Don't use the courts to force people to like you

Social approval! We all want it. And we're never going to get it--at least, not as much as we want. Whether the people around you approve of you is not within your control. Well, some of it is--you can take some voluntary actions to improve your chances of approval. Being nice and tipping and taking showers helps. But that will never guarantee you get the approval you want.

Why not? Part of it is pure luck--or “privilege,” grudgingly. Part of it is the “you can't please everyone” effect. Being upper-class is generally good, but not if you want to fit in in a lower-class environment. Some people resent immigrants; others think Americans are dumb. Some people will hate you for being black, and others for being white. You can be fat-shamed or skinny-shamed. So, fundamentally, we have to live in a world in which, no matter who you are, some people will hate you for no good reason. A woman has to navigate a world with misogynists and rapists in it. An atheist has to accept that many people think he's going to burn in hell. And gay people have to live with the knowledge that many of their neighbors disapprove of their sexual and romantic relationships. For the person who finds these facts upsetting, I recommend Agent Cooper's mantra.

FBI Agent Roger Hardy: They're liable to extradite you for murder and drug trafficking.

Special Agent Dale Cooper: These are things I cannot control.

This is my problem with the current gay rights movement. As a libertine and libertarian, I have of course been strongly in favor of gay rights as long as I can remember. When gay marriage was banned, and, earlier, when gay sex was illegal, there was a crying need to fight so that gay people can get what they deserve.

But now? Every time I read about a new gay rights case, it's, well, bullying. Suing the small business owner who refuses to sell flowers or cake or custom-printed T-shirts for gay weddings or gay causes. These are not cases about getting gay people what they deserve-- the same privileges and rights the rest of us enjoy. This is using the courts to force the illusion of social approval.

Not even the plaintiffs claim that any person has actually been damaged in these cases. One litigant in a right-to-wedding-flowers case claimed that his actual damages were some $17, or the cost of the gas he burned when he had to drive to a different florist. In another case involving a transgender high school student, the biologically male student wanted to use the girls' locker room; the school wanted him to use the boys' room, and offered the obvious compromise; a private changing room for this student. The offer was rejected--proving, beyond a doubt, that the transgender bathroom controversy is not about providing safe and decent bathroom facilities for transgender people. It's about forcing society to accept the transgender theory of gender. This is completely wrong. Partly, of course, I think it's wrong because my concept of gender is different. But it would be wrong to use the courts to force people to accept my gender theory too! I just have to live in a world in which most people are terribly, terribly, wrong, and, rather than being something the courts ought to correct, this seems like the human condition.

Litigating for social approval is not what the courts are there for. Social approval is not something gay or transgender people deserve, because desserts don't make sense in this context, because social approval is inherently arbitrary.

I wonder if the gay rights advocates agree with me on this point. Is it that they think of approval as something that you are entitled to, if you do x and y? In my life, I've gone from being one of the most stigmatized, powerless and low-status people in our society, to now being reasonably successful and respected. From having to ask dumb people for permission to go to the bathroom to having a job that largely consists of telling smart people what to do. And yet, I feel like the same person. It creates some cognitive dissonance that I've never really known how to communicate. But, other people have not had this experience. If you've always had people approve of you if you did the “right” thing, I imagine you might come to think of approval as something you “deserve.”

Another possibility is that gay rights advocates think of these cases not as means of redressing specific wrongs done to the plaintiffs, but rather as a means of shifting popular opinion. So it's not about fighting for what someone deserves, but rather conducting something of a morality play in which the state of the law is merely a public relations tool.

I would be interested in hearing your opinion, especially if you agree with these gay rights cases. Do you think social approval is something that people deserve? Or do you think these cases are a PR tool? Or do you think our disagreement resides somewhere else?

Gay conversion therapy

This is an interesting issue that I expect to neatly divide the liberals from the libertarians. Should "conversion therapy," a.k.a. therapy intended to make gay people straight, be banned?

Arguments against it:

• It's unpopular with the mob. "In two different national polls, more than 60 percent of Americans indicated that they believe conversion therapy doesn’t work." Who cares?
  
• The American Psychological Association says it's not backed by evidence. But this would support banning pretty much all psychotherapy, not to mention alternative medicine. Psychiatry is not a science, and it's common to see that any given treatment works for some and not others.
  
• Part of the reason there's no evidence base is that it's hard to verify whether someone who says he is straight is straight. I don't see a way around this, other than a longer follow-up period.
  
• Homosexuality isn't a "mental illness." But whether something counts as a mental illness or not is a political decision. People should be able to seek treatment for whatever is troubling them, regardless of whether it's in the DSM.
  
• Conversion therapy sometimes makes people feel worse. Again, no different from any other therapy.
  
