Furth and Fortune blog by Will Murray

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—Will

Driving down the free­way, I noticed a bumper sticker on a Toyota Prius that read, “Draft SUV dri­vers first”. I chuck­led at the sen­ti­ment even though I thought it was slightly offen­sive, as any form of dis­crim­i­na­tion is to me. As I passed the Prius, I noticed that the dri­ver looked like a young stereo­typ­i­cal left-wing col­lege pro­fes­sor you would see in a movie full of awk­ward stereotypes—the plaid shirt, wire-rimmed glasses, and hair that was red, curly, and slightly reced­ing. I hoped that no strong, SUV-driving ex-military type suf­fer­ing from post trau­matic stress dis­or­der took offense at that bumper sticker, because the Prius dri­ver likely wouldn’t have been able to defend him­self. Then an SUV passed me, and I noticed the dri­ver was a slight woman, prob­a­bly in her mid 40s, wear­ing a sleeve­less dress, gold jew­elry, and looked the type who might carry a tiny dog around with her as she shops at Nordstrom. The incon­gruity between my ear­lier thoughts of a big bruiser of a man step­ping out of a Hummer and deck­ing the col­lege pro­fes­sor, con­trasted strangely with the diminu­tive (but prob­a­bly feisty) woman in the SUV pos­si­bly mac­ing the pro­fes­sor (though I’d prob­a­bly put even odds on the pro­fes­sor in that confrontation).

After the lady sped on ahead and the pro­fes­sor fell behind, I reflected on the sen­ti­ment of his bumper sticker. It was obvi­ous that he, at least jok­ingly, does not value SUV dri­vers as much as he, at least jok­ingly, val­ues dri­vers of more fuel-efficient vehi­cles. Is that any rea­son to wish SUV dri­vers harm or even death, by send­ing them unwill­ingly off to fight in a war?

I sup­pose that if one is going to dis­crim­i­nate against another class of peo­ple, dis­crim­i­na­tion based on lifestyle choices is prefer­able to dis­crim­i­nat­ing based on some­thing that can’t be changed.

All SUV dri­vers who wanted to avoid a draft could sim­ply switch to dri­ving some­thing other than an SUV. Yes, it would prob­a­bly impact their daily activ­i­ties a lit­tle bit, and they would be out some money they wouldn’t have had to spend oth­er­wise, but noth­ing fun­da­men­tal about the per­son would have to be changed. After all, nobody is born an SUV dri­ver or a Prius dri­ver. Such deci­sions are based on a num­ber of other exter­nal influ­ences and inter­nal value judge­ments, along with mar­ket deci­sions from auto­mo­bile man­u­fac­tur­ers. So, dis­crim­i­nat­ing against SUV dri­vers, while still dis­crim­i­na­tion, is dis­crim­i­na­tion against a lifestyle CHOICE, and avoid­ing that dis­crim­i­na­tion is as easy as choos­ing a dif­fer­ent vehi­cle to drive.

This is very dif­fer­ent from dis­crim­i­nat­ing against some­one based on height, eth­nic­ity, or hand­i­cap. People can­not change their height to avoid dis­crim­i­na­tion, nor can they change who their par­ents and other ances­tors were. While they might yearn to change the cir­cum­stances lead­ing to a hand­i­cap, that is impos­si­ble. Discrimination based on such immutable fac­tors is clearly ille­gal in most mod­ern soci­eties, includ­ing the United States.

Other types of dis­crim­i­na­tion are a lit­tle trick­ier. What about a person’s weight? Fashion mod­els are rou­tinely dis­crim­i­nated against for either being too thin (by many in the pub­lic) or too fat (by the fash­ion indus­try). People with pro­trud­ing bel­lies are dis­crim­i­nated against for being over­weight. Discrimination can come in the form of rude com­ments like “slob”, “pig”, “overeater”. But is a person’s weight a lifestyle choice, or is it an immutable fac­tor in their life? Surely there are peo­ple who carry extra weight from eat­ing more food than is healthy and not exer­cis­ing enough to burn off the excess calo­ries. But there are also many peo­ple on life-sustaining med­ica­tions or who have hor­monal or genetic issues that eat and exer­cise prop­erly and still carry extra weight. While weight may be affected by lifestyle choices, many other fac­tors con­tribute to it, and for many it is immutable and not a lifestyle choice at all.

