Bigotry: It's Back

By Crispin Sartwell

 

Since at latest around 1970, we Americans have been congratulating ourselves for having overcome our history of bigotry and exclusion. This supposed triumph has always been overrated, but if we ever gave up on prejudice, we're certainly right back at it now, with a good conscience.

     The current political attacks on gay people and immigrants are about nothing but sheer bigotry, and they deploy that combined strategy that you find almost anywhere you find people: to insult or spit on you is simultaneously to improve my self-esteem. Your inferiority and my superiority are, of course, the very same fact.

      "Crime," "activist judges," "national security," and so on: these are of course the merest distractions from the heart of the matter: we hate wetbacks and fags, and we don't regard them as fully human, as deserving the same sort of respect that we demand for ourselves.

       The idea that the basic problem with illegal immigrants is a matter of national security and border protection is deeply dishonest. The last military or terrorist threat we faced from Mexico was at the Alamo.

     And yet here we are, affirming legislatively, for example, that English is our "national language." It is, in precisely the same sense that WASP is our national ethnicity and torture our national interrogation technique.

     Let this go a little longer and we will have - even more than we do already - a national system of internment and deportation camps for people whose status is basically detectible by their skin-tone and language.

      Gay marriage is as clearly and directly an issue of civil rights as anything could possibly be. All it demands is the extension of equal rights to a group of previously excluded persons.

      Furthermore, such an extension does absolutely no damage to anyone in the dominant group. It doesn't require busing, increased taxation, or even a cure for homophobia.

      What it does, merely, is damage "the institution of marriage," which means, as far as I can tell, that it throws into slight doubt the God-given superiority of heterosexuals. In other words, it throws into doubt the bigotry of God.

      Mary Cheney has famously said that if the Republicans oppose gay marriage, they will find themselves on the wrong side of history.

     I'm not so certain about this, because if history teaches us anything, it's that, though bigotries come and go, bigotry never dies. At the moment of a particular prejudice's ascendency, there are a thousand seemingly plausible causes or justifications for the hatred in one's heart, and a thousand ways to convince yourself that your hatred is righteousness, truth, or even love.

      That is, segregation, exclusion, exploitation, and denunciation never appear as evil at the moment of their lurid bloom as they do in retrospect. When our grandchildren look back at this era, they will be shocked by our explicit violation of our professed values. They will see our hypocrisy with perfect clarity, as we see clearly the injustice of racial apartheid or laws prohibiting women from voting.

    But even as they do, they will be busily rationalizing their hatred of the Norwegians or men who cook or people who speak Pig Latin. It's the only way they'll be able to live with themselves.