Disclaimer: this is long and rambling and probably not very well-written and not funny. I had some thoughts in my head and wanted to share them with you. 

Judging by all the oddly similar Facebook profile pictures that denote people as fans of math (or is it equality?) today must be a rather important day. I wanted to take a few minutes to tell you all about how I stopped being a bigot, and to do that we’ll begin with Harry Potter.

The Harry Potter Argument

You see, my family used to be vehemently anti-Harry Potter. There are a number of Biblical arguments against Harry Potter, but what most of them boil down to is that the Bible condemns witchcraft and witchcraft (or, at least, the word “witchcraft”) is used in the Harry Potter series, therefore, Harry Potter is evil and should be avoided by all Christians. This was not an unpopular opinion in Christian circles 12 years ago and there are plenty of Christians who don’t let their kids read Harry Potter for exactly the same reasons today.

Nowadays, my family is the complete opposite. Everyone in my family has read the books, seen the movies, is involved in Pottermore, and has a somewhat unhealthy devotion to the Potter series. How did that happen? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but mainly, we stopped listening to people telling us that Harry Potter was wrong, we actually read the books, and came to the conclusion that they’re actually pretty good. And for that matter, there’s an argument to be made that Harry Potter symbolizes Jesus’ love for everyone in how he laid down his life for his friends.

To summarize: my family went from vehemently anti-Potter to ridiculously pro-Potter in the space of a few years, and both before and after we could use Biblical arguments to back up our point of view. Keep that in mind.

Back To Bigotry

As I mentioned in my previous article, my road to bigotry began in my deeply religious childhood. I had a somewhat unique experience in that unlike many other Christians, my family slingshotted between wildly different churches for most of my childhood, between replicating the Paulian early “living room” church, over to Pentecostal, then deeply downhill into an incredibly legalistic pseudoAmish church (complete with head coverings, hard wooden benches, and a blanket ban on music, television, radios, and bicycles), then veering back into vaguely Pentecostal territory until settling back where we’d began.

The most interesting lesson I learned from all this was that it completely destroyed any notion I had of what the “Christian” faith is. There is no Christian faith, that’s a 20th century notion. Sure, most churches agree on the same basic Judeo-Christian tenants such as Jesus dying for your sins, but outside of that, Christians disagree on practically everything. And every particular branch is, naturally, convinced that they are Right, and other branches are Wrong. Even at a very young age, I could taste the hypocrisy. After the tenth different group of people telling me they had things completely figured out, and having deep, true convictions about that, I knew that most of them had to be wrong. There was simply no other possible answer.

Or maybe all of them were wrong.

At age 17 in an English 201 class at my local community college, I wrote an essay denouncing gay marriage and explaining, in detail, how it would destroy the sanctity of marriage, ruin children’s lives, and send America spiraling down the slippery slope of moral decay and eventual societal breakdown. I meant every word, and I received an A. This was probably the height of my bigotry.

But as time passed, I started doubting the narrative that I’d been told. The science didn’t add up. The Bible didn’t add up.

I knew, from friends who had struggled with accepting their homosexuality and had tried unsuccessfully for YEARS to be straight that it was by no means a choice. Why, then, would any sort of loving God condemn these people to deny who they were at the very core of their being? It simply didn’t make sense. As I was unable to reconcile these two belief systems, I decided, in a stunning display of cognitive dissonance, that I would simply not think about it. Privately, I resolved to treat any gay person exactly the same way as anyone else. In my heart, though, the suspicion remained that being gay was wrong. And the bigotry lingered.

The most difficult part for me – and really, for anyone struggling to reconcile their faith with homosexuality, is hardly anyone believes they are being a bigot, most especially Christians who believe homosexuality is a sin. If I truly believe in Heaven and Hell, and I truly believe that homosexuality is a sin, then why wouldn’t I bring it up? In fact, from my point of view, I’d have to be a complete asshole to NOT say anything, right? For people who can’t understand how I could be a well-intentioned bigot, let me pose this hypothetical:

Imagine I see a blind man crossing a highway, blissfully unaware of the truck speeding towards him. What should I do? Should I shout a warning? Should I run out and drag him to safety? Obviously I have to help him: there is nothing more evil that I could do than simply stand there and watch as he is crushed to death. That’s how I viewed homosexuals: people wandering dangerously into traffic. And I felt motivated at the deepest core of my beliefs to try and save you. And I didn’t understand why that would be offensive to anyone. Or, I felt in the long run, it’s worth it. After all, if I did a flying tackle of the blind man to knock him out of the way of a speeding truck, he’d be momentarily upset. He believes he was just assaulted by me, because he can’t understand that I was saving his life. That’s what I believed. And that’s what a lot of people still believe.

