| February
2001
Beware the bias in your questions
|
|
In
an earlier article, Where have eternal life banners gone?,
I wrote about how students doing school projects have occasionally contacted me
for interviews. Almost all have so far been tertiary students.
Very recently, a teenage girl from a secondary school emailed me with questions for her project. Without identifying her, I will present her questions and my answers here. The questions are as important as the answers; they reveal where the questioner is coming from, the assumptions that everybody takes for granted. These assumptions create a societal framework in which the heterosexual fits very well, but which the homosexual person does not. His ill-fit is then taken to mean that homosexuality is a kind of disorder, whether social or biological, depending on how you wish to see it. In fact though, the ill-fit is not due to homosexuality. It is due to the framework that was created, and used as a test of acceptability. * * * * * Q1. Gay couples are able to raise heterosexual children. Do you know of any articles or websites that might give me proof that this is true? What do you think of this statement? Why is the onus of proof put on gay people to "be able to raise heterosexual children"? Why is raising heterosexual children treated like a test of adequacy? Why is heterosexuality treated as superior such that the raising of such becomes a test of adequacy? Historically there have always been homosexual parents. Even today, many homosexual persons have children. Despite centuries of this, no one has ever observed and recorded that homosexual persons tend to beget and raise homosexual children. The record is blank simply because there has been no observable pattern to record! The question posed is a really an indictment: Give me proof that you are "innocent", otherwise you are presumed guilty. What about the fact that most homosexual persons came out of heterosexual
parents? Does that make heterosexual persons inadequate parents? Should
heterosexual persons be barred from parenthood since, throughout history, they
have been producing homosexual offspring? Q2. If a gay couple were to want to have children, they would have to adopt children. Then in this case, who is going to play the role of the mother? (same goes to lesbian couples, who is going to play the role of the father?) How can they ensure that they are able to protect their adopted children from discrimination from the majority of the society? This question presupposes that children need a "father" and a "mother". It is not clear that this axiom is really true. Lots of people throughout history have been raised in non-nuclear families. Either they grew up in extended families with lots of adults around -- older cousins, aunts and father's other wives in the same household -- or disease cut life-expectancy short, and children were often left without one parent. The idea that we all take for granted today -- that families should comprise father, mother and children with grandparents, uncles and aunts at arms' length – is a very recent one. Do not assume that it is long-standing truth that children grow up well only in such circumstances. It is also predicated on a sexist idea that fathers and mothers have different roles. That a woman can't do certain things, and a man can't do women's things. Supposing someone asked, "Can we ever allow two persons from the astrological society to get married and raise children? Which partner is then going to play the pragmatic role? Which partner is going to play the mystic role? Likewise, can we ever allow two shopkeepers to raise children? They’re both such down-to-earth people, who will be the mystic parent?" We'd immediately see the fallacy in the underlying idea that in a family, one parent must be a mystic, or a seer, and the other a pragmatic, money-minded person. Using this test, lots of people won't be allowed to pair up, because they don't "complement" each other. But why this test of complementarity? Instead we should ask, what makes good parenting? And look at issues of love, attention to the child, economic sustenance, and being good models, e.g. in terms of self-discipline, honesty, and hygiene. By these tests, lots of heterosexual couples fail miserably. One party abuses alcohol. Another is sent to jail for stealing. A third is so lazy, the home is filthy and unhygienic; a fourth is so bad-tempered, he is unable to hold a job for long. Just because they are heterosexual, and therefore they are able to play the sexist roles in society, they are qualified to be parents? The sub-question was "How can they ensure that they are able to protect their adopted children from discrimination from the majority of the society?" Ignore the "adopted" bit. Again, this question is selective in its indictment. In many societies, people of minority race are discriminated against. People with hearing disabilities are discriminated against. Do we ban them from having children because they can't ensure that they kids are not discriminated against? If we don’t ban them, then why only gay parents? This kind of thinking simply misses the issue. Worse, it excuses the
oppressors from seeing their own oppression. Where discrimination is the
problem, whether against people of a different colour, religion, sexuality or
disability, then deal with the discrimination. Don't excuse yourself from
tackling the problem by saying such people shouldn't raise any more children
(the hope being that that inconvenient class of people would then disappear from
the face of this earth?) Q3. What do you think about teenagers in secondary school who try to act like lesbians? (I have only come across girls who try to act like "butches") Do you think that they are sure of their own sexual orientation? How many heterosexual persons are sure they are heterosexual? And if they aren’t, but act like one, we take the view that’s it’s their own business to think they are what they are. If a homosexual girl covers up her feelings and pretends to date boys, we think it’s fine. She’s doing the right thing. But if a heterosexual teenager decides it’s hip to be gay, do we go out and try to salvage the lost soul? Do we demand that they are absolutely sure they are homosexual, before we leave them alone? Why the dissymmetry? Why do we insist that people must be sure? It may not be possible to be sure about anything in one’s teenage years. We don’t know what career we really want in life. We don’t know whether we would like to live in America or in Singapore. But we let young people learn by giving them room to try. We think it is wiser to let them try various courses and pursue what they like or do well in. We think a good educational system must be open-ended, and not leave people with no options. We think it’s OK for youngsters to go on dates, otherwise they may never learn how to socialise, and how to handle relationships. We don’t demand that the first date you go out with must be absolutely the right person with whom you’d spend the rest of your life. So why must young people be sure of their sexuality? Why do we penalize them if they’re not, and just want to try? Is this paranoia about homosexuality a sign that we still see it as a kind of incurable disease? Try once, and you’ll be infected for life? No release? If so, then we have the strangest idea indeed about how fragile is heterosexuality. It’s almost like saying, homosexuality is the default condition for humans, and heterosexuality must be strenuously created and protected, or else people lapse back to homosexuality! What a strange idea. How revealing it is of our fear. Our phobia. Homophobia. You see how easy it is to display homophobia even when we don't mean to? This comes from using the framework as a measure of others, without giving any thought to the biased nature of the framework. * * * * * It is going to be frustrating doing a school project, thinking up these good
questions, only to find that I don’t really answer them. Instead, I question
the questions. Yet, these are what we have to do if we are ever to get a better
understanding of the issues. It’s the framework, the underlying assumptions,
that should be interrogated. Not gay people. © Yawning Bread
|
|
|
Footnotes
Addenda None
|
|
