Why Straights Hate Gays - Asked and Answered!

This week, the L.A. Times served me an unintentional one-two punch that asks AND answers questions about the origins of hostility towards gays. Larry Kramer gets credit for asking the question "Why do you hate gay people so much" in this article:

Why do straights hate gays? - Los Angeles Times

Larry takes the tone of a modern-day Shylock, as he takes off on his own "if you prick us, do we not bleed" rant. His tone alternates between whiny and angry as he points out a handful of the myriad inequities in the way law and society treats gays. And he asks why. With the persistence of a three-year-old, he asks (or implies) over and over again ... why, why, why, why. Even his statements imply an underlying question ... why ?

• why are candidates for public office unwilling to "come right out, unequivocally, and say decent, supportive things about us" ?
  
  
• why are unfair inheritance taxes imposed on gay couples ?
  
  
• why are gays, who continue to be brutalized because of something as inherent to their identity as race or ethnic origin, excluded from the protection of state or federal hate crime measures ?
  
  
• why does the US refuse to recognize and protest human rights violations against gays in foreign countries ?
  
  
• why isn't there greater denouncement of this hate from "supportive" straight people ?
  
  
• what happened to "the equal protections that the Bill of Rights proclaims for all" ?
  
  
• what possible harm comes to you if we marry, or are taxed just like you, or are protected from assault by laws that say it is morally wrong to assault people out of hatred?
  

I think Larry asks these questions rhetorically, maybe even hoping that some readers will recognize and reconsider their own attitudes. On the off chance that he actually wanted answers, I'd suggest he dig back in the L. A. Times stacks about 8 months for this article by Daniel Gilbert:

If only gay sex caused global warming - Los Angeles Times

Daniel brilliantly serves up the scientific / psychological perspective on the characteristics of "threats" that humans are likely to care about. He maintains that "the human brain evolved to respond to threats that have four features" - going on to explain that these features are lacking from the real threat of global warming. I can't top his examples or explanations, but I'll try to sum up the four factors:

1. A Human Element - we devote a lot of thought and attention to the things that other people are planning and doing. Intentional actions get a lot more of our attention than natural accidents, perhaps because we feel like there's something we can do about the former and little to be done about the latter.
   
   
2. Moral Sensibilities - when people are confronted with something that requires them to entertain thoughts they find "indecent, impious or repulsive" they react ... and mores about sex are abundant.
   
   
3. Immediacy - we're great at getting out of the way of something that's about to smack us in the head, and not so adept at (or concerned about) the even bigger threats that might not affect us for years.
   
   
4. Precipitous Change - its like Al Gore's boiling frog who quickly jumps out of the boiling water he happens upon, but is comfortably in a beaker of room temperature water that is gradually brought to boiling. We notice the changes that are NOT gradual.
   

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Dear Larry,

If you really want to understand the nature and origins of hostility towards gays, and come up with some ideas that might start to reduce that hostility, consider these four factors. Get past the rightous notions of fairness, the outrage over the inequity of it all, and deal with the reallities that come with being highly evolved social animals. You might even spend a minute or two reconsidering the efficacy of your own confrontational style.

Responding to the Oblivious

What's up with Garrison Keillor? I always thought of this guy as a liberal, but his March 17 2007 article on Salon called "Stating the Obvious" suggests otherwise. The article starts by blasting a costly government-funded study about the benefits of exposing children to art, then goes on to explain the superiority of "old fashioned" parenting - without any requirements for costly studies.

He has since come under fire (and apologized) for his comments suggesting that stereotypical same-sex couples are ill-suited for parenting. He wrote:

"The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men -- sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts. That's for the kids. It's their show."
-GK

In his apology, GK explains that the entire article was tongue-in-cheek, meant to be funny, just a joke and all that. Pretty un-funny stuff coming from a professional who should be able to communicate a little more clearly. He goes on to write: "

...the government is paying large sums of money to have the obvious pointed out..."
-GK

WRONG - The government spends money on valuable research so that decisions that affect individual rights and public interest aren't made based on the limited perspective of personal opinion. Thanks to the willingness to invest in research, we now know that that children with gay or lesbian parents fare as well as those raised in families with a mother and a father. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) and other adoption advocacy groups will confirm this.

I grew up the child of a mixed-gender marriage that lasted until death parted them, and I could tell you about how good that is for children, and you could pay me whatever you think it's worth.