Was I wrong? Of course I was wrong. I was deeply, completely, and unequivocally wrong.  Worst of all, I believed I was right.

The Counter-Argument

The key to understanding why this point of view is so tasteless, crass, and incredibly hurtful is understanding the way that it comes across. If you oppose gay marriage, or think homosexuality is a sin, try to think of it this way:

Imagine you’re black. All you want is to be treated the same way as everyone else and be afforded the same rights as everyone else. And a white person comes up to you, very pleasant and friendly and smiling, and says, “I’m sorry, you cannot have these rights because you are black, which is wrong. I know you say you don’t choose to be black, but you are wrong. You need to choose to be white.”

Naturally, you’d point out that you can’t change the color of your skin unless you’re Michael Jackson, but that doesn’t matter to this pleasant racist. They explain that they love you and want the best for you but because you choose to be black, you’re going to hell, because the Bible says that being black is a sin, and because of that, they are also going to vote against you having the same rights as a white person. Now, at this point you’re extremely frustrated, mostly because this incredibly ignorant person is completely missing the point, but also because they’re not being an asshole. An asshole screaming abuse is easy to ignore, but this pleasant white racist is deadly serious and smiling and you can tell they truly believe with deadly sincerity each and every word that is coming out of their mouth.

You give it one more shot. You explain that being black is not a choice, it is fundamentally who you are, and you aren’t able to change it. You point out that all scientific evidence says that it is not a choice. You point out that the only reason they even believe that way is a specific interpretation of a few lines in a two thousand year old text. And you ask them why you can’t have the same rights as a white person?

The friendly racist smiles and says, oh, but you can. They pull out a makeup case full of whiteface and explain that all you have to do is coat yourself in makeup and spend the rest of your life pretending to be white and denying who you really are, and then you can have equal rights.

That’s how the Christian anti-gay argument comes across to people. It is literally one of the cruelest possible things that you could ever say to someone, because you are asking them to deny who they are, and you are asking them to live a life without love.

It’s evil.

Back to Bigotry

I don’t think there was  a defining moment when I stopped being a bigot. There was no intense showdown and no sudden flash of what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity. It was more of I thought about it, and thought about it, and thought about it, and eventually, I realized that I was wrong.

I thought about all of the beliefs that I had held fervently at one point in my life, and now didn’t hold anymore, and I realized that beliefs need to be challenged, because many of them are wrong.

I thought about how deeply religious members of my family could be so voraciously opposed to Harry Potter and then do a complete 180.

I thought about how bigots have been using religious texts to dehumanize and subjugate anyone they felt like for any reason they felt like, and how slowly, through inexorable progress of scientific discovery and rational thought these beliefs have been challenged, fought, and eventually fallen by the wayside.

And I realized that the reason why I was a bigot was not because I had thought about things, sifted through all of the evidence, and came to the careful conclusion that I should be a bigot. It was because someone had told me something and I had accepted it as being true, and after the fact I had looked for and found evidence that my bigotry was true. That’s how bigotry exists, how it maintains itself, and how it spreads. Humans hate changing their minds, there is nothing quite so difficult and unpleasant. It’s far easier to keep believing what we have always believed, even in the face of all evidence.

There is absolutely nothing special about today. It’s the twenty-sixth of March, 2013. It’s mostly cloudy here where I live.  It’s just another day, but it doesn’t have to be. If you’ve never done it before, go out, find a gay person, and give them a hug and tell them they’re awesome.

And, if you oppose gay marriage and think that homosexuality is a sin, all I would ask is that you sit and you take about 10 minutes to think about the fact that maybe, just maybe, you might be wrong.

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