By Angel Lemke
Just a couple weeks ago, I wrote this, in my (overdue) seminar paper for my course in Ethics After Postmodernism: “[I]t is really discomfort that motivates ethical action. Rorty argues that ‘it is best to think of moral progress as a matter of increasing sensitivity, increasing responsiveness to the needs of a larger and larger variety of people and things’ (429, Rorty’s emphasis); we should understand ‘sensitivity’ here to mean not just a vague awareness of the other, but of an actual felt sense that the other is if not a part, at least of extreme importance to our relational selves such that in cases of injustice ‘a failure to intervene would make us uncomfortable with ourselves’ (430, Rorty’s emphasis). In this conceptualization, comfort becomes not a capitulation—for example, remaining in the closet at family gatherings in order to make one’s homophobic grandmother comfortable—but an ever-receding horizon at which we continually aim. In this conceptualization, no single person or group’s comfort takes greater priority; or, as the Buddhist tradition has it, ‘No one is healed until everyone is healed’. . .We might ask, in our example, first, that our homophobic grandmother simply acknowledge our same-sex partner’s existence, rather than expecting her immediate transformation. Discomfort becomes a tool that serves a pedagogical purpose in our ongoing journey toward true collective comfort rather than merely being an unpleasant feeling that we would all like to avoid.” I’m not sure that passage says anything new to those of you who are involved, one way or another, in anti-oppression work. I’d venture that it’s a bedrock principle of the movement, finding discomfort a productive site for growth and self-reflection. But right now, it seems strangely prescient. I cite my paper because I’m about to make some people uncomfortable. And I want to make sure they know: it’s not for nothing. It’s because I think we can all be better than we are. Rather, I should say that I’m about to refuse to make some people I love feel comfortable. When the latest Chick-fil-a flap started popping up in my Facebook feed, my initial reaction was, “Um, this is news?” I briefly considered posting or linking to posts that listed Chick-fil-a alongside the myriad other organizations with leadership who spout hate (The Salvation Army, for instance) or who try to put on gay friendly faces while still funneling money to anti-gay politicians and initiatives (Target). But by the time the Jim Henson Company posts started, I felt pretty much like a commenter on a friend’s post who wrote:
“I've been avoiding chik-fil-a for years because of the homophobia, and when I've mentioned that I wouldn't buy from them or some of the two dozen other openly gay-bashing companies out there, thatI see fit to abstain from, I got scoffed at. But lo and behold, when a muppet makes a stand, we all jump into that bandwagon. And don't get me wrong, I approve and I'm not trying to be all hip about it, but chik-fil-a is hardly the only corporation that has been openly endorsing anti-gay movements and since we all have google, why does it take a talking frog to get people to notice something?” In short, my attitude was “Over it,” followed by an eye roll and some muttering about how they probably use factory farm chickens, too, and how no one does their homework about where their money really goes, and the more things change, and other jaded leftist mutterings, etc, etc. A general resignation to the apathy of the masses. But then a strange thing started happening. People who have for years presented themselves to me as straight allies—not terribly active ones, but people who don’t oppose same sex marriage and have more than one “gay friend” and are generally good people—started acting very strangely. They weren’t acting apathetic at all. They seemed to care about this issue. . .or at least they cared about it enough to want to make it go away, to make it seem as though it shouldn’t have been an issue in the first place. First, a straight male friend interrupted our text conversation to ask if we could still be friends if he had dinner at Chick-fil-a. I thought was a bad joke, and did what I do when bad jokes fall flat; I didn’t respond. When he checked in at Chick-fil-a later on foursquare, I started thinking about the position such a text put me in if it were—as it appeared—in earnest. The way the question was posed, my options were either say, “Sure, I’m cool with you knowingly providing profits to folks who think I’m an abomination” or “No, I’m another one of those angry lesbians who’s all ‘sensitive’ and ‘political’ and ‘making a ‘big deal’ out of things.’” You know, some days you just don’t feel like fighting the good fight. Even when you TOTALLY are a sensitive, angry political lesbian. Since there was no good answer in the multiple choices, I left the question blank, in hopes that the questioner would independently recognize the design flaw in the exam. And someone at HuffPo did a better job of addressing the “making a big deal out of things” response better than I could, anyway. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/conor-gaughan/chick-fil-a-homophobia_b_1711566.