What about reli­gion? On the sur­face, it would seem to be a lifestyle choice. After all, in a typ­i­cal com­mu­nity, there are any­where from a cou­ple to dozens of dif­fer­ent churches, tem­ples, and other houses of reli­gions at which one may par­tic­i­pate in a par­tic­u­lar form of reli­gion. In fact, there is noth­ing that requires any­one to par­tic­i­pate in reli­gion at all. Not only that, some peo­ple do change reli­gions. Sometimes the change is minor (Methodist to Presbyterian), and some­times it’s more dra­matic (Christian to Buddhism). Despite all of that, courts in most mod­ern soci­eties have ruled that reli­gion is such an intrin­sic part of a person’s self-identity that it is ille­gal to dis­crim­i­nate based on a person’s religion.

Discrimination against gay, les­bian, bisex­ual, trans­gen­der, and inter­sex­ual (“gay”) indi­vid­u­als is another issue that seems to be a murky deci­sion for many peo­ple. Is “being gay” a lifestyle choice or is it an immutable part of a per­son? While dis­crim­i­na­tion against some­one for a lifestyle choice (as in the Prius dri­ver and the SUV dri­vers) is unfair, it’s not really a legal issue since some­one could escape dis­crim­i­na­tion sim­ply by chang­ing their actions. But is that what “being gay” is? Is it really that sim­ple for a gay to escape dis­crim­i­na­tion by chang­ing his or her actions? If so, then legal pro­tec­tions are prob­a­bly unnec­es­sary. But if not, if gay­ness is immutable or an intrin­sic part of self-identity for a gay per­son, then gays deserve every bit of pro­tec­tion that other pro­tected classes of peo­ple are (eth­nic­ity, hand­i­cap, reli­gion, etc.).

Currently in the United States, and espe­cially here in California, the sub­ject of gay mar­riage is a hot topic right now. People on one side are fight­ing to retain the “dig­nity of mar­riage” and “pro­tect the fam­ily” by out­law­ing the right of gays to marry. I don’t under­stand either argument.

My par­ents and grand­par­ents are excel­lent exam­ples of how to do mar­riage right. Both sets of my grand­par­ents hap­pily exceeded 50 years together, and my par­ents are approach­ing the same num­ber. They do seem to be the excep­tion, though. Today divorce tears apart about half the fam­i­lies in the U.S. Straight men cheat on their wives, straight women cheat on their hus­bands, kids end up with kids of their own. It would seem that the non-gay keep­ers of this solemn insti­tu­tion have tar­nished the “dig­nity of mar­riage” quite nicely. Would gay mar­riages do bet­ter than het­ero mar­riages? Who knows, but it is dif­fi­cult to see how they could do much worse. One big dif­fer­ence is that straight cou­ples seem to take mar­riage for granted, and often marry out of con­ve­nience or for eco­nomic advan­tage. Gay cou­ples are fight­ing for their right to marry each other; they don’t take their love for advan­tage. Gays face pub­lic ridicule and per­se­cu­tion every time they say “my part­ner”. If their love is strong enough to fight through oppo­si­tion like that, it is hard to see how “dig­nity of mar­riage” is diminished.

Likewise, gay cou­ples are often com­ing together to form new fam­i­lies. Partners often have chil­dren from pre­vi­ous rela­tion­ships. Denying gays the right to marry sends a mes­sage to the chil­dren that their par­ents are some­how less val­ued by soci­ety than their friends’ straight par­ents are. Also, many gay part­ners seek to have chil­dren of their own, just as straight cou­ples do. In all these cases, the gay part­ners are seek­ing to build fam­i­lies, to pro­vide their chil­dren with two par­ents, to care for, nour­ish, and grow their fam­i­lies. It’s very dif­fi­cult to do that while also fac­ing sus­pi­cion, dis­crim­i­na­tion, and out­right hatred sim­ply for being a fam­ily that looks a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from what you see in 1950s tele­vi­sion shows. Blocking gay mar­riage does noth­ing to “pro­tect the fam­ily”, but it does plenty to harm the affected families.

Is “gay­ness” a lifestyle deci­sion, like dri­ving an SUV, or is it some­thing deeper, some­thing immutable within the per­son that can­not be changed with­out dras­ti­cally alter­ing the intrin­sic self-identity of the person?

