Left-handed

From News Writer, a link to Juan Cole's argument that the anger that the Cheneys are expressing about their daughter's sexual orientation being mentioned in the debate says more about their own prejudices than about Kerry's character. In it, Cole compares being gay to being left-handed.

But right-thinking Americans don't believe that being gay is a disability or anything shameful. It is like being left-handed or red-headed. It is just the way some people are, and probably has a complex base in genes and proteins. So if in a debate, the issue came up that some school teachers make left-handed students write with their right hands, and Kerry were to say, "Well, Dick Cheney's daughter knows how unfair this is because she is left-handed," nobody would think that was rude or inappropriate. Because Kerry wouldn't be instancing it as a stigma or a disability, but just a neutral fact of life.

I've seen the metaphor of left-handedness used a number of times, usually by mainstream writers are arguing for gay rights to an audience of people that are not that are mostly ignorant about the issue, the sort of people who are ripe for arguments about homosexuality being a choice. It always gives me pause because I'm concerned that it is belittling a large issue. Left-handedness is inconvienent if you aren't accomodated, but it doesn't shape your entire life in the way that sexual orientation does. Who you are attracted to, if nothing else, is probably going to determine who you live with and have your most intimate relationships with.

But thinking it over, I realize that most of the things that make gay and lesbian lives different from straight lives can be attributed to the discrimination that gays and lesbians face. If we were able to scrub homophobia out of our society and achieve legal equality, many of the differences would melt away. The concept of coming out is a good example of what I'm talking about. Straight people do not come out. The idea of agonizing of what people will think when they find out our sexual orientation is completely alien to us. Hell, being straight is treated like a cause for celebration--everyone enjoys cooing over the milestones of straight life from the first kiss to weddings to babies and all that. Coming out has been turned into an occasion for joy, but there's still anxiety there that straight people never have to experience.

But if we were able to get rid of homophobia, coming out would disappear as a concept, I'd think. You can see this already happening in more liberal communities where homosexuality is considered as acceptable as heterosexuality. I've never had someone "come out" to me, that I know of. I've only had people tell me they were gay at most, and usually not even that. It seems about as necessary as telling them that I'm straight. Like being left-handed, actually. At most, you see someone pick something up with her left hand and you say, "Oh, are you left-handed?" and she says, "Yep," and there's really nothing else to talk about. Without homophobia, gays and lesbians could expect that no one will be shocked so there's no reason to think up ways to tell people. And the assumption that people are straight until otherwise proven would probably disappear, too. In the past few years, I've noticed that straight people aren't as quick to assume that the person they are speaking with is also straight. It usually doesn't take more than one embarrassing incident of asking a lesbian about the man in her life to learn that it's better in the future to ask people if they have "someone", for instance.

So, the more I think about it the more I realize that the left-handed metaphor is probably one of the best we have at our disposal when trying to educate people about homosexuality with an eye towards achieving equal rights. Being gay now is like how being left-handed used to be when people still thought there was something wrong with it. Prejudice against left-handed people actually used to be a serious problem, especially in education, where left-handed kids were told that they would be right-handed if they just worked at it, much like gays are told that their orienation is a "choice" now. It was treated as a source of shame and anxiety, and there's even evidence that some left-handed kids who were forced to write right-handed may have even developed learning disabilities from it. And all it took to change the situation was to get people to understand that there's nothing wrong with being left-handed, and now that orientation is considered unremarkable. So, I think that the metaphor is a good one, because it suggests that the biggest obstacle to tackle in the fight for gay equality is people's ignorance.