Senator Orrin Hatch, conservative Republican from Utah, urges us to accept and to value those who had once been the objects of unmerciful derision, who are still targets:
No one should ever feel less because of their gender identity or sexual orientation. LGBT youth deserve our unwavering love and support. They deserve our validation and the assurance that not only is there a place for them in this society, but that it is far better off because of them.
These young people need us—and we desperately need them. We need their light to illuminate the richness and diversity of God’s creations. We need the grace, beauty and brilliance they bring to the world.
Sofie Werthan of Slate Magazine suggests that Senator Hatch made a lovely little speech but that it is far too little and comes decades too late.
Indeed, his long-standing hostility to equality may have contributed to the very marginalization of LGBTQ people that he now decries. It’s nice to see a Republican senator break from his party on this issue. But his Wednesday statement, however lovely it might’ve been, cannot make up for decades of anti-LGBTQ advocacy.
She details the Senator’s hostility back to the beginning of his 40 plus years in the Senate, with this quote in 1977:
I wouldn’t want to see homosexuals teaching school any more than I’d want to see members of the American Nazi Party teaching school.
Others are a little less harsh.
It has taken too long, but maybe Sen. Orrin Hatch is finally getting it.
Robert Gehrke of the Salt lake Tribune, June 13, 2018
The evolution of the Senator from Utah has been slow and a little painful, but it has been happening for a while. Last year, he opposed the ban of transexual people from the military. When an advocate asked Utah lawmakers if they would stand with transgender Utahns, Senator Hatch posted a single word answer.
Yes.
Yes. https://t.co/HRHwabbPQn #utpol
— Senator Hatch Office (@senorrinhatch) July 26, 2017
The Hatch Senate speech asking for acceptance and inclusion, and the remarkable contrast with his earlier positions, took me back to another controversy.
Eleven years ago, a conservative United States Senator, a vigorous opponent of gay rights, an avowed enemy of gays themselves, embarrassed himself and, perhaps, significantly advanced the cause of equality in the United States.
He was a moral individual. You could take his word for it. In fact, he delighted in the moral failings of others. When it came to Bill Clinton in 1999, he entertained conservative constituents with infantile language, treating the President as a misbehaving child:
It’s a bad boy, Bill Clinton. You’re a naughty boy. The American people already know that Bill Clinton is a bad boy, a naughty boy.
I’m going to speak out for the citizens of my state who, in the majority, think that Bill Clinton is probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy.
Senator Larry Craig, January 24, 1999
And he hated gay people. He was passionate about it. He opposed gay marriage. He was even against civil unions. He fought hard to keep government from protecting gay people from violence.
The existence of gay people filled him with a holy fury.
His arrest in the men’s room of a Minneapolis airport came as a surprise. He had attempted to solicit gay sex and, to his horror, found that he was making advances toward an undercover police officer. Senator Larry Craig tried to get out of it. He handed the officer a card identifying him as a United States Senator asking, “What do you think about that?” The officer put the card down and demanded the Senator’s driver’s license. The audio recording of the arrest itself sounds like a television story.
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in court law.
The story went unnoticed for over 10 weeks. What reporter spends afternoons checking airport arrest logs?
The Senator’s eventual press conference started with an unintentional double entendre…
Thank you all very much for coming out today.
…then went to implausible denial.
Let me be clear. I am not gay. I never have been gay.
There was some joy in Mudville. Americans forgive many things, but we do love to hate hypocrisy. Especially from moralists. And that all too gleeful cheap shot at President Clinton was an easy, haunting, video moment.
…a nasty, bad, naughty boy.
I remember feeling differently.
I tried to imagine how it might have been for someone struggling against his own nature, and how that struggle must have been replicated for millions of people who found themselves attracted to those forbidden to them. The inner denial, the exaggerated opposition, the importance of that opposition.
In the early 1980s, there were loud whispers about sexual aggressiveness around Congress. Young male pages were the supposed targets of male Congressional Representatives. We have to wonder, and we ought to worry, about what happened to those pages.
Larry Craig was one of those Representatives. He issued a denial.
Persons who are unmarried, as I am, by choice or by circumstance, have always been the subject of innuendos, gossip, and false accusations.
The next year he got married.
A life traveled along hairpin turns, meant to dodge any evidence of inner turmoil, has to be a terrible way to live. The price is interest compounded when guilt about others is included.