The first way to ana­lyze that is to reverse the ques­tion. Is het­ero­sex­u­al­ity a lifestyle deci­sion or some­thing immutable? Would a typ­i­cal straight man or woman suf­fer noth­ing more than a mod­er­ate impact on their daily activ­i­ties by becom­ing homo­sex­ual? Would it be as easy for a straight per­son to switch to being gay as it would be to change brands of sham­poo or decide to vaca­tion in Florida instead of Palm Springs? I don’t know any­one who thinks so. Why then should it be any eas­ier for a gay per­son to switch to heterosexuality?

Statistics clearly show that a very high num­ber of teen sui­cides are due to mat­ters relat­ing to sex­ual iden­tity. Surely, if gay­ness was a lifestyle choice, like attend­ing the foot­ball play­offs or the prom, then it wouldn’t be some­thing worth killing one­self over. Taking one’s own life comes from the con­flict of real­iz­ing you are gay in a world that demo­nizes gay­ness, refuses to acknowl­edge basic human and civil rights to your kind, and is known to phys­i­cally harm gays sim­ply for being who they were born to be.

What about the anec­do­tal sto­ries of suc­cess in peo­ple hap­pily chang­ing from gay to straight after ther­apy and reli­gion? Well, I’ve never met any such peo­ple. The only place I’ve ever seen them is in tes­ti­mo­ni­als from pro­grams claim­ing to have imple­mented such changes and on con­ser­v­a­tive Christian mate­ri­als that demo­nize gay­ness as a dis­ease that needs cur­ing. I have met sev­eral hap­pily mar­ried straight men and women who have told me they “exper­i­mented” with peo­ple of their own gen­der in the past, some even main­tain­ing rela­tion­ships with such a per­son for a while, but even­tu­ally, they returned to their own ori­en­ta­tion. Likewise, most gays in their 30s and older I have met have main­tained rela­tion­ships with girl­friends or even mar­riages before real­iz­ing they were liv­ing a lie and decided to end it. It would seem that many peo­ple are able to main­tain rela­tion­ships out­side of their pri­mary ori­en­ta­tion, yet even­tu­ally they return to what their own inter­nal com­pass tells them is right for them.

What about bisex­u­als? In many ways, they are even more mis­un­der­stood and treated like out­siders than gays and les­bians. People, straight and gay, often ridicule them as gays afraid to step fully out of the closet. Others mis­tak­enly think that being bi means being excep­tion­ally promis­cu­ous, since they are mis­tak­enly believed to be sex­u­ally attracted to any­thing, male or female. I had a bisex­ual room­mate and also a cou­ple of bisex­ual good friends, and talk­ing with them about it, I real­ized that they face all the same prob­lems as gays, but often even more. It’s not that they are attracted to every male or female they see—they are just as choosy as any­one else about who they date—but rather they are gender-blind when it comes to seek­ing a part­ner. However, when they date a per­son of the same gen­der, they are dis­crim­i­nated against by a largely homo­pho­bic soci­ety, and when they date a per­son of the oppo­site gen­der, the gay com­mu­nity dis­crim­i­nates against them. While a bisex­ual who falls in love with a per­son of the oppo­site gen­der may not have a prob­lem with laws ban­ning gay mar­riage, if love hap­pens to form between some­one of the same gen­der, gay mar­riage rights would be very important.

Transgender peo­ple also suf­fer a lot of dis­crim­i­na­tion. While cross-dressing as “drag queens” and “drag kings” seems to be accepted, or even expected, within the gay cul­ture (espe­cially within the gay cul­ture pop­u­lar­ized in movies), trans­sex­u­als are often shunned. To clar­ify, trans­ves­tites are cross-dressers, and trans­vestitism does not nec­es­sar­ily align with sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion (many male to female cross-dressers are straight males). Transsexuals are peo­ple who often feel “trapped in the wrong body”, such as a man trapped in a woman’s body or vice versa. Those who feel strongly enough about it and have the money for surgery, often undergo surgery to “cor­rect” their gen­der. This, too, is often sep­a­rate from sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion, because a pre-operative bio­log­i­cally male trans­sex­ual who is attracted to men, does not become inter­ested in women after cor­rec­tive surgery. Was the per­son ever gay? As an out­ward male attracted to other men, it would seem so. But post-operative, the per­son is an out­ward female and still attracted to men, thus she would seem to be het­ero­sex­ual now. This is one rea­son why dis­crim­i­na­tion based on sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion is ludicrous.

