cognitive dissident

John Corvino's piece "Gay Marriage and the Bigot Card" in The Humanist magazine yesterday led me to check out his "Gay Moralist" column. He quickly became a new favorite of mine, especially when he observed that "opponents [of same-sex marriage] ignore the substance [of our arguments] in favor of touting their alleged persecution:

Marriage-equality opponents are increasingly complaining that we're calling them bigots. This leads to a kind of double-counting of our arguments: For any argument X that we offer, opponents complain both that we're saying X and that we're saying that anyone who disagrees with X is a bigot.

Then, instead of responding to X--that is, debating the issue on the merits--they focus on the alleged bigotry charge and grumble about being called names.

I've dropped the b-bomb a few times over the past several years of blogging--100 times out of 600,000 words in nearly 2,000 posts--but not without reason. (Actually, "without reason" is my justification for using the word bigot in the first place: when dealing with unjustified discrimination, identifying it as bigotry is an appropriate response.) Our use of the word bigot irks Corvino as well:

Personally, I think the term "bigot" should be used sparingly. Many of those who oppose marriage equality are otherwise decent people who can and sometimes do respond to reasoned dialogue.

To call such persons bigots is not merely inaccurate; it's a conversation-stopper.

If anything, their claim that bigotry is required by their religious beliefs is the real conversation-stopper. Since--in their minds, at least--reveled religion always trumps human law, they are the ones stopping all dialogue, refusing to compromise, and demanding that we all live according to their rules (whichever ones they choose to obey, anyway). As we make no similar demands of them, their persecution complex seems especially ludicrous.

In "That's How I Was Raised," Corvino accuses opponents of marriage equality of "moral laziness" despite accepting them as "otherwise decent folk misled by powerful tradition:"

When traditions cause palpable harm to people, it's time to change. At that point, rethinking tradition is not merely optional...it's morally mandatory.

One can see that--without a formal mechanism for self-correction--religion does a much poorer job at making those changes in a timely manner.