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Back in the mid-90's, I was a student at the University of Oklahoma. An issue came up before the governing student body, about supporting a petition.
The petition was to grant domestic partner benefits for faculty and staff of the university. Now, OU isn't the most progressive place in the world, but we'd already put non-discrimination language into the rules, so this seemed easy.
Except, of course, it wasn't. A lot of the GLBA members thought they were just going to go argue the case and how it was fair and right to non-straight people who couldn't get married, but they forgot that arguments don't work quite the same here. That argument works fine in California, or the Glorious People's Republic of Massachusetts, but it's not an Okie argument.
See, Oklahoma is a pretty close-knit state. Everybody knows somebody, and in some places everybody knows everybody. Giving "equal rights" or "equal preference" to your own kid and somebody else who just moved into town isn't going to happen in practice, no matter WHAT the rules say. This is because we have a tradition that people tend to move into the state, buy things up with their out of state money, and then either take the good parts out of state, or crash and burn it and leave us the wreckage to clean up. We don't like out of state people.
So, the proper argument isn't "if we don't give DP benefits, then Famous Women's Studies Professor and her girlfriend are going to go back to New York where they came from." It's more like "if we don't give DP benefits, then gay Oklahomans will have to leave their home state in order to find somewhere that they can live their lives with a fair chance." We've had people working on the brain drain issue for years now (i.e. that the best and brightest students leave the state) and it's never once occurred to them that more than wages, or prestigious titles, people want a fair chance at living a happy life with a family, without having to go broke on insurance and lawyers because their job doesn't have benefits and their state makes it illegal for a gay, lesbian, or bisexual person to adopt a child.
So, really, the best argument for tolerance among us isn't to point out that abstract (people of another sort) are really just like (people of our own sort). It's to point out that the guy down the street who fixes your bike, or the lady who plays the piano at your church, or the family who runs the copy shop, are the people we're talking about-- people who already live here, already make their homes here, and want their homes to be safe and happy just like everyone else.
Had a discussion at work with the new guy the other night. Actually came out to him (as bi). It sorta slipped out, I guess because I'm not planning on working there forever, and what with the other bi woman having VERY vocal discussions, I'm not terribly worried. One of the things we discussed is that it seems like the best argument for gay rights here is that by limiting gay rights, you place restrictions on straight people, and get into their private lives. For instance, if your state forbids gay marriage, and someone was misidentified at birth because of some anomaly (some intersexed people appear to be one sex at birth, but are genetically and practically much more the other sex) then they're going to have to go through a HUGE legal headache in order to prove their "real" sex in order to marry heterosexually.
Do we really need to make straight people jump through hoops in order to prove their entitlement to the privileges restricted to straight people? Is the argument for gay rights going to come down to this-- that not having them is a pain in the ass to straight people who are inconvenienced? Heaven knows that the sexual orientation discrimination clause only really took off after someone was fired for being straight...
Guess you really can get more by appealing to people's self-interest than their better nature-- probably because everybody's got self-interest.
The petition was to grant domestic partner benefits for faculty and staff of the university. Now, OU isn't the most progressive place in the world, but we'd already put non-discrimination language into the rules, so this seemed easy.
Except, of course, it wasn't. A lot of the GLBA members thought they were just going to go argue the case and how it was fair and right to non-straight people who couldn't get married, but they forgot that arguments don't work quite the same here. That argument works fine in California, or the Glorious People's Republic of Massachusetts, but it's not an Okie argument.
See, Oklahoma is a pretty close-knit state. Everybody knows somebody, and in some places everybody knows everybody. Giving "equal rights" or "equal preference" to your own kid and somebody else who just moved into town isn't going to happen in practice, no matter WHAT the rules say. This is because we have a tradition that people tend to move into the state, buy things up with their out of state money, and then either take the good parts out of state, or crash and burn it and leave us the wreckage to clean up. We don't like out of state people.
So, the proper argument isn't "if we don't give DP benefits, then Famous Women's Studies Professor and her girlfriend are going to go back to New York where they came from." It's more like "if we don't give DP benefits, then gay Oklahomans will have to leave their home state in order to find somewhere that they can live their lives with a fair chance." We've had people working on the brain drain issue for years now (i.e. that the best and brightest students leave the state) and it's never once occurred to them that more than wages, or prestigious titles, people want a fair chance at living a happy life with a family, without having to go broke on insurance and lawyers because their job doesn't have benefits and their state makes it illegal for a gay, lesbian, or bisexual person to adopt a child.
So, really, the best argument for tolerance among us isn't to point out that abstract (people of another sort) are really just like (people of our own sort). It's to point out that the guy down the street who fixes your bike, or the lady who plays the piano at your church, or the family who runs the copy shop, are the people we're talking about-- people who already live here, already make their homes here, and want their homes to be safe and happy just like everyone else.
Had a discussion at work with the new guy the other night. Actually came out to him (as bi). It sorta slipped out, I guess because I'm not planning on working there forever, and what with the other bi woman having VERY vocal discussions, I'm not terribly worried. One of the things we discussed is that it seems like the best argument for gay rights here is that by limiting gay rights, you place restrictions on straight people, and get into their private lives. For instance, if your state forbids gay marriage, and someone was misidentified at birth because of some anomaly (some intersexed people appear to be one sex at birth, but are genetically and practically much more the other sex) then they're going to have to go through a HUGE legal headache in order to prove their "real" sex in order to marry heterosexually.
Do we really need to make straight people jump through hoops in order to prove their entitlement to the privileges restricted to straight people? Is the argument for gay rights going to come down to this-- that not having them is a pain in the ass to straight people who are inconvenienced? Heaven knows that the sexual orientation discrimination clause only really took off after someone was fired for being straight...
Guess you really can get more by appealing to people's self-interest than their better nature-- probably because everybody's got self-interest.
