Meandering Through the Maze

I think a lot about why things are the way they are, how they got that way, what we can change for the better, and how we can change it. It is not an activity with much instant gratification. Regarding the queer equality movement (or any equality movement), it's simple enough to vote strategically and participate in various kinds of activism and all that sort of thing, but I think without more thinking, and different thinking, we (on a cultural level) are just going to keep creating and recreating variations on the inequality theme over and over again.

I've spent a lot of time lately thinking about how conservatives wield arguments. One of the conservative arguments that got caught in my brain filter goes thusly: Gay people having equal rights under the law oppresses Christians by infringing upon their right to religious freedom. It's the kind of argument that makes me do that cartoon thing where I shake my head really fast and emit a series of lip-bobbling sounds that don't approach comprehensible language. It's tempting to dismiss the argument out of hand, but I often can't let go of things until I understand them.

The argument basically states that Christians should be able to oppress anyone they damned well please, otherwise they're being oppressed, and furthermore, that unless secular society both supports as well as participates in oppressing the groups that Christians determine ought to be oppressed, then that is also oppressive to Christians. It's as if they don't understand the meaning of words like "oppress".

I don't think that's true. I think the folks who forward those arguments understand the words just fine. I think they understand that a word like "oppress", particularly, is a powerful word, and that's why they've sought to redefine it in the sense of popular usage. I mean, if "oppress" is allowed to mean what it really means, then everyone has to fight for and support everyone else's equality. Theocrats can't have that else they'd never get their theocracy, which is predicated on hierarchy. So instead, they need to paint themselves as victims even when they're not, and they need to paint their victims as oppressors.

Christians who disapprove of homosexuality lobby the government to enshrine their religious beliefs into community standards, public school curricula, and US law at every level from local to federal such that they and they alone dictate both the morality and legality of marriage to everyone else. They do not consider this behavior "oppressive". They refer to it as "freedom of religion", which is important, because they need the "freedom" word in there to try to mask the fact that this is, by definition, oppressive behavior on the part of Christians.

If queers were lobbying for a context in which all marriages must be queer, or seeking to forward a social movement that popularly as well as legally disadvantages non-queers simply for being non-queer, that would be oppressive in the same way as the Christian anti-equality movement is oppressive. However, no one serious pushes for those positions from the left.

From the left, the push is for equality, nothing more and nothing less. No queer equality movement seeks to infringe on the existing marriage rights of Christians, nor abuse the law to meddle around in their churches. People should be free to choose Christian marriages, they should be covered by family law, and they should be protected by law from discrimination. The queer marriage equality movement wants the same legal rights and responsibilities of marriage for all adults regardless of religion, race, reproductive capacity, disability, sex, or sexuality.

And it's the equality that sends the theocrats into a tizzy. They start calling it "oppression" the very same second they are told they don't get to control everything without challenge; that they must share the law with other people who do not necessarily agree with the tenets of their religion or their morality; that they must share social power with people who do not share their worldview. If we are all sharing power equally, then plenty of folks might be uncomfortable, but no one is being oppressed. Nonetheless, this particular claim of oppression arises again and again, always from the right, and always whenever they are not allowed to control other people.

Like any effective exercise in double-standard based discriminatory behavior, they never explain precisely where the oppression they claim to be experiencing is actually occurring, they just repeatedly claim that it is happening over and over until people who don't pay very close attention start to believe that it must be at least kind-of true. People actually start to buy into the idea that the equality of a minority group is somehow oppressive to a majority group that is currently enjoying a disproportionately larger share of sociopolitical power. That conservatives can successfully wield this argument without making a single logical connection is what interests me. They've primarily appealed to ignorance, social prejudice, and emotion (predominantly faith and fear), from beginning to end, just as they did when they used their religion to justify slavery and then, when they lost that conflict, to justify the racial segregation that followed slavery in America and oppressed black people for roughly another fucking century.

I'm less interested in the architects of the theocracy movement, whom I view as garden variety powermongers -- history's never had an age without 'em, bless the dark little shadows in their chest cavities where their hearts should be -- and more interested in those who allow themselves to be used as its cinder blocks, who totally fucking baffle me. Why are so many regular people susceptible to such obvious lines of bullshit, especially when said lines of bullshit do eventually curve back around to kick said regular people in their regular asses? (You people who are willing to throw queers under the bus, you know these people are coming after you next, right? They're coming for your marriages, your birth control and whatever entertainment choices you have that they deem immoral. And they're gaining ground legislatively.)

Language, I think, has to be a key factor. It's easy to think of language as a human tool, but it's the kind of tool that shapes us just as much as we shape it. With few exceptions, we can only think about things for which we have a language. For example, telling small children nothing whatsoever about gays makes gay identities inarticulable to the children. They have no word for it and thus can't really think of it at all until it somehow presents itself into their experience. Once it does that, they have absolutely no idea how to navigate it, whether it's occurring within themselves or in someone else.

(This is probably not common anymore, but I remember seeing it occasionally when I was a kid in the 70s. Some other kid whose parents sheltered them more than mine sheltered me would be just gobsmacked by the mere theoretical existence of gays, and usually call bullshit on the whole idea, like gays were a Hook-Handed Make Out Hill Killer. The facial expression looks the same as the one you get when you manage to withhold sexual reproduction information from a kid until they're close to or at puberty. Half of them think you're making that shit up just like you made up Santa Claus. Lacking that information until they're tweenage means they've had plenty of time to internalize their understanding that genitals have but a singular function, and they understand the function to be dirty, so this multiple-usage deal involving another human being's nasty bits freaks them the hell right out.)

