I'm an opinionated know-it-all who doesn't know nearly as much as she'd like to think. And I'm more naïve than is justifiable for a 34 year old woman who claims to be as worldly as I do when I’m in a bragging mood.
I was raised by unusually unbiased parents. Not all Italian-Americans can say the same. And I while I bitch often about some of the other pedagogical shortcomings of my mother and father, I will sing their praises to high heaven for having encouraged open-mindedness in me and in the rest of my siblings. In this regard, both of them did a stellar job. Perhaps too good. I'm sometimes utterly and stupidly bewildered at the close-minded way in which many people in this country think and operate. I should also say that the bulk of my experience in this great nation has been in cities like New York and Los Angeles and, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it is uncommon to find myopic intolerant people in these places, one may indeed be more likely to encounter them in other parts of the country. So sometimes, like a deer frozen by the light of an oncoming car, I just get side-swiped by the opinions people hold.
Take gay marriage. As a straight person with a pretty low opinion of marriage as an institution in general, my initial response to the issue was: Why are we even talking about this? They want to get married? Let them! And then can we PLEASE move onto something IMPORTANT like childhood illiteracy, this fucking war, or the sad (and racist) state of the U.S. justice system? Mine was a "let them eat cake" attitude that I have come to rethink and regret.
Now, I hope it does not but perhaps it requires mentioning that I think homosexuality is a splendid lifestyle that increases the variety of people we have the good fortune to get to know on this planet and that it is another aspect of our collective nature that we should relish in, learn about and from and, YES, expose our children to. But naïve though I may be, I wasn’t born yesterday and I know that not everyone in this country feels the way I do. Still, I was astonished at how many people had -not just opinions- but strong crusade-like opinions about what gay people should not be allowed to do. I just didn't get it. I'm saying this with my hand on my conscience, I'm not being cheeky: why anyone who wasn't gay would have more than a passing "whatever" attitude about the whole thing absolutely escaped me. Like I said, I am a dummy.
The anti-gay lobby uttered some incendiary one-liners about "sanctity" and "the children" and presto, all of a sudden we had an issue that everyone had to have an opinion about. Its vitriol bulldozed me. The arguments about the “sanctity” of marriage repulsed me. First of all, what’s so sacred about marriage? As far as I can tell, marriage hasn’t been sacred for a few generations at least (a very good thing if you ask me). Was it sacred for Elizabeth Taylor? Many married people I know are moderately to extremely unhappy in their “sacred institutions”. Besides, this country still does enjoy separation of church and state, no one was telling Roman Catholics they had to let Adam and Steve get married in Saint Patrick’s but why would the SECULAR state be opposed to it based on the “sanctity” of the institution? Since when is sanctity a criteria for deciding PUBLIC (that is, SECULAR) issues? And this whole business about what it will do to the children! I am outraged at how kids are always being used for these obscenely transparent ends. But you’ve all heard the rhetoric, I don't intend to get into each ridiculous claim of the anti-gay lobby. Suffice it to say, in the face of all this, I ended up feeling awful about having been so cavalier about the whole thing at the beginning.
But I still think that gay marriage should be something like a non-issue, where do straight people get off telling gays what they "think" about them having the same rights? The cheek of it still kind of shocks me. And I do think that our energies as a nation would be better focused on what I consider to be much more pressing problems. A large part of me suspects that part of the reason why this issue was so polemicized is that its resolution was “simple”: i.e. we either decide to let gay people do what they want or we decide instead what they can and cannot do. It’s an easy thing to talk about in sound bites. Other issues, like an increasingly awful education system, an increasingly doped up population of children who don't spend enough time with their parents but spend WAY too much time in front of the TV, are complex and require thoughtful reflection and discussion and their resolution is likely to come in stages and to be expensive. So while I have the anti-gay lobby to thank that I have become convinced that marriage is a civil right after all and that gay people were absolutely right to make a stink and hopefully this insane notion that straight people should get to dictate whether gays marry will eventually fall into an ugly part of our past along with state-sanctioned segregation, I also worry that the only problems we tend to focus on are these controversial, yes, but ultimately easily digested ones, ones that make snazzy headlines, ones around which people are easily galvanize-able.
If I’m right, we’re in trouble. Because it means that complicated issues will always be eclipsed by sexy headlines and facile polemics. I’m glad that things seem to be moving –albeit slowly- in the right direction when it comes to gay marriage but I fear that our other, truly big troubles may never be so lucky if we insist on only focusing the public dialogue on problems that can easily be categorized as polarizing yes or no issues.
