Andrew Sullivan is excerpting a fascinating debate he titles, “Embracing the Bias,” about the dilemma NPR faces over its surprising to no one tilt toward the left. One of the key bones of contention is whether NPR should just say outright, yes, we are sort of leftish, but unlike Fox News, we’ll own up to our bias and honestly try to be fair rather than just asserting it.
As much as I’d like to endorse that kind of full disclosure, it presupposes, as the lawyers say, a fact not in evidence. Lesbians and gay men should be more attuned than most to the fact that in a whole lot of cases, people don’t recognize their own bias. On the contrary, they can understand what others view as bias as some sort of natural order.
When Maggie Gallagher takes umbrage at being called a bigot or worse, she is sincerely expressing her view that the world she grew up in and understands is entirely neutral and correct. Her incredulity comes from the notion that such a uniform history of acknowledging heterosexual marriage holds no bias against homosexual couples.
And, speaking historically, she is not wrong. I don’t think the long, confounding and ongoing development of marriage came out of a bias against same-sex couples, it just came out of an ignorance of their existence. It took all of that history, culminating late in the 20th Century, for lesbians and gay men to fully assert their public presence, much less their need for the same legal recognition of their relationships that heterosexuals take for granted.
But just because there was no intent to discriminate against same-sex couples in, say, the 16th Century doesn’t mean that the effect of that unawareness isn’t discriminatory today. Gallagher has set herself up as the ambassador of that obliviousness. If history isn’t biased, how could she and her followers be? What is wrong with people?
What Gallagher can’t see (or won’t acknowledge) is what a gathering majority can no longer blind itself to. Lesbians and gay men do exist, do fall in love, do form relationships, do raise children. The law’s neglect of them is now clear to anyone who wants to see it.
But those who keep their blinkers on do, in fact, begin to look biased, look like they really don’t want to see something that is right in front of their eyes. Perhaps that isn’t really bigotry or hate, but it looks so willful, so harsh, so mean.
Maybe it is always hard for us to recognize our own biases, too easy to mistake them for justice when, in fact, their injustice is only still coming into view. It would be so nice if Gallagher and NPR and everyone could stand back from their deeply held beliefs and examine them fully. But history proves that’s hard.
On a lot of subjects, now, we don’t know what bias is. How can we expect people to admit something we don’t have agreement on the boundaries of? If NPR doesn’t see their bias as bias, they can do no more about it than Gallagher can, and will be missing many of the same cultural shifts that are happening right under their nose.