless; love is love, and hate, even when couched in a brand-new misguided mission to save society from its imminent demise, is still hate. Otherwise our children are going to be wondering who the new gay is.
Jacqui Detwiler is a graduate student in psychology and neuroscience. Her column runs every Friday.
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