Unfortunately, certain problems can not be addressed by simply forcing people to answer the question: For or Against?
I was raised by unusually unbiased parents. Not all Italian-Americans can say the same. And I while I bitch often about some of the other pedagogical shortcomings of my mother and father, I will sing their praises to high heaven for having encouraged open-mindedness in me and in the rest of my siblings. In this regard, both of them did a stellar job. Perhaps too good. I'm sometimes utterly and stupidly bewildered at the close-minded way in which many people in this country think and operate. I should also say that the bulk of my experience in this great nation has been in cities like New York and Los Angeles and, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it is uncommon to find myopic intolerant people in these places, one may indeed be more likely to encounter them in other parts of the country. So sometimes, like a deer frozen by the light of an oncoming car, I just get side-swiped by the opinions people hold.
Take gay marriage. As a straight person with a pretty low opinion of marriage as an institution in general, my initial response to the issue was: Why are we even talking about this? They want to get married? Let them! And then can we PLEASE move onto something IMPORTANT like childhood illiteracy, this fucking war, or the sad (and racist) state of the U.S. justice system? Mine was a "let them eat cake" attitude that I have come to rethink and regret.
Now, I hope it does not but perhaps it requires mentioning that I think homosexuality is a splendid lifestyle that increases the variety of people we have the good fortune to get to know on this planet and that it is another aspect of our collective nature that we should relish in, learn about and from and, YES, expose our children to. But naïve though I may be, I wasn’t born yesterday and I know that not everyone in this country feels the way I do. Still, I was astonished at how many people had -not just opinions- but strong crusade-like opinions about what gay people should not be allowed to do. I just didn't get it. I'm saying this with my hand on my conscience, I'm not being cheeky: why anyone who wasn't gay would have more than a passing "whatever" attitude about the whole thing absolutely escaped me. Like I said, I am a dummy.
The anti-gay lobby uttered some incendiary one-liners about "sanctity" and "the children" and presto, all of a sudden we had an issue that everyone had to have an opinion about. Its vitriol bulldozed me. The arguments about the “sanctity” of marriage repulsed me. First of all, what’s so sacred about marriage? As far as I can tell, marriage hasn’t been sacred for a few generations at least (a very good thing if you ask me). Was it sacred for Elizabeth Taylor? Many married people I know are moderately to extremely unhappy in their “sacred institutions”. Besides, this country still does enjoy separation of church and state, no one was telling Roman Catholics they had to let Adam and Steve get married in Saint Patrick’s but why would the SECULAR state be opposed to it based on the “sanctity” of the institution? Since when is sanctity a criteria for deciding PUBLIC (that is, SECULAR) issues? And this whole business about what it will do to the children! I am outraged at how kids are always being used for these obscenely transparent ends. But you’ve all heard the rhetoric, I don't intend to get into each ridiculous claim of the anti-gay lobby. Suffice it to say, in the face of all this, I ended up feeling awful about having been so cavalier about the whole thing at the beginning.
But I still think that gay marriage should be something like a non-issue, where do straight people get off telling gays what they "think" about them having the same rights? The cheek of it still kind of shocks me. And I do think that our energies as a nation would be better focused on what I consider to be much more pressing problems. A large part of me suspects that part of the reason why this issue was so polemicized is that its resolution was “simple”: i.e. we either decide to let gay people do what they want or we decide instead what they can and cannot do. It’s an easy thing to talk about in sound bites. Other issues, like an increasingly awful education system, an increasingly doped up population of children who don't spend enough time with their parents but spend WAY too much time in front of the TV, are complex and require thoughtful reflection and discussion and their resolution is likely to come in stages and to be expensive. So while I have the anti-gay lobby to thank that I have become convinced that marriage is a civil right after all and that gay people were absolutely right to make a stink and hopefully this insane notion that straight people should get to dictate whether gays marry will eventually fall into an ugly part of our past along with state-sanctioned segregation, I also worry that the only problems we tend to focus on are these controversial, yes, but ultimately easily digested ones, ones that make snazzy headlines, ones around which people are easily galvanize-able.
If I’m right, we’re in trouble. Because it means that complicated issues will always be eclipsed by sexy headlines and facile polemics. I’m glad that things seem to be moving –albeit slowly- in the right direction when it comes to gay marriage but I fear that our other, truly big troubles may never be so lucky if we insist on only focusing the public dialogue on problems that can easily be categorized as polarizing yes or no issues.
Unfortunately, certain problems can not be addressed by simply forcing people to answer the question: For or Against?
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