April 2004

Broad gay acceptance no longer unimaginable

    

  

 
Significant shifts in social attitudes towards gay persons have recently been reported by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. 

As reported in the story 'Acceptance of gays on rise, polls show' from the Los Angeles Times, 

  • Public acceptance of gays in the military grew from 51% in a 1977 Gallup Poll to 80% in 2003. 

  • Approval of gays as elementary school teachers grew from 27% in 1977 to 61% over the same period. 

  • A 1999 Gallup survey showed that 59% would vote for a well-qualified presidential candidate who was homosexual, up from 26% in 1978. 

The polls taken were just 26 years apart, barely a generation.

In the UK, the Economist magazine reported the same tectonic shifts:  

According to the British Social Attitudes survey, 70% of Britons thought homosexuality was wrong in 1985; by 2000 that had dropped to 47%. Moreover, there is a startling generational divide: 60% of people aged 60 and over still thought homosexuality was always wrong in 2000, but only 23% of people under 30 did. So homophobia is dying off. 

[See the story Glad to be Tory] 

These data should give pause to anyone who thinks that wholesale acceptance of gay persons by entire societies is unimaginable, or at least a very long time coming.  

In his letter to Massachusetts Senator Marian Walsh, Prof Stephen Schloesser, wrote,  

Historians ... are profoundly skeptical of the word 'always'. One of my teachers was fond of this aphorism: "We study history, not in order to render what is unfamiliar familiar, but to render what is familiar unfamiliar." Another one liked to say: "You show me what you think is the most stable thing imaginable, and I will show you how horribly contingent it really is." 

[See A Catholic history of marriage]

The Singapore government comes pretty close to relying on the idea of 'always' - unchanging certainty - whenever they dismiss any talk of civil rights for the gay minority by chanting the mantra of "conservative majority". Intellectually, they - some at least -- may see that things can or may change, though they seem also to assume that attitudinal change of such profound subversiveness can only be at a glacial pace, if ever. Emotionally, though, they appear to need the assurance that the bedrock of the conservative majority should ALWAYS be solid. 

 

 

(I love the use of the word "horribly". And indeed, it describes the feeling when something you have assumed to be the eternal truth is shown to be merely a product of circumstance.)

 

They have given no indication that they can dispassionately contemplate a different world; they certainly give no indication that they are preparing Singaporeans for it, what with a censorship regime that is almost paranoid in its strictures. 

And frankly, I have little hope that anyone in our government would even be alerted to the data indicated above. I am gravely skeptical that our civil servants even report contrarian news to their political masters. 

Well, if so, they'd be missing a shift as significant as that of recognizing equal rights for women or racial minorities, which have propelled social history through the last 100 years. 

In a sense, this remarkable trend is not surprising at all. In many cases of societies accepting the alien, one of the biggest factors for change is that of having to confront the issue. In the last 30 years, the visibility of gay persons has increased as never before, and not just in the media. Close friends, colleagues, sons and daughters have come out. 

It's very easy to be adamant about something being alien and unacceptable when it is in the abstract. It's a lot harder in relational situations. 

In the West, where individual liberty is better protected by law and custom, there is a lot more room for the non-mainstream to "be themselves". Therefore having to confront difference is quite unavoidable, at least in the main urban centers. This confrontation was what created the dynamic that led to the shift in attitudes reported above. 

The one area of still considerable resistance is same-sex marriage. About two-thirds of Americans still can't bring themselves to accept that idea. Yet, the explanation that acceptance comes from having to confront the uncomfortable also applies here. Same-sex marriage isn't broadly accepted - yet - simply because it hasn't happened to any scale yet. When it does, and enough people get used to married gay neighbours, or to working under married gay bosses, objections will erode quickly. 

I say this with confidence because gay marriages don't subtract anything away from other people's lives. It is thus very easy to change one's mind and say, OK, we can live with it after all. 

Is the same confrontation - with homosexuality, not same-sex marriage  -- taking place in Singapore? Quite obviously it is, as gay visibility in increasing here too. Thus, the same dynamic is at work. 

However, there is also a difference. Our government is not neutral: it has a homophobic agenda. It aims to deny voice and legitimacy to the gay minority.  

Why it does so is ultimately irrational, in the sense that there isn't any good justification for not being neutral on a social question. No doubt, our ministers attempt to rationalize their position, as when they point to the supposed "conservative majority", but since most people also see that in many other areas, they pay no heed to public opinion, there is little credibility in this plea. 

It is precisely from this irrational effort to maintain homophobic policies that I intuit an emotional need to believe in the 'always' of its stance, as mentioned above. If a government wasn't so invested in the idea of heteronormativity, it would be able to see that a smarter stance would be to stay neutral in what is really a social question, not a critical issue of State. 

This fixation on shoring up their heterosexist model will blind them to how fast opinion can change. In fact they may not have seen the early indicators of change that can be teased out of their own Social Attitudes Survey 2001 [see the article SAS 2001 - the first monograph]  Already the younger generation and the better-educated among Singaporeans hold significantly different attitudes to homosexuality compared to the rest. If the government stays as rigid about its policies as they have, they may find themselves quite out of step with the people within 10 years. 

On the other hand, it is also possible that their policies might work, and slow down the tide of social change here. They would certainly feel vindicated then. But that raises another question: at what cost? In a world that is increasingly borderless, why would talent flow to, or stay in this little blister of zealously-maintained intolerance? 

© Yawning Bread 

 

2 April 2004
New York Times
Editorials/Op-ed

Gay Soldiers and Teachers

At a time when Massachusetts legislators are scrambling to amend their state's Constitution to ban gay marriages and President Bush supports a federal constitutional amendment to do the same, it is worth recalling the enormous strides made in tolerance toward gay men and lesbians on a wide range of other issues in recent years. The trend gives some reason to hope that gay marriage will eventually be deemed acceptable and no threat to heterosexual Americans.

The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research and advocacy group, has been collecting poll results on gay issues going back three decades. The numbers document a profound change in attitudes, most strikingly on employment issues but also in areas like adoption rights, legal benefits and acceptance of gay relations.

Although Congress and the Pentagon have balked at letting gays serve openly in the military, a Gallup poll last year found that an astonishing 80 percent of the respondents thought gays should be allowed in the armed forces, up from only 51 percent in 1977. Approval for hiring gay teachers for elementary schools jumped to 61 percent from 27 percent over the same period. Most gay athletes may be afraid to identify themselves publicly, but fully 86 percent of the public thinks that they should be hired for professional sports. A majority of the public thinks gays are just fine as members of the clergy, and three-fifths say they would vote for a well-qualified gay presidential candidate.

There are lots of theories to explain these more tolerant attitudes. Our own guess is that as more and more gays have acknowledged their sexual orientation, straight Americans have come to see that gays are not deviants to be feared, but valued friends, neighbors and colleagues who are not much different from anyone else. Sadly, the poll data shows little easing of opposition to gay marriages in recent years, with roughly three-fifths or more of the public still opposed. That opposition might melt away if some state had the courage to legalize gay marriage and everyone could see that it posed no threat whatever to heterosexual unions.

 

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