More Reasons Why Homophobia Makes No Sense

I’ve already given eight reasons why homophobia makes no sense, but I am continuously discovering more reasons, as you can tell by the title of this blog entry.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer recently vetoed (for largely economic reasons) a bill passed by the Arizona legislature to allow business owners to discriminate against people on the basis of religious belief. Senate Bill 1062 would have allowed business owners to deny service to members of the LGBT community on the basis of personal religious faith. (The pro-business Brewer was pushed to her decision largely by corporations threatening to leave Arizona if the bill was passed.)

The bill also could have allowed business owners to deny service to Muslims, pagans, very many women, and others who do not subscribe to the religious doctrines of the business owner. If a business owner passed by a restaurant booth and overheard a conversation by a Muslim woman saying she was seeking or had sought an abortion, the bill, if passed, would have given that business owner the right to deny that woman service (if the business owner could prove their religious conviction in accordance with the re-written law).

This whole fiasco drew opponents to homosexuality out of the woodwork, and they populated social media in force. They hemmed and hawed against religious restrictions, while LGBT advocates hemmed and hawed about equal protection (which is also a constitutional right in the United States).

So, with that in mind, I am going to focus here on the attitudes of people I have encountered in social media who supported the bill because it would have allowed business owners to discriminate against LGBT people. I am going to expose their fallacies and destroy them one-by-one. I cannot connect a single argument with a single person, but I can say I encountered these arguments commonly (and you have probably encountered them, too).

1) ‘Why should I serve people who flaunt their sexuality at the restaurant table?’

Why should I serve people who flaunt their sexuality at the restaurant table? Oh, wait, you are talking about LGBT people, and I am talking about straight people. Why do you think that gay people flaunt their sexuality at a restaurant table any more than straight people? Is it just the fact that you know they’re LGBT? As opposed to straight? How is there a difference? I am confused.

2) ‘What’s next? Allowing swingers and people in BD/SM gear to enter my establishment and demand to be served?’

Wait, what? So you equate LGBT people with swinging and BD/SM more than you do straight people? That’s silly, since straight people probably have just as much interest in BD/SM as LGBT people. If you shun LGBT people because of their scary sexual experimentations, why don’t you shun straight people as much for the same reason? It doesn’t make sense.

3) ‘You can’t compare LGBT rights with black rights.’

This is a false dilemma. You are saying that LGBT rights do not compare with black rights because LGBT people choose to be who they are, while black people do not. First, how do you know that LGBT people choose to be who they are? Give me the evidence. Second, even if they did choose to be who they are, natural does not equal right, and unnatural does not equal wrong. Third, it is wrong to say that LGBT rights and black rights are entirely separate just because LGBT identities are based on sexuality, and not skin colour. No, LGBT and black rights are similar because both LGBT and black people have experienced institutional and/or systemic discrimination based on their status. Obviously their experiences overlap. Ask Audre Lorde.

4) ‘Gays and atheists and what-not will discriminate against me!’

No, they won’t! What they want is a compromise. The gay-theists will take wedding photos of you, because state law says they should, and you will take wedding photos of gay-theists, because state law says you should. Doesn’t it all work out to a magical equilibrium?

5) ‘Religion trumps everybody else’s rights’

No, it doesn’t. True religious freedom means the right to exercise your religion in peace and harmony while also respecting the freedoms of others. It does not mean steamrolling over their freedoms; it does not mean controlling every aspect of their lives; and it is not a free pass to do whatever you want on the grounds of personal faith. Religious freedom ends when it seeks dominion over the basic freedoms of others.

So that is my response to attitudes about the recent decision in Arizona. I know I will not reach the heart of truly devout Christians who believe what they believe, but I hope something like this will make a dent in the beliefs of people who are on the fence. If you truly believe that God made Adam and Eve to procreate, you have to ask yourself why there are post-menopausal women who have sex, women who have had hysterectomies but have sex, sterile women who have sex, and women who simply choose not to have children but have sex. How is that any different from a gay person having sex? Obviously it is about love and devotion toward another human being. How is that wrong?

Mapping American Social Attitudes

I’ve found maps fascinating ever since I was a wee lad. I remember getting a globe for my birthday in 1986 and an atlas for Christmas in 1991, and getting new maps and globes over the years to watch the changes in national boundaries. I was shitty at math but adored maps. Maps say so much in pictures  about people, politics, migratory patterns, industry, the environment, natural resources, social attitudes, and loads of other hot, steamy, bloggable stuff. Looking at different maps of the United States, we can see a stark divide in political and social attitudes about race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. Here I want you to take a look at some maps of the U.S. to see where different attitudes are concentrated. It’s amazing to see the clear patterning of regional differences, which in turn shows us where we have our work cut out for us in terms of achieving social equity.

We can start this work by looking at the political attitudes, which frequently overlap with social ones. Consider the following maps of the 2008 U.S. presidential election. The first map shows states with red, Republican majorities, and those with blue, Democratic majorities; the second one shows this same information, but with a focus on population density.