Language is powerful. Our understanding of any given concept is strongly affected by whatever terms we have to apply to the concept, and the way those terms are understood to relate to other terms about other concepts. A good deal of that is socially constructed. For example, teaching small children that gays are "bad" and "wrong" and "gross", or the children merely inhabiting a world that regards gays in this fashion, is the kind of thing that trains children to believe that gays are not quite entirely people. Gays are not like Us; gays are different; gays are Other. Culturally, "Other" is almost always synonymous with "enemy" due to a bunch of other social narratives, thus training children to Other gays is a pretty effective mechanism to get the adults the kids will someday become to make social war on gays (or sometimes direct violence) without even giving it a second thought. Oppressing gays becomes internalized as "the right thing to do" with no real reason ever required.

Consider how meanings become hooked together in people's minds without people realizing that it's happening, until a whole network of meaning has been created. Then consider how meanings are often conflated, and how these conflations must affect the very structure of thought inside of people's minds. They also affect the neurochemistry inside the body such that they affect people's feelings as well; bodies can only respond emotionally to stimuli that obey the parameters and associations dictated by the network of meaning. For example, plenty of people conflate love with control and because of that they come to understand control as an expression of love. Then, in very real ways, they cannot feel loved or feel as though they are expressing love unless they are also controlling and/or being controlled. Anything else feels wrong. Feelings are powerful.

Screwing around with the structure of someone's bodymind via language is an enormously effective way to manipulate them. Think: advertising/marketing, and virtually all modern American politics. Most people aren't even aware they're being manipulated by these things, let alone the extent to which they're being manipulated.

(Which is funny in that ironic way because whenever someone tries to point it out to them, they tend to spend all their energy attacking that person rather than reality-checking the situation and affording themselves a chance to actually realize the extent to which they're being manipulated. This, I suspect, is a fail-safe built into the manipulation system; you know, the social narrative is always reassuring us as Americans that we are free thinkers, controlled by no one, the freest people on Earth, we are so free that other people hate us for our freedom, so how dare you suggest that I'm being manipulated by a beer commercial you crazy feminist! Heh.)

Associating concepts via the terms we use to describe them in a complex network is how socialization occurs. It's how we learn to be a part of our culture, laugh at jokes, function in the supermarket line, pee in the bathroom, and hold down an accounting job. It's also how brainwashing works. Funny, that. And messy. It's the kind of messiness that ensures there's no easy way out of this chronic social problem that we have with systemic inequality. We train children not just to understand that there is a hierarchy of bodies, but we train them to understand that there has to be a hierarchy of bodies. We train them to understand that such a hierarchy is necessary and natural (and worst of all, that it's ethical). Which is why it is that, when you pick at someone's reactionary defense of the hierarchy long enough, eventually they will sputter, "That's just how it is!" But that's not just how it is. That's how we make it.

Children aren't born into the world with a preset negative opinion about gay people that they just need words to describe. They are taught the opinion along with the language. They are also taught the structure that holds the opinion that they describe with the language. And the systemic symbolic mechanisms we use to teach them mean that if someone has been trained up from young enough to understand ("understand" as opposed to "believe") that "gay" means "bad", then you can't just deploy a logical, fact-based argument to show them where their thinking has gone awry. It's not just their thinking that has gone awry; it's the way in which they've been programmed about how to think and feel, which is a much more complicated problem. People are very convinced that their feelings are natural (much of our social narrative hammers on this point, as well) and it's difficult to get them to understand how their feelings have been manipulated, and how at least some of them have been outright fabricated.

It's not really a problem of language, though language is a critical hinge. I think it's a problem that powermongering has created inside consciousness, inside the bodymind, using language as both a tool and a weapon. The entire strategy is very simple: divide/manipulate/conquer. It's just that the division accomplished via the manipulation is sufficient to ensure that most of the time practically no one sees anything but the [manufactured] desire for conquering, which they mistake for authentic desire ("human nature"), and round and round we go, like a big hedge maze where everything looks the same and we have all been here before.

The center of this hedge maze, which is remarkably out of the loop of well-traveled territory despite its central locale, is that place where I imagine that authentic desires are actively being covered up as manufactured desires are being slipped over them. I do not believe that authentic desires are ever replaced, though. I think they are always being created and recreated; they are always being covered over and emerging and being recovered. (I've rambled on for too long already to entertain the argument that perhaps there are no authentic desires, so I will just say that I think that is a legitimate argument, and that I come down on the side of believing that whichever desires we generate that are not being powermongered are close enough to authentic for me.)

The longer I think about it, the more I believe that locating our authenticity is the only thing that can save us from this cycle of inequality. If enough of us simply are who we really are, who we really want to be, then the hierarchy, the very structure on which the inequality props itself up, will dissolve for lack of support. Equality wouldn't look like oppression to anyone. Perhaps even oppression itself would no longer be desirable.

Heh -- life, it's the ultimate role-playing game: to escape the maze, we must find the center.