Caring Takes Effort

This lines have been made very clear in recent months. There are those who accept differences among people, and those who don't, and the two sides are digging in. As homophobia declines in the country, the rabid right keeps trying to use sexual identity as a wedge between "us" and "them," capitalizing on the misunderstanding that people have, the discomfort that citizens might have with something they don't understand.

Here's the guy running for governor in New York:

The Republican candidate for governor, Carl P. Paladino, told a gathering in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Sunday that children should not be “brainwashed” into thinking that homosexuality was acceptable, and criticized his opponent, Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, for marching in a gay pride parade earlier this year.

Addressing Orthodox Jewish leaders, Mr. Paladino described his opposition to same-sex marriage.

“I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option — it isn’t,” he said, reading from a prepared address, according to a video of the event. And then, to applause at Congregation Shaarei Chaim, he said: “I didn’t march in the gay parade this year — the gay pride parade this year. My opponent did, and that’s not the example we should be showing our children.” Paladino Attacks Gays in Brooklyn Speech

Recent polls show that most Americans support marriage equality, and the trend toward a liberal view of sexual orientation and gender identity has been relentless over the past decades. Conservatives try to convince voters that sexual orientation is a moral choice made by individuals, a moral choice that represents a mutiny against traditional values and is thus an insult to ordinary people. And this is a good, strong argument to use with ignorant people and people who are too busy to look into the matter. It is not a good argument for educated citizens and those who are paying attention.

Science does not take the conservative view, medicine does not take their view, well-considered common sense does not take the view that gay and transgender people choose to be different from the rest of the population, or that sexual orientation and gender identity are moral choices, or that LGBT people are different in any important way from everybody else. The belief that sexual orientation is a moral choice simplifies the world, making it easy to understand, but it is not an accurate view, not a view that is supported by any evidence.

To understand sexual identities that are different from your own requires cognitive effort. It's hard to understand, perhaps impossible to empathize with someone whose attention is diverted by an entirely different kind of distractor. For straight men it is hard to imagine kissing another man, and seeing men kissing typically elicits a kind of feeling that is hard to overcome, it requires effort to work through the emotional reaction and realize that those are just two people showing affection.

This creates an opening for politicians who can offer an explanation that does not require cognitive effort and does not require people to deal with their own feelings. Accept, with those such as Mr. Paladino, that gay people are morally decadent, and you don't have to go through the mental exercise of understanding why someone would want to do something you would never dream of doing. Instead of empathizing, which takes effort, you can simply reject them. The approach is appealing, not because it explains any truths about the world, but because it means that you can go on to other things, you don't have to bother thinking about it. Wrap it up and throw it away.

So how do you explain the liberal trend? While conservatives have been churning out their simple-minded explanations for sexual identity, the actual population has been moving the other way.

I think the answer is that conservatives' worst nightmare is coming true. After the Stonewall riots of 1969, the LGBT community came together in outrage. They organized, they wrote papers and books and articles, they monitored and criticized the media, they implemented a very intense and successful publicity campaign to teach straight people not to fear them, not to hate them, but to regard them as ordinary people. The conservatives call it "the gay agenda" and paint it in negative terms, as if gay people were trying to recruit children and ram their lifestyle down our throats, but all it is really is a persistent campaign by LGBT people to present themselves in a better light, and you can't blame them for that. Suddenly we saw gay people in movies and television shows, we read books by them, we realized their importance behind the scenes in many environments, we discovered many of our heroes were gay, and after several decades most straight people have come to the correct conclusion that is is just no big deal.

The conservatives can use homophobia as a wedge, maybe, through this election cycle, but it is a losing strategy in the long run.