• Children should not be given conversion therapy because they don't have the capacity to freely consent to it. I'm pretty sympathetic to the argument that children shouldn't be brainwashed. But why is brainwashing bad when applied to “correct” homosexuality, and not when applied to “correct” drug use, heterosexual sex, bad grades or any of the other sins for which children are sent to therapy?
  

Argument for:

• Boils down to the basic libertarian argument that people ought to be able to do what they want to with their own lives. Like it or not, some people don't want to be gay and are desperate for a way to avoid it. Cultural liberals may think it's laughable or sad for a gay man to marry a woman and call himself straight. But is it any more absurd than some of the weird sex liberals get up to?
  

A classic kook

For the abnormal psychology enthusiasts. This is a man who is telling the sober truth, it seems to me. The things that happen to him are exactly the same irrational, annoying, and inexplicable things that happen to all of  us. But his strong perception that everything that happens around him is all about him is what makes his thinking classically schizophrenic.

Also interesting that he seems to believe that such a simple thing as a newspaper to read in line would be a weapon against the secret police. As if some part of him knew that the real problem is what happens inside his head when the secret police start their machinations.

 

I looked at around ten apartments...since the secret police had already selected and prepared an apartment for me this proved to be a futile endeavor. It is difficult to relate to and impossible to adjust to the artificial, arbitrary and hostile living environment the secret police have created...they try to turn the most commonplace life experiences and the activities of daily life into a maze-like obstacle course.

While descending the stairs from my apartment I usually meet one or more of the “tenants” trying hard to look as if they live in the building or staging a scene for me to observe. Frequently groups of men are standing or sitting on the stoop when I go out or come in; sometimes blocking the steps so that I have to ask them to move. On days when it is felt some special intimidation is necessary a police car will drive by as I go out and again as I come home...A corner with a hardware store, a sometimes open grocery store and two abandoned buildings is not likely to be a favorite neighborhood hangout yet there are often groups of Puerto Rican and black men standing around. As I approach the intersection, a signal is given and people, most of whom are young men, start crossing the intersection from every direction; people walking on the sidewalks, boys riding by on bikes, and other people driving by in cars...

A male child or a handsome young man presents himself to be looked at while other people observe me. Presumably, if I look at the conspicuously displayed bait, the observer-witnesses claim to have seem proof of sexual interest or an attempted seduction. A few thousand such scenes were staged to create incidents that could be  used to discredit me...

On Tuesday I left my apartment intending to pay my Con Edison bill. At the Con Edison office I looked in the window; the office was unusually crowded and the bill-paying line seemed suspiciously long. I was  generally apprehensive about entering a trap, so I decided to come back the next day.

I left my apartment around 3:05 p.m. on Wednesday. Walking across 14^th street, I looked at every newstand for a copy of the New York Times so that I would have something to read while waiting in line. Over a two-year period, I frequently bought or saw papers late in the afternoon at the various newstands; it is highly unlikely they would have all been sold out. I believe intelligence agents asked the newspaper sellers to hide the papers so that I would have nothing to do while waiting except to observe the planned operation. I joined the bill-paying line; there were around ten people in line and as I approached two young men placed themselves directly ahead of me in the line. There were five bill-paying windows. While I waited in line the clerks closed their windows until only one window was left open for customer service. The four people in front of me all went to the same window. I believe this was a delaying tactic to keep me in the office for a longer period of time.

While waiting in line the secret police operation being staged was very obvious. Seven young men presented themselves to be looked at and a man and a woman each walked by me twice staring holes through me...intelligence agents had set up an elaborate but thinly disguised covert operation within the office of a legitimate business. A few weeks earlier I found myself surrounded by game-playing collaborators in a line at my bank. I became angry and denounced them for participating in secret police operations. I believe intelligence agents chose to restage a similar scene in Con Edison’s offices hoping to elicit the same or a similar response; an angry outburst that could be used as “proof” that through paranormal powers I had somehow triggered the transformer malfunction and resulting blackout.

--Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief, Donna Kossy

You probably won’t get AIDS

"If you look at the data we have right now, it is very clear what is driving the AIDS epidemic in the United States. It's not sustained heterosexual transmission, it is not IV drug use, it's basically in African American men who have sex with men. HIV in heterosexuals persists only because you have inflow either from other countries, from high prevalence areas for example, or from other risk groups such as intravenous drug users or men who have sex with men."

Why gay marriage is unpopular

The gay rights movement likes to frame the gay marriage question as a civil rights issue, by analogy with Loving v. Virginia . If we are to accept this, race is like sexual practice.The theory here goes, there are black people and there are white people, and the two groups are morally equal, and therefore members of those groups should be allowed to marry whomever they please. And similarly, there are straight people and there are gay people, and the two groups are morally equal, and therefore they should be allowed to marry whomever they please.

