IGF CultureWatch

There is more visceral media interest in our reaction to Jared Loughner’s heinous acts than there is in Loughner, himself.  It is worth our attention that our first instinct, after learning of the mass murders he committed, was to try and locate him on the political spectrum.

Part of that has to do with the fact that the primary target of his attack was a politician.  But there was something else at work as well: a need to view people as having and taking sides.

Rep. Giffords is a Democrat, and there can’t be much debate about the fact that a cadre of commentators on the left did what they could to locate Loughner on the other side – the right, and specifically, the Tea Party right.  If she was political, then there must be a political motive for the shooting somewhere.  Commentators on the right then needed to respond to these misguided efforts, and have done what they could to associate Loughner with the left, or more generally with the Democratic Party.

This is not exactly the kind of madness that Loughner suffers from, but it is the defining insanity of our time – the compulsion to understand people within categories.  In other contexts, we know this to be prejudice, but nothing is ever called prejudice when it is taken for granted.  Our political prejudices are so completely subsumed in our thinking that we don’t recognize them for what they are.

No one with the least amount of sense believes that Loughner acted for political motives.  Even the most herculean efforts to shoehorn his acts into politics needed to resort to the gymnastics of assigning blame to our political rhetoric, and the rhetoric’s effect on Loughner (and, necessarily, others).  There is little doubt in my mind that our political rhetoric is poisonous and unhelpful.  But only those who live and breathe in our rancid political culture could think that everyone understands the world this way.  Many Americans – maybe even a majority – partake of only enough political talk to get by, and ignore or shun vast swathes of it.

I suspect that these are the people who are abandoning the sides.  As Gallup has helped us understand, 38% of Americans identify themselves as independent of either political party, 7% more than the next leading brand.

It is the media’s tiresome and incessant need for “narrative” that helps to drive this movement.  The binary nature of the Democratic/Republican divide is invaluable in crafting stories that purport to explain our public life.  The drama comes from the divide, and the divide is endlessly exploitable by the press.  Because the parties need the press’s attention, the dramatic cycle is complete and self-replicating.

Except for the people who eventually weary of it.  While the political world is divided in two, the world Americans live in is neither binary nor so simplistic.  Drama and conflict are not always sufficient to truly understand things, and can, in fact, obscure more profound truths.  Sometimes, the effort we expend in trying to locate human beings on one side or the other, in order to better understand the narrative, wastes our time and leaves nothing but empty anger behind.

This site was started exactly because of that sort of problem.  The Democratic party’s impulse toward equality for lesbians and gay men was always decent and important.  Removing discriminatory laws from the books is the bedrock of our movement, and we now only have one left to go: marriage.

But after the laws that require discrimination are gone, Democrats still want to do more, to try and remove discrimination from the culture, itself.  That is a much larger, and more difficult task, and government’s role in it is not uniformly accepted.

On this point, the Independent Gay Forum was formed, both to question the reliance of lesbians and gay men on only a single political party, and to prod the Republican party on its unwillingness to address the simple issue of the existence of homosexuals and their role as citizens who are not heterosexual.  Should the law continue to ignore their existence?  Encourage their silence?  Punish them?

Neither party – neither side – was exactly right for us, as I’m sure neither party is exactly right for many people.  The binary political debate the nation was having about gay equality did not fit the more complicated facts and multiplicity of motives that exist.  And the disconnect could not be ignored.

I don’t expect all of those independent voters Gallup is tracking to go away soon.  I think they are now a permanent part of our politics, made more so by the parties, themselves, who find such a hard time even giving public acknowledgement of their existence.  But an awful lot of us just don’t feel a need to pick a side, and suffer the toxic effects of our artificially two-sided debate every single day.  We crave a discussion that is a bit more nuanced, and a lot more realistic.

I hope that’s what IGF provides.  Even when we irritate our own readers (and from the comments, it seems we do that a lot), we hope the irritation is welcome, and useful.