Set the Controls

If you checked in with me a decade ago and asked me if I ever thought I could defend the right of two persons of the same sex to pursue their idea of happiness in the form of a marriage I would have said “When hell freezes over.”
As a child of the New South I may have been raised in racially integrated schools but there were proper limits to my understanding of equality. Raised in an all white suburb on the outskirts of Winston-Salem in the late 1970s and 80s you can imagine the foundations of my moral and political philosophy.
Jesse and Jerry. Helms and Falwell. Twin pillars of my understanding of what it meant to be American, moral and free. No one pointed me in their direction. My home was relatively free of politics and focused more so on family, football and free-time. All that changed when my grandfathers died suddenly, one after the other (I was blessed with three!) in a three-year period from 1981 to 1984.
Stunned by the loss of what I felt was my connection to the wisdom of the past, and having had my thirst for knowledge whetted by teachers and grandmothers alike, I looked around and settled on Republicanism and the certainty of Christianity, which my mother went running to after her father died, as the paths to set my feet upon.
Like many human beings I was uncomfortable with the uncertainty of the monad. I sought a place to fit in. A group to belong to.
Problem was I never felt completely comfortable under the shelter of either set of beliefs. Almost 30 years later, I’ve benefited in the last full season of my life with the knowledge of the full truth of my family history. I have a more complete understanding of who I am, who my ancestors were, what choices they made. And most painfully what lies and deceit they have covered up.
And it is that knowledge, which current lives give me pause to discuss in full at this time, that demands I speak up and combat the current move afoot in North Carolina’s General Assembly to continue into the early days of a third American century the uniquely American tradition of selecting a minority group, isolating it and subjecting it to abuses in the name of the greater good.
Truth be told, there is no greater good. There is the market. There is profit. There is the mirage of an idea called “liberty” that is limited to participating in the market process and not one step further.
These ideas could consume a lifetime of reflection. I’ll leave that to the reader to decide if he desires to pursue that end.
But for me it is increasingly and abundantly clear that across the history of our nation we have long abused the rights of the minorities in our midst. Singling out homosexuals in the year 2011 in North Carolina as a group not worthy of the full blessings of liberty has its roots in the murder and robbery of this land itself from its original inhabitants. The idea that because of one personal trait an individual or group can be singled out for the betterment of the majority was sustained for centuries on the backs of human beings from Africa who were brought to this land as slaves and treated worse than livestock.
The very notion that there is some exceptional raison d’être for which in the name of God and prosperity and America we can strike down the hopes and dreams of a certain class of human came into full bloom across the western half of this land in the second half of the 19th century as soldiers and citizens alike murdered en masse indigenous peoples from the Dakotas to the Rio Grande, from the fertile lands where the Missouri meets the mighty Mississippi to the luscious plains and mountains of Arizona and California. Their dreams of liberty haunt the plains and Rocky Mountains alike unto this day.
This same rationale was then turned upon the impoverished working class of America shortly thereafter. Even amidst some of the exact same states and counties where Native Americans had been murdered a mere 20 years before, immigrant laborers and citizen workers alike were gunned down in the streets or in the work camps for daring to demand a better quality of life as a fruit of their sweat and toil. Was this then their dream of liberty?
As the last century dawned and technology began to mold our society in its very image, unimagined prosperity and wealth accumulated in our midst. But even as the slaves were freed, the natives corralled and the evil forces of collectivism cut down by the armed forces of the state, still some dared to dream of a full flowering of individual liberty.
As our machines and explosive power combined to save the world from the logical extremes of imperialism and capitalism alike during the last “Good War” we still found ways to isolate a minority group, round them up and herd them to a place in which they could be controlled and denied an equal taste of the blessings of liberty.
Since that time we have engaged in a worldwide ideological standoff between state sponsored capital economy and state sponsored collectivism. I do believe the wisdom of the ages will reflect at some point in the future and thank us for enduring such a standoff, but now some 20 years after the collapse of the last great worldwide threat to unfettered market economics we face a crisis of confidence in our own economic system.
Is liberty again trying to be heard amidst the streamlined processes and automated calculation of the current global economic paradigm?
Perhaps that answer is beyond the bounds of this effort. Again, let the reader decide if that concept is a worthy pursuit.
But as we stand in the midst of the greatest economic crisis in almost a century, as untold numbers of children are raised amidst suffering and poverty in single-parent homes, as countless men and women alike are falling by the wayside of an economy uncertain of itself, do we really believe that now is the time to yet again single out a minority group and say “You are not like us! You are not fit for the refreshing water of liberty!”?
For many years I bought into the notion that homosexuals were perverted and disgusting and that only because of their own weakness and moral failure did they chose to engage feelings and commit acts that were beyond my poor power to understand. And to this day perhaps I do not understand.
But as I watched the undeniable suffering on the faces of those in California who fought to secure the blessings of liberty for their gay friends and failed at the polls in 2008 I was struck with the type of moment of clarity that perhaps an inventor feels when he finally sees the full picture.
I personally cannot deny that I have lived a life of failure and deceit for most of my 41 years on this planet. I will not deign to pretend that I have not fallen prey to the bitterness of suffering that comes with the realization that my own cold heart has its roots in generations beyond my control. I will not refuse to claim that I as much as anyone have longed forever to be admired by the chosen few who are lucky enough to be happy and content in this life. That place is not for me to know. It never was meant to be and only in the last two years have I begun to understand the roots of my discontent.
But that combustible mixture can be defeated when I pour out my heart and seek to rise to the defense of those who are in the eye of the storm. Full well do I understand that these very words will be printed and passed around in future years as the group chooses to yet again judge this writer as “unworthy.”
But it is the weight of that very judgment that made that moment of clarity in 2008 so vivid. It was the sudden death of a loved one a short year later that opened the floodgates of compassion that I had never before experienced. It is the knowledge that even the most stoic and religious person arrived at that affect more times than not after experiencing failure and defeat and searching for a place of comfort and rest.
And it is the knowledge that I failed even the ones closest to me in their time of need by turning my back on them because I felt them “unworthy” that drives me to say the following.
Human beings are not meant to live in isolation. They are not meant to be ignored and maligned because of a single trait amidst the countless essences that make us human.
Experience is to be shared. Love is to be cultivated, not defined by one person for another.
Human beings across the planet want to be included. They want to share commonality. They want in their weakest moments to be comforted by those they know and admire.
Pointing to one group in 2011 and saying “You are not like us” or “We judge you to be unworthy” has its roots in a Christianity that has previously rationalized slavery, genocide and other forms of human rights abuses. These things did not happen in some far off land of fantasy. They happened in the United States of America. They took place in the name of God, country and the flag.
Before there was a United States of America, a man named Thomas Jefferson wrote these words about the King of England:
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
In the context of civil rights for minority groups of whatever trait that a majority might single them out for, these words could easily be spoken of our nation over the course of its history since 1787.
But Jefferson perhaps knew that they could be applied not only to King George III but to any group of power brokers who would come together to deny freedom to subgroups within their midst.
Standing together with love and compassion for those who would be singled out by a majority wielding once again its own subjective notions of concepts such as morality, family, prosperity is perhaps what Jefferson had in mind when he penned those words.
Because freedom is the essence of humanity. Humanity is the essence of liberty itself.