A recent New York Times Magazine article spotlighted a shocking vestige of our nation's racism: segregated proms. It focused on one school in Georgia's Montgomery County, though the practice is common across the rural South.
I say "shocking" even though I personally wasn't surprised. One of my best friends is from rural Tennessee. His alma mater still segregates superlatives: White Most Likely to Succeed, Black Most Likely to Succeed; Funniest White, Funniest Black, and so on.
The white students quoted in the Times article expressed some reservations about the practice, but generally concluded with "It's how it's always beenâ¦It's just a tradition." In the words of Harley Boone, a platinum blond girl with beauty-queen looks who co-chaired last year's white prom, "It doesn't seem like a big deal around here. It's just what we know and what our parents have done for so many years."
"It's just what we know." Miss Boone reminded me of another beauty queen, in both her appearance and her comment: Miss California USA Carrie Prejean.
Miss Prejean, you'll recall, when asked her beliefs about marriage equality, responded (in part), "I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that's how I was raised."
How I was raised. Tradition. What our parents have done. This is not, in itself, a bad reason for doing something. It explains why I set the table the way I do, for instance, or why I always put an extra unlit candle on a birthday cake ("good luck for the next year," my mom always told me). It explains, too, more substantial practices-how we gather, celebrate milestones, express joy, or mourn loss. No generation does, or should, invent everything from scratch.
And yet, sometimes "what we know"-or thought we knew-stops working, or never worked very well in the first place.
I used to load the dishwasher with the forks tines down-because that's how my parents did and still do it-until I realized they get cleaner tines up (in my dishwasher, anyway, and please don't send me irate e-mails if yours is different).
Spotty forks are one thing. Racial and sexual inequalities are quite another. When traditions cause palpable harm to people, it's time to change. At that point, rethinking tradition is not merely optional, as in the dishwasher case-it's morally mandatory.
And that's why Prejean's " how I was raised" comment struck so many of us as a dumb answer. No educated person can justifiably claim ignorance of the challenges gay individuals and couples face. We gays are deprived of a fundamental social institution, treated unequally in the eyes of the law, and told that our deep, committed, loving relationships are inferior, counterfeit, or depraved. In the face of such injustice, "that's how I was raised" sounds hollow and cowardly.
There are those who bristle at any analogy between homophobia and racial injustice. Indeed, a favorite new right-wing strategy is to claim that liberals unfairly label as "bigots" anyone who opposes same-sex marriage, even on the basis of sincere moral and religious convictions.
But that's one reason why the analogy is so powerful, and so revealing. It shows that citing "sincere moral and religious convictions" doesn't get one a free pass for maintaining unjust institutions.
No analogy compares two things that are exactly the same. (That would not be an analogy, but an identity.) Analogies compare two or more things that are similar in some relevant respect(s). The similarities can be instructive.
The white citizens of Montgomery County, Georgia, seem like a nice enough bunch. They don't carry pitchforks or wear hooded robes. I doubt that Miss Boone ever uses the n-word, although her grandparents probably do. (Mine did, too, until we grandchildren protested loudly enough.) They are otherwise decent folk misled by powerful tradition.
I'm sure that, pressed for further explanation, many of these folks could make the right noises about doing what's best for their children and eventual grandchildren. And much like "that's just what we know," that response would sound familiar. Opponents of marriage equality use it constantly.
But don't marriage-equality opponents have social-science data backing them up? They don't. Yes, they have data about how children fare in fatherless households, for example, and then they extrapolate from that data to draw conclusions about lesbian households. The problem is that there are too many confounding variables. So then they fall back on their "vast untested social experiment" argument: we just don't know how this is going to turn out. Which, again, is precisely the sort of thing we might expect the Montgomery parents to say to justify their "tradition."
From the fact that two groups of people use the same forms of argument, it doesn't follow that their conclusions are equally good or bad. It depends on the truth of their premises.
Still, the tendency of both segregationists and marriage-equality opponents to hide behind "that's how I was raised" provides a powerful analogy-in moral laziness.
8 Comments for “‘That’s How I Was Raised’”
posted by Jeremy on
Is it really a “right-wing strategy” to point out that liberals paint everyone who opposes same-sex marriage as bigots? I know a handful of people (myself included) who are careful enough to respect the beliefs of those who oppose same-sex marriage on sincere religious or moral grounds. Most same-sex marriage supporters, however, throw around the term “bigot” indiscriminately. There are some people who just think gays are gross and shouldn’t have rights — they are bigots. There are some people who think gays should have rights, but believe marriage is fundamentally between a man and a woman. I believe our failure to distinguish between these groups of people is a problem that is holding our cause back. We need to win over the hearts and minds of the people in the middle — if they see that we can only call our opponents bigots, I doubt many of them will be swayed.
posted by TS on
well said. as always.
Rationality has never done too well among activists whatever their insignia.
posted by CPT_Doom on
When I first heard the idiotic comments of the beauty queen from the OC, all I could think was “I was raised to think you are a Satan-worshipper, Carrie, should we base our valuation of your life based on that?” You see, I was raised Roman Catholic, and taught that all other “religions,” particularly Protestant ones, were inferior and often not God-centered at all. Of course, because I had Protestant relatives on my Dad’s side, I knew they were teaching a load of bunk, but there you have it.