As we can see, Republican voters were clustered in the south, the Great Plains, and the interior west, while Democratic voters were clustered in the northeast, Great Lakes, and west coast. As it so happens, the red areas also generally reflect sparsely populated areas, and the blue areas, more densely populated areas, revealing a correlation between cities and Democratic values.

But does the Republican-Democrat divide reflect something more than just urban versus rural? If we look at the following Gallup maps from 2011 and 2010, respectively, we get a better idea how conservatives and liberals are distributed across the country.

Not only are the northeast and northwest regions predominantly Democratic and urban, but they are also decidedly more liberal than the south and the midland. (The midland tends to be a grey area, as we shall see.) The ideological divide along geographical lines begins to deepen. Urbanity, Democratic politics, and liberalism begin to characterize the northeast and west coast while rurality, Republican politics, and conservatism begin to characterize the hinterland.

The regional difference comes into even sharper focus when we look at education and religiosity in America. Below is a 2009 Gallup map showing the most religious and most secular states in the country as well as a 2000 Census Bureau map showing educational attainment.

As the first map suggests, the south is much more religious than average, while Cascadia and New England are much more secular than average. The second map shows the inverse for education: the more secular areas tend to have better-educated people, and the more religious areas tend to have less-educated people, especially when we compare Washington state and Massachusetts with Mississippi. What this seems to show is that religiosity and lower educational attainment pattern together in the south, while secularism and higher educational attainment pattern together in New England and Cascadia (anchored by the cultural and educational centers of Boston and Seattle, respectively).

This ideological divide becomes particularly important when we look at the history of black civil rights in the United States. Consider these maps on slavery and anti-miscegenation laws:

It’s probably no surprise that the south consisted almost entirely of slave states, and the north and west almost entirely of free states and territories. Nor is it surprising that the map of anti-miscegenation laws so closely follows this pattern, with the south resisting the repeal of racist marriage laws until 1967, over one hundred years after slavery was abolished. The south wasn’t always overwhelmingly Republican, though: the region was full of “Dixiecrats” when the liberal Democrat and conservative Republican binary was not as stark as it is today.

But this general pattern of a blue, liberal region wrapping around a red, conservative hinterland doesn’t end with race; it also shows up in opinions about women, women’s rights, and sex differences, as illustrated in the following maps of women’s suffrage laws and attitudes about abortion.

In the suffrage laws map, the divide between a conservative south and a liberal north and west is slightly blurred. Large parts of the northeast joined with the south in resistance to suffrage, but vast parts of the west and northwest remained progressive on this issue, in stark contrast with the south. The north-south binary reappears, however, in the 2006 abortion map, which shows a northeast and west coast far friendlier toward reproductive rights than the south.

The south’s apparent concern for unborn babies seems incompatible with its poor record on child welfare. We see another stark regional difference looking at maps of state-by-state child poverty rates and overall child welfare across the United States.

On the 2008 child welfare map, children are better off in the lighter-shaded areas, which include Washington state, Utah, the Upper Midwest, and New England, but they are worse off in the south–the same part of the country where women’s rights, black civil rights, and post-secondary educational attainment tend to lag behind, and where religiosity tends to flourish. A very similar pattern holds for child poverty rates, with a dark band of impoverished children in the south and a lighter strip of well-off children in the west, north, and northeast.

No discussion of American social attitudes would be complete without mention of gay rights, which seems to be the social justice zeitgeist of our time. It’s everywhere in the news, at least in the United States, where everything is controversial. Once again, the general pattern we have been seeing holds true when we look at the maps below showing the advance of gay rights in the United States.

The first map shows the northeast, Midwest, and west coast taking the lead in knocking down old laws banning sodomy between consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes. Most of the south (as well as Mormon country) had to be forced by a 2003 Supreme Court ruling to catch up with the rest of the country. And, in typical fashion, the northeast, Midwest (Iowa), and northwest (Washington state) shine bright blue as the beacons in the gay marriage movement, while the south and Great Plains are steeped in a mostly dark blood red. We must take care not to lump the entire south into the category of “retrogressive”, however: one former slave state–Maryland–is now a gay marriage state. Now, that’s a remarkable transformation. How many states can say that they used to have slaves, but they will soon have legally married gay couples if all goes according to plan?

Certainly, looking at a few maps gives only a rough depiction of social attitudes in America, and much more investigation is required to yield a truly refined and nuanced portrait of the issue, but we can still get a general idea where American attitudes lie with respect to the rights of women, minorities, children, poor people, etc., by looking at maps. Cascadia and New England generally represent more liberal, educated, healthy people while the south generally represents the opposite. We can use this kind of knowledge to focus our efforts on helping those who have been targeted for oppression. It isn’t about judging ignorant rubes–it’s about demonstrating compassion for the underprivileged. With further research, and with the facts in mind, we can reach out to disenfranchised minorities, abused children, poor people who don’t have money for rent, young pregnant women with no access to reproductive health-care, bullied gay youth with nowhere to go, and the lonely, ostracised atheist or Muslim, with the goal of creating equity for all. This is the purpose of looking at social attitudes in America.