DABlog

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that other forms of hate and prejudice are extinct, or even on the wane. But it feels like the stars anti-Muslim sentiment and homophobia are in the ascendancy.

It’s very much about statements that don’t sound aggressive or hateful, on the surface, but that would never be made if hate didn’t lurk just below. I’m thinking, for example, of a report I heard on the radio of some attack or other, involving “three Muslims of middle-eastern descent.” I might have the phrasing of the “middle-eastern descent” part wrong (though it was that or close to it). In any case, the salient bit, for me, was “three Muslims.”

When was the last time you heard a crime described as having been committed by “three Christians”? How about “A Jew broke into a convenience store…”? So what’s up with “three Muslims”?

What’s up, of course, is hate. I don’t think the radio announcer or the newswriter hates Muslims. But they do operate under a compulsion to mention explicitly that Muslims are Muslims, and ultimately that’s so that the listenership can be put on alert to hate them. Does the phrase “three Muslims” have explanatory power? Did these people do whatever they did because they are Muslims? No. There’s no reason to mention their religion except out of habit of mentioning the fact that Muslims are Muslims.

Back when I was a university professor (1992-2005; in this case somewhere around 2003, I think), the school newspaper had a kind of “person-in-the-street” feature, where they’d ask a few people around campus a question and print selected answers. One week, the question was something about Iraq. One of the people quoted in the feature said something along the lines of, “Bomb them all off the face of the earth.” Or “Blow them all up”—words to that effect.

My response was to call the editor-in-chief of the newspaper into my office and have a little chat with him. I was under no institutional imperative to do so—I was not involved with the paper directly—but it seemed to me that I had an opportunity to teach him perhaps the most important lesson of his college career. “If the question of the week had been about how to improve the cafeteria food,” I asked him, “and someone had said, ‘Line the whole cafeteria staff against the wall and shoot them dead,’ would you have printed it?”

Of course he would not have, and said that he would not have. “The fact that what we would not say about the cafeteria workers, we would say about the entire population of a Muslim country,” I explained, “is the dehumanization process at work.” I do believe he understood and took my point on board.

So we mention that people are Muslims, and we lower the bar when it comes to suggesting (or, if you like, joking about) their violent deaths. And it’s all very dangerous and should be sending up serious alarms.

Labeling the gay as gay is an even more popular pastime. The world has settled for a breathtakingly stunted view of what homosexuality entails, and how it manifests itself. It manifests itself, by the way, as itself, not as an obsession with the song “YMCA” or an expertise in designer footware. Hey, more power to you if you have that expertise. But the set of all men who do intersects in a miniscule subset with the set of all men whose primary sexual orientation is toward men. Ditto for all the stereotypes.

Of course, the world can’t deal with the idea that homosexuality manifests itself only as itself, because if that’s true, it means you can’t tell who’s gay; and that, like being unable to tell who’s Jewish, is unacceptable. The workaround is to pretend that you can tell who’s gay, resorting to babytalk about your “gaydar” when the stereotypes, as they must, fail you.

And then, following a fairly tight train of thought, there’s hatred of gays.

First of all, let me explain that I include, as hatred, the “love the sinner, hate the sin” horseshit espoused by the Catholic church. It is, to be sure, a kinder, gentler hatred than the burning-at-the-stake kind. The idea is that you’re enlightened enough to acknowledge that some people just are gay. But you also understand that, as gays, they must never indulge in the kinds of sexual activities they feel interested in. So you, as the compassionate believer, offer to contribute to their happiness by giving them support and encouragement as they fight to maintain their chastity.

How noble.

The church, of course, has two thousand years of experience disguising hate as love. But this one is particularly devious and malign. Let’s cut to the chase: the only reason that one adult human being would try to stop another adult human being, on a lifelong basis, from attaining romantic and/or erotic satisfaction is that he or she (human one) hates him or her (human two). No amount of theological stroking can change that. It’s hate.

Not news, of course, that the Pope and friends hate gays. But interesting to see how slimy and prurient they can get, in the process. Anyway, let’s move on.

Actually we can borrow a concept from the church: “invincible ignorance.” When I read the stuff about homosexuality being a choice (note that it’s not that sexual preference is a choice, just homosexuality—which makes it kind of weird to describe it as a choice), my reaction is that if you put twenty articulate, knowledgeable people in a room for twenty years with the person who’s taking the “choice” position, that person would emerge still saying that homosexuality is a choice. There’s no point of entry for explanation, and no point of contact with reality.

It’s pathetic, but I still count it as hate. At least it leads to hate. Or from hate, perhaps. Or maybe these people are actually choosing to be vicious, and could stop themselves if they really wanted to. It’s hard to know. They’re not saying.

With gay marriage on the news radar these days, more and more of this kind of discourse is showing up: the choice thing, but also the “gays recruit people” thing (which is actually backwards; have these people ever watched television commercials?) and, most disturbingly of all, the “gays prey on children” thing. And each of these things embodies two problems: first, that people believe it; and second, that it’s acceptable to say it publicly.

Which hateful statements are acceptable and which aren’t is a kind of lump under the carpet that moves around but never goes away. Unfortunately, the underlying hate never goes away either—and ultimately, no matter which targeted people or groups we’re talking about, it’s the underlying hate that matters. But who gets to say what, and when, and with what consequences (or lack thereof) is, in itself, something that I think it’s worth keeping fairly close tabs on.