As for the “bigot” label – I’m sorry, but even those who oppose equal marriage rights for “sincere religious or moral grounds” are still bigots. If you think that being straight is better than being gay, if you think straight relationships are fundamentally superior to gay relationships, if you buy the lie that gays can’t raise healthy children, you are a bigot, pure and simple, no matter what the reason.
Roman Catholics are taught that people like Rudy Guiliani, Newt Gingrich, and John McCain are adulterers or potentially polygamists, depending on your viewpoint, because they have left their wives and taken up with mistresses/concubines. The law may recognize their divorces and classify their subsequent relationships as “marriage,” but good Christians (and again, that only includes Roman Catholics) can never consider them valid.
Yet I would never argue that Catholics are bigoted against the divorced and remarried – why? Because they are not arguing that people who chose the divorced lifestyle are fundmentally flawed human beings, nor do they advocate that the civil rights of divorced people be limited in any way, nor subject to majority veto. Roman Catholic hospitals do not refuse to recognize the spouses of those previously divorced for purposes of HR benefits or visitation rights; Roman Catholic schools do not refuse to recognize the families of those who have been divorced; Roman Catholic adoption agencies that take public money have never insisted on refusing to allow those living in the sin of adultery (or polygamy) to adopt. Yet Roman Catholic institutions, to point out just one example, have demanded the right to treat gay and lesbian couples differently from the divorced. Massachusetts RC hospitals, for example, chose to self-insure rather than provide spousal benefits to their LGBT employees, an RC school in CA insisted that the gay fathers of one of their students lie to the parents and other students in the school about their relationship in order to enroll the child, and of course the diocese of Boston shut down the allegedly secular Catholic Charities adoption agency when the local bishop found out they had been following the anti-discrimination law in MA for 10 – 15 years (and placed about a dozen kids with gay or lesbian couples). If that does not demonstrate bigotry, I don’t know what does.
posted by David on
On what basis can opposition to marriage equality NOT be considered bigotry? Perhaps if there’s a fact-based argument to be made against marriage equality as public policy. However, the only attempts at such I’ve heard have been based on discredited or distorted data. In the absence of a rational argument, it’s a value-based proposition: some people just don’t like marriage equality because it conflicts with their beliefs. If such beliefs are private, that shouldn’t be considered bigotry. But when these beliefs enter the policy arena, they become weapons used against individuals who do not share the same beliefs, again, without a policy objective based on anything other than personal values. If that’s not a definition of bigotry, I don’t know what is.
posted by Regan DuCasse on
John, much as I love you and admire your intelligence, I have to go with the rest of the posts here.
There are hard and soft kinds of bigotry, but that’s still what it is.
We have decades, if not centuries of all manner of religious based abuses. Whether it’s towards indigenous people or women, or support of slavery or Jim Crow, there is measurable harm and damage that can be pointed to, rather than measurable societal benefit for such discriminatory public policies.
Religious belief is simply the rationale to hang it on, and the person who invokes it hopes to never be challenged if their motive is ‘the will and word of God.’
It IS intellectual and moral laziness to forget all the mitigating circumstances where religion has compromised human rights.
Let alone social and scientific progress.
My white in laws, in all the years I knew them didn’t display any specific and detectable race prejudice.
But they were never really in any social or economic situations that really tested their racial sensitivity…or lack of it.
And sometimes it’s hard, I’m sure as well for gay folks, to not harbor a way to protect themselves for a betrayal.
Bigotry shouldn’t have to rear it’s head for someone to get it, as an act of violence or name calling in the street.
Sometimes it bears itself in the ballot booth, the job line, the family gatherings.
No less hurtful or damaging.
Marjorie Christofferson, of El Coyote, portrayed herself as a ‘friend of gays’…and betrayed the trust of her ‘friends’ when they had no value enough to her except to make her money, but not to share in the joys of equality as parents and spouses.
I hate the pussyfooting around what bigotry is, and especially it’s results.
posted by Bobby on
“It IS intellectual and moral laziness to forget all the mitigating circumstances where religion has compromised human rights.”
—How come we never talk about state-sponsored homophobia in secular societies like Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, China and the former USSR? Secular homophobia doesn’t need religion to exist.
Other times, religion respects human rights. Watch the film “Be like others” and you’ll see a society where the state embraces transsexuals thanks to Khomeini.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transsexuality_in_Iran
posted by akn on
Bobby –
FYI, China decriminalized homosexuality in 1997, six full years before Lawrence v. Texas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_China
http://www.chinaelections.net/NewsInfo.asp?NewsID=20318
posted by Regan DuCasse on
Hi Bobby, just because I didn’t mention it, doesn’t mean I’m not aware of exactly the abuses by governments you mentioned.
But we were talking about HERE in America and the was if oft repeated as a rationale for denying human rights AND it’s history.
Even recent history, such as in the case of Jim Crow.
We can bear witness much better as we also live in a country with free media and it’s access, unlike the Communist countries you listed.