Sunday, October 19, 2003
(11:05 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Advocacy
In this day and age, it is generally accepted that most people will support civil rights issues. Even if you're white, even if you have no black friends, even if you've never even really met a minority person, no one is surprised if you are an advocate, whether rhetorically or financially or whatever, of civil rights or affirmative action. If someone writes an article on the Internet or in print, with no photo attached, advocating civil rights or affirmative action, no one assumes that that person is black or a member of another minority. It is within the scope of our imagination that one could support the idea that people of all races should have equal political rights and even that races that have historical disadvantages should get preferential treatment, without those policies directly benefitting the advocate.
Similarly, no one assumes that advocates for illegal immigrants, the homeless, the elderly, the unborn, Sudanese Christians, the Palestinians, or single mothers are themselves always illegal immigrants, homeless, elderly, unborn Sudanese Christians, Palestinians, or single mothers, respectively.
With that in mind, one would think that a rational person could arrive at the conclusion that, given allowances for the possibility of coersion or abuse, people should generally be allowed to have sex in the ways in which they find themselves to be inclined. Further, a person with no personal stake beyond a concern for justice might believe that laws, institutions, and deep-seated cultural attitudes that force people to choose between entering into a sexual relationship that they find deeply distasteful and unsatisfying or having no sexual relationships at all need to be critiqued, changed, and possibly disposed of.
Why, then, is an advocate of gay rights quite often suspected of being gay?
UPDATE: In all fairness, it is also often the case that opponents of gay rights are accused of being self-loathing closeted homosexuals. No one really suggests that racists actually have some minority blood in them and hate themselves for it.