Now this argument makes sense to very many people, especially to those of us who are already sympathetic with gay rights. But it is not efficacious. It won’t convince anyone who isn’t already half convinced. In fact, I’m not sure it’s true. Race is immutable, short of plastic surgery. But the people you have sex with, or whether you have sex at all, are choices. (Being gay is generally thought to be innate; I’m not so sure; but actually fucking is a choice.) This is why opponents of gay marriage by and large reject the notion that gay people are morally equal with straights, and the notion that gay people can’t help it. So the civil rights analogy makes no sense to them. There must be another way to convince them. This is diplomacy, after all; meet the other side where they are, not where you wish they were.

It seems to me that a lot of gay rights supporters are simply willing to sit back and let time do their work for them; and time is probably on their side. But legalizing gay marriage through the courts will never create widespread tolerance of gay rights; did Roe v Wade make abortion popular? If gay marriage becomes legal against the wishes of a majority or large minority of the people, homosexuals will get symbolic recognition but not actual safety and protection from discrimination. Isolating the people who think homosexuality is wrong will just intensify them in their hatred.

What would be likely to reach them? Well, it might help, for instance, to read what people on the right actually say about gay marriage. It seems to me that gay rights advocates tend not to read these things, and to reject every argument their opponents make as motivated by unconscious hatred for gays. Or religion motivated by hatred. Is there unconscious hatred? Well, probably, sometimes. We can’t negotiate with hatred--that’s too bad-- but what we can address are the rational and plausible fears motivating most of the enemies of gay marriage. In order to do this we need to understand where the other side stands. No one ever engages in successful diplomacy without making some effort to figure out what the other guy is saying, what he’s thinking, what he wants and what he fears. We can also learn from the world of linguistics that when two people use the same word, it’s not always safe to assume they mean the same thing. Say “gay marriage” to one of its supporters, and he probably visualizes crowds of happy newlyweds. Say “gay marriage” to one of its opponents, and he thinks of much more than that. It’s not just married people to him--it’s one more step on the road towards the institutionalization of tolerance for homosexuality. If those are too many abstract nouns, it’s a step towards a world in which gays and liberals have power and people like us don’t.

Read the right wing and see what they fear. For example, Focus on the Family’s little dystopian fantasy about what they feared would happen if Obama won the election. It’s called “The World in 2016” or something like that. They imagine, for instance, that if we legalized gay marriage, public schools would start teaching children that homosexuality is okay. Christian teachers might be fired for refusing to teach this. Christian churches might be sued out of existence if they refused to marry gay people. Christian ministers or anyone else who said in public that homosexuality is a sin, or is a choice, might be sued or imprisoned.

If this seems farfetched, consider some of the anti-hate-speech laws which have been passed in the past few years in Britain and in the Netherlands. Religious people and MPs have been accused of slander and of hate speech for criticizing Islam. So it’s not so implausible to imagine that something similar might eventually happen here. For instance, the case in New Mexico in which a photographer refused to shoot a same-sex ceremony and was sued for it! Or this case in which a man who was found to have expressed 'hatred' was banned for life from expressing opinions critical of homosexuality in any medium, including private communications. How can people consider themselves liberals and yet do their best to use the legal system to batter people who disagree with them?

Gay rights advocates even strengthen this sort of fear by attributing all criticism of homosexuality to sheer hatred. In fact such criticism is usually based in religion, and calling a belief taken straight from the Bible “hate speech” is not likely to win over the Christians.

So what gay rights advocates should do is two things. First, de-emphasize the unconvincing analogy with civil rights. Instead, frame the argument as a libertarian issue. It is one, basically, and besides, many people on the right can sympathize with libertarian ideas. Second, reassure your enemies. Say for instance:

“We gay people just want to live our lives and hold our beliefs without being interfered with. In return, you can live your lives and hold your beliefs. That’s part of living in a democratic pluralistic society. We understand that you think homosexuality is a sin. --We disagree. But we are willing to preserve and to defend your Constitutional right to continue believing and saying what you do, and teaching your children whatever you think best. You leave us alone; we’ll leave you alone.”

Why can’t they say this?

I believe the gay rights movement is handicapped by its own moral fervor--the moral fervor, I suppose, of feeling like you have to defend your very essence as a gay person. Moral fervor is not conducive to a rational, effective and, above all, compassionate diplomacy. After all, very few people are capable of a compassionate understanding of their enemies when they believe those enemies are motivated by personal hatred for them as people. Maybe the straights would make better advocates.