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false) Then this popped up in my Facebook feed: “Being conservative doesn’t mean I can’t love everyone. . .Straight, gay, AND chick-fil-a :).” I’ve spent a long time puzzling over what that one means. The best I can come up with is that it’s an argument that fast food patronage is apolitical. I’ve never been to a Chick-fil-a. I had to look up how to spell it today when I sat down to write. I’ve lived in Ohio all my life, and by the time they started to penetrate this market, I already knew about the heinous politics, and I was making a general effort to eliminate fast food from my diet, for both political and health reasons, so I just never went. What I am beginning to gather, however, is that they make one hell of a chicken sandwich. I mean, it must be the best chicken sandwich some folks have had in their entire lives. It must be a life-changing, willing-to-risk-life-and-limb-for-a-taste-of-that-fine-fine-chickeny-goodness kind of sandwich. Why else would so many people who are avowedly not-homophobic be trying so hard to justify their continued patronage? Though I loathe most of the national dialogue on gay marriage on all sides (there’s more than two), and will rattle on in snarky-leftist-Michael-Warner-and-Dean-Spade-quoting glee about how marriage is the wrong goal, I can’t deny that there has been much change since I came out, only a decade and a half ago, and that I fully expect to see gay marriage legalized, for better AND worse, in my lifetime. And what I think is going on in my Facebook feed and among my more casual straight allies is the gradual realization that it is going to require more from them than “liking” the I Support Gay Marriage in Ohio page. That it is going to require more than having some gay friends. They might have to have uncomfortable conversations with their family members. Or their church communities. Or their co-workers. They might have to give up their chicken. This is where the rubber meets the road, folks. Put up or shut up time. This is when being an ally gets uncomfortable, when you have to give up some of your privilege. I think you’re starting to realize that, and I think some of you want us queers to say it’s okay to chicken out. I’m here to say that it’s not. A couple years ago, Sarah Schulman’s Ties that Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences was a devastating read for me, not because it told me anything I didn’t already know, but because it was so angry, because it galvanized my anger, and because it made it clear to me that I could not go on making straight folk feel comfortable about their heterosexism. It’s pretty plain in Schulman’s account: “Are homophobic family members evil? Well, not if you be
lieve that evil does not have a human face. Yes, the people who won’t take responsibility for their dying gay son, won’t invite their lesbian sister to their wedding, won’t allow their gay cousin to hold their child, won’t praise their gay co-worker, won’t send their gay son a birthday card, vote for anti-gay politicians, give money to a homophobic church, love films that diminish gay people—those people may have all kinds of great attributes. You may love them. They may have taken you fishing when you were six or made you a quilt for Christmas or had a great sense of humor or looked just like you. That is what evil looks like. Evil knows great old songs, can be weak and vulnerable, can love you, can feed the hungry, can pick out a book because they were thinking of you. Evil can have Alzheimer’s. Familial homophobia is deeply human, as all evil is the product of human imagination.” Devastating. So many people in my life become evil in this light. Some of you become evil in this light. But, mercifully, there is also this: “[A]ll people have the option to judge and act ethically. That there are individuals in all situations who do take responsibility proves the availability of moral behavior as a possibility for the others. There were always white people who opposed slavery, always German Christians who opposed Fascism. There are always Jews who oppose the Israeli occupation, always Americans who oppose the war with Iraq, always men who work for abortion rights. There were always capitalists who opposed the persecution of American Communists and Russian Communists who opposed the persecution of the Jews.” So there is hope. But what she doesn’t stress is that it will be HARD, that having the courage of your convictions always is. You don’t get to be an ally and funnel money to a hate-monger. The two don’t mix. You have to choose. I don’t care how uncomfortable that makes you. (For how uncomfortable it makes ME, see the link above.) I am here to tell you that you have to choose. In talking about my plans to write this with a friend earlier, I planned to throw down the gauntlet by announcing my plans to live a conviction that I’ve had for some time but have been failing at because it requires giving up some conveniences and some privileges, because it will require more work than I’ve been willing to put it in. The kind of conviction that I can talk about on Facebook, and then forget about when I go about my daily life. I’ll write of it another time, because I think it is crucial to make such choices public, to offer other ways of being in the world, to make clear what our values are, but in reaching this point in my angry lesbian screed, the particulars of the conviction that I needed to be called to live at this moment in my life seem less important than reminder that you who seem so eager to be let off the hook for yours have given me that it’s ALWAYS going to be hard. That waiting until it’s easier is a cop out; is unjust. That discomfort we feel? We can try to make it go away, hide in being apolitical, drug ourselves on carbonated sugar water, or the very real suspicion that one person’s act won’t make a difference; we ask those who are being discriminated against to tell us its okay. Or, we can be better. You choose.
Planet of the Blind 