Back in the day, that was the standard arrangement. Everyone had a yard, a garage, a female mom, a male dad, and a refrigerator with leftover boiled potatoes in plastic dishes with snap-on lids.
-GK

WRONG: It may have seemed that everyone had the same idyllic experiences and situations growing up with two loving mixed-gender parents, in reality the world is a much bigger place than GK's neighborhood. In the great big world, and likely in GK's little neighborhood, too many kids suffer unspeakable abuse and shameful neglect at the hands of their mixed-gender parents. Let's not advance the notion that a kid having a mom and a dad in their life is always a good thing.

Monogamy put the parents in the background where they belong and we children were able to hold center stage.
-GK

PLEASE: Another example of how perception and reality differ. Just because GK wasn't aware of any shenanigans that may have been going on at the time DOESN'T mean that people were any more faithful back in the good old days. Perhaps they were just sneakier, or benefited from having no "smoking gun" cell phone or email records to implicate them. I don't understand the need to idealize a previous generation in this way.

Nature is about continuation of the species -- in other words, children.
-GK

SORT OF: Continuation of the species is certainly one thing that nature is about, it might even be the main thing. But we also know that homosexuality is widespread throughout the animal kingdom, that some parents in nature kill the young when they have the opportunity, and that many species have very little to do with their young outside of conception. Thankfully, most people are smart enough to realize that mimicking the brutality of nature is neither humane nor virtuous.

And now gay marriage will produce a whole new string of hyphenated relatives.
-GK

ABSURD: I'm gay. I'm married. Like many married people, I call my spouse "husband", I refer to his parents as my in-laws, and if he had children I would likely refer to them as "the kids". Is GK suggesting that a married gay man needs some new kind of prefix or label to announce a difference that shouldn't matter to anyone else in the first place? This would be like suggesting that mixed-race marriages require a new set of hyphenated labels for our relatives.

I hold the (liberal?) belief that change is good and necessary so that we can improve the imperfect world we live in. I'm thankful for all of the people who came before me who had the courage to advocate necessary changes, sometimes at their own peril. So many people today enjoy the rights of equality to which they are naturally entitled, thanks to those who have had the courage to change the rules. I'm disappointed to learn that Garrison Keillor doesn't share this belief.

Toothpaste

As ridiculous as this sounds, some people don't seem to understand that toothpaste is intended for teeth - even though the word "tooth" is right there in the name! It should be that simple, and certainly used to be that simple when I was growing up.

But today, in the 21^st century, liberal "free thinkers" have come up with all kinds of outrageous ideas that they want to pass off as equally legitimate uses of toothpaste, including:

• a general purpose polish, for mirrors & silver & such
• spackling compound, for small holes in drywall
• removing scuffs from shoes
• soothing bug bites & bee stings
• etc, etc, etc

Folks, there are MANY web pages devoted to pedalling these obviously bogus ideas, right out there for kids to see. Here's a sickening sampling just to show you what we're dealing with here:

• Yahoo Answers
• Frugal for Life
• even Reader's Digest

TOOTHPASTE IS FOR TEETH! If it was meant to polish silver, it would be called "silver polish". Sure, it is great for silver, probably better than any silver polish I've ever tried, but come on. Dental health is too important, and we cannot afford to have the traditional use of toothpaste threatened by these new ideas.

What are children supposed to think when they see these web pages, talking about toothpaste for acne, as a defogger, or as a deodorizer? Kids are impressionable, and if they start seeing toothpaste in all these other capacities, then the traditional role of toothpaste ... between a brush and a tooth ... will become meaningless. Are we that willing to risk our kids' dental health by allowing these unnatural uses of toothpaste to continue?

To those who point out that non-traditional uses of toothpaste do not detract from its traditional role in any way, i say: we just can't afford such a risky social experiment. For generations "The American Family" has depended on toothpaste to fill its traditional role, and we ought not risk tearing the delicate social fabric by allowing all the deviant practices already cited. Our way of life is under attack here, so I propose the following:

• at the federal level - demanding passage of the Defense of Mouths Act (DOMA). In this way we can codify in law the natural place for toothpaste: between a tooth and a toothbrush.
  
• in each state - calling for constitutional amendments limiting the use of toothpaste, or anything like it, for uses other than cleaning of one persons teeth with one brush.
  
• in our churches - unfortunately, we simply cannot allow people who use toothpaste for deviant purposes to participate in the congregation. of course, this goes double for clergy members.

This is a no-brainer, right ... just like gay marriage?