Back to gay mar­riage, if a pre-operative bio­log­i­cally male trans­sex­ual is legally mar­ried to a bisex­ual woman, what should hap­pen to their mar­riage after he under­goes surgery and cor­rects his gen­der to female? Opponents of gay mar­riage would argue that, as a now homo­sex­ual cou­ple, their mar­riage should be inval­i­dated. Nothing about their love for each other has changed, nor their love for their chil­dren. Yet, only based on gen­der cor­rec­tion, their mar­riage auto­mat­i­cally nullifies.

Is it a lifestyle choice to change one’s gen­der? I don’t think so. Changing one’s hair color because “blondes have more fun” is a lifestyle choice. Undergoing months of ther­apy, hor­mone treat­ments, rad­i­cal surgery, and pos­si­ble alien­ation of your friends to match your body to your intrin­sic self-identity does not seem to be a mere lifestyle choice. It is surely some­thing much deeper.

As if there is any need to show that dis­crim­i­na­tion against gay mar­riage is wrong, con­sider the plight of an inter­sex­ual per­son. ADAM Health Illustrated Encyclopedia defines inter­sex­ual as” Intersex is a group of con­di­tions where there is a dis­crep­ancy between the exter­nal gen­i­tals and the inter­nal gen­i­tals (the testes and ovaries). The older term for this con­di­tion [was] her­maph­ro­ditism”. These are peo­ple with both male and female char­ac­ter­is­tics at a very fun­da­men­tal level; they are nei­ther exclu­sively male nor female, but a com­bi­na­tion of both. To define mar­riage as some­thing “only valid between one man and one woman” entirely excludes inter­sex­u­als. While reli­gious extrem­ists and mar­riage tra­di­tion­al­ists may argue that homo­sex­u­al­ity is a lifestyle choice, a genetic con­di­tion such as this cer­tainly is not. A law that defines mar­riage so nar­rowly is a law that dis­crim­i­nates against a par­tic­u­lar class of peo­ple with a in immutable genetic con­di­tion. It does so by elim­i­nat­ing a fun­da­men­tal human and civil right—the right to fall in love with a per­son and marry them.

That Prius owner may want SUV own­ers suf­fer for their deci­sions, but such a desire is not going to harm mul­ti­ple classes of peo­ple for some­thing they can­not change.

Revoking the right or out­law­ing mar­riage for gay, les­bian, bisex­ual, trans­sex­ual, and inter­sex­ual indi­vid­u­als does cause harm. It encour­ages other prej­u­dice and dis­crim­i­na­tion against these same indi­vid­u­als, both in legal mat­ters and in ordi­nary deal­ings within their com­mu­nity. It per­pet­u­ates hatred and vio­lence by estab­lish­ing a hier­ar­chy of those who may marry and those who can­not, and thus are not full mem­bers of soci­ety. It increases the pres­sure on young­sters or peo­ple of any age com­ing to terms with their sex­ual iden­tity and dis­cov­er­ing they are part of a class of peo­ple legally dis­crim­i­nated against. It tar­nishes the insti­tu­tion of mar­riage by mak­ing mar­riage an elit­ist right that is only avail­able to a self-selected major­ity. It destroys fam­ily val­ues by pro­hibit­ing lov­ing cou­ples from com­ing together as mar­ried spouses and rais­ing chil­dren in homes full of love, accepted by soci­ety as legal and normal.

Too many peo­ple seem to per­ceive gay­ness as a sim­ple “lifestyle choices” instead of an immutable aspect of self or an intrin­sic part of one’s self-identity. Either way, this per­cep­tion is false, and the courts will even­tu­ally rule in favor of pro­tect­ing a mar­gin­al­ized minor­ity, just as they have done in the past for African Americans, for reli­gious fol­low­ers, and for peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties. In time, things will change. The ques­tion is how long must we wait? How many more peo­ple must suf­fer dis­crim­i­na­tion and per­se­cu­tion before that even­tual day arrives? And how many peo­ple want to go down on the wrong side of his­tory by being in favor of unlaw­ful discrimination?

Join me in the right fight, and thank law­mak­ers and jus­tices who take the dif­fi­cult stand against dis­crim­i­na­tion and express your dis­plea­sure to those who don’t. The more peo­ple who do that, the sooner rights will be restored here in California and elsewhere.

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