I don’t remember, exactly, when my views on gay people changed. I do remember teenage years thinking of homosexuality as perversion. I simply accepted what I only later recognized as bigotry. Then I remember, in later years, rejecting that same bigotry as evil.
As a teenager, I read about another men’s room arrest. The undercover officer in that case took into custody a man whose foot tapped under a bathroom stall. It was, said the officer, a well-known homosexual signal. The judge threw out the case. Foot tapping was insufficient evidence.
I agreed with that verdict. I thought of how terrible it must have been to be tapping innocently to some inner music, then suddenly finding oneself accused of something so horrific. That homosexuality might be something other than a terrible crime did not occur to my young mind. It wasn’t that I never gave it a second thought. I did not give it a first thought.
At least not then.
At some point, I must have. As a young man, I remember thinking about how it was wrong to forbid mutual love between adults. Perhaps there was some epiphany that has since been forgotten. Perhaps I just grew up.
Maybe that is the way of prejudice, of unreasoning derision. We accept a definition of others as less than ourselves, we accept it because we do not think to reject it. It is a hopeful thought, that some bigotry can be rejected by thinking it through. That thinking ought to include thoughts of the targets.
Larry Craig, a perpetrator of hate was, in some ways, one of its most damaged victims. He could not accept his own nature as part of nature, as natural. The self-loathing must have been overpowering.
Senator Hatch may have arrived late.
LGBT youth deserve our unwavering love and support.
Perhaps, like many of us, he is still coming to terms with his past, a past that includes irrational rejection of the humanity of others.
We who once stood with him, unquestioningly accepting our bigotry, can now walk with him toward the light. Somewhere along that path we ought to join in silent apology toward our God and toward those of his children whom we have joined in hurting. That has to include the Larry Craigs of the world.
The latest embrace by the Senator from Utah of those he once derided is met with some skepticism.
He has it coming.
So do we.
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“We’ve all got it coming, kid, as Will Munny, noted.
If a correction in moral philosophy is met with accusations of hypocrisy, then we assume there can be no corrections.
Once my mother and my brother decided that I was gay, they both softened their positions. I eventually came out and confessed that I was a closet heterosexual, but the “damage” was done. They had stopped hating homosexuals and there was no turning back.
I found myself wanting to be gay for them. Perhaps I could have been. It was the hair really, more than anything else, I suppose.
As culture evolves lots of bigotry just goes away. We simply stop feeling it and focus our attention on newer prejudices that are less flushed out and more acceptable.
Often we don’t see it coming. We just stop hating some people for who they are. It doesn’t make us hypocrites. I am sure we hate others in their place.
Senator Hatch has the right to be who he is today, and we have no standing to judge the stranger he once was. His high horse is focused on Oliver North one day, the hapless hopmosexual the next. Sometimes he feels agression, others, empathy. Tomorrow, his passions will be focused elsewhere.
Who are we to judge the man he is right now? Senator Hatch of today has no control over the Senator Hatch of yesterday. That person lived in a different time. That person was not finished. As Heraclitus put it, “A man cannot cross the same river twice, because it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.”
I agree that we should generally welcome those who change for the better rather than focus on their past. However, those who hate and use political power to spread that hatred bear additional responsibility. After building a career partly out of such behavior, it is not enough to say that one has changed his mind. He must work to undo the damage that he caused.
Furthermore, condemnation serves a useful purpose whether the condemners are perfect or not. Beyond simply making the condemners feel good, it sends a message to the condemned and to observers that some behavior, attitude, or thought is wrong. If people are on some sort of path to become “finished,” praise and condemnation, like reward and punishment, can assist in the journey, even if they can also be abused. We cannot rely on everyone softening with time or with exposure to the people they hate or with some revelation.
“We just stop hating some people for who they are. It doesn’t make us hypocrites. I am sure we hate others in their place.”
We replace one form of bigotry with another? That may be true of those who only change due to exposure to the people they hate, especially among friends or family. Such people have no guiding principle. But those of us who don’t see a reason to hate others who don’t cause harm are not similarly swept from one form of bigotry to another on the waves of passion. While religion is certainly not the sole source of such hatred in the world, it does help to abandon religions that preach hatred for (or as some might say, “compassionate opposition to”) the non-traditional, the abnormal, or whatever else makes people uncomfortable for no solid reason.