I don’t want to define Arkansas Economic Development Commission Director Grant Tennille’s statements last week calling for the end of legal discrimination against gay people in our state as “courageous.”
I would rather say they were reasonable, that they were common-sensical. But I suppose the climate in our state is still such that most people who wish to preserve their political viability think they can profit by playing to the fears of the backward and the mean. One would think it’s obvious that a place that supports equality and non-discrimination would be attractive to national and multi-national concerns with diverse workforces.
Companies look for locations where all their employees can be welcomed, Tennille said. “I think the first state in the South that moves in that direction will have a leg up.”
That’s just a fact. Failure to recognize it is myopic. But the backward and the mean vote too, and in the short run, at least, there may be enough of them to push some main chance opportunist into some petty office. So it’s probably smart to simply avoid the topic, or to muse about how you always thought of marriage as something between one man and one woman, as though all that really matters is the maintenance of nostalgia. (Be careful, habits like that are what happened to Paula Deen.)
Maybe not everyone understands that they’ve grown up with and lived among gay folks all their lives, but more and more it’s becoming obvious even to the most oblivious and cloistered among us that every oneroom schoolhouse and basketball team has a naturally allotted share of people inclined to love differently than the majority. Sexual orientation is not a choice any more than left-handedness (though people used to believe that sinister trait might be “corrected” as well).
Mankind is never guaranteed happiness, no matter what advantages we are born into and what sterling qualities we acquire. We tend to accept what we are told when we are young, regardless of whether it aligns with our heart. (You know that still, small voice within you? That can be wrong too.)
It is difficult to make your way when every choice forecloses possibilities, when there are tides within us that operate independently of our will. We are pulled in directions we cannot understand, and sometimes we sabotage ourselves. Maybe the best part of us understands how fallible we are, how capable we are of misperceptions and misjudgments. We can hurt people, and ourselves, when what we mean to do is to soothe and uplift. We err, despite our best intentions.
And so we might look for safety, we might seek the counsel of the wise. But who among us is wise? The man crying on the radio? The woman with the book to sell? The preacher-politician asking for your money to help his good fight against the justices sworn to uphold the law? How do we know whom to trust, who means to keep his word, who loves his fellow man more than himself? I don’t know, but I don’t expect to find these folks in gated communities or beachfront Xanadus or on television or radio. I suspect the selfless and the sainted do their work in relative obscurity, that we only hear about them secondhand, that the good work they do reverberates in the hearts of the helped, that most of the time they live and die without much stirring of the atmosphere.
I do not expect to be like them. I do not expect you to be like them. But I am tired of the cynical and the self-aggrandizing, the smug men in the $100 haircuts testifying to their own righteousness. I am sick of hypocrites and patronizing apparatchiks in pancake make-up playing what they will freely admit (when they are among those they recognize as their equals) is a contest to see who can best align their self-serving interests within the parameters of politics-ain’t-beanbag, being held up as moral examples and distinguished gentlemen and women.
I think it is important that able, decent people make themselves available for public office, and it is possible to serve honorably. But there are limits to what politicians ought to concern themselves with. They ought to mostly leave us alone.
There are areas of experience into which the law ought not to reach. While not all sex is loving or consensual, no law should tell you who to love, or seek to regulate the tender contracts consenting adults enter into. If marriage is a legal right-if the state confers benefits on those who enter into this particular kind of contract-then it must be available to all of us. It is that simple, and the courts will eventually make it so.Anyone who protests that civil equality somehow confers preference is either disingenuous or confused, but in any case wrong. If the government is going to be in the business of abetting and sanctioning marriages, it cannot deny those benefits to gay or lesbian couples.
And why would it seek to? Because some people retain the belief that homosexuality is somehow morally wrong? Because there are lines in sacred texts that can be interpreted to suggest that the Lord disapproves of this particular sort of love? Because it feels wrong to you? Because you have some intellectual mascot telling you that you are the salt of the earth (and persecuted, besides) and that your prejudice ought to be privileged because you’re a better type of American?
I’m sorry, but ignorance, willful or received, is a kind of wishfulness, a magical notion that refuses to acknowledge the universe’s indifference to your personal cosmology. You do not know what happens when people die. And your guess is informed by unreliable witnesses, at least some of whom would be grateful if you could write them a check.
All I know is what I have seen, and I have seen good people scarred and damaged, not only by the words and actions of a hateful few, but by the indifference and reticence of a sheepish majority.
But we do seem to advance, to creep forward, understanding a little more each century. And though the ignorant and mean will always be with us, it will not be much longer before this particular tendentiousness will give way to some other perhaps more nuanced-but hardly more valid-reason to despise. And that will be a small, but real, victory.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com Read more at
Perspective, Pages 70 on 07/14/2013