House Bill 229, the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, passed in Tennessee by legislaters Dunn and Campfield:
“Human sexuality is a complex subject with societal, scientific, psychological, and historical implications; those implications are best understood by children with sufficient maturity to grasp thier complexity. Notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, no public elementary or middle school shall provide any instruction or material that discusses sexual orientation other than heterosexuality.”
These claims do not necessarilly follow. Perhaps what these bill makers are aware of at some level is if they were to spell out, logically, their decision-making process, it would be riddled with prejudice and irrationality.
While implemented, the bill encourages adolescents, leaving the “child sphere” access to information about heterosexuality, but delaying mention of homosexuality until they are already well into the “adult sphere” of high school. By banishing homosexuality to the later of high school instead of the graspable present-- we are placing a multitude of other implications on the nature of homosexuality.
We all have become unconsciously habitual-ized to the association of the word “adult” with things that are “dirty,” “unknowable,” and unsafe for children. Consider "Adult super stores." They are understood by everyone to be places that sell licentious sex-products and porn videos—we are clued in by the one operating word in this title: “adult.” And just as “adult superstores” are topographically located on the margins of towns, off the side of the interstate, away from homes—we are similarly locating homosexuality as outside day-to-day experience. By now legally casting homosexuality into this category we are perpetuating a fear. A fear of otherness, AIDS, and immorality: a fear that we have created. As Donna Haraway reminds us
“Biological and cultural determinism are both instances misplaced concreteness— i.e. the mistake of, first, taking provisional and local category abstractions… for the world, and second, mistaking potent consequences to be preexisting foundations.” [1]
By marginalizing homosexuality we are producing consequences within the population-- and in turn mistaking these consequences as inherent facts of matter. This is about justice. Heterosexuality isn’t any safer than Homosexuality, yet because we tell kids this is so, than we make it so.
What I am saying here is something most people already know. In fact the objections to be found with this sort of legislation cited above and this sort of thinking in general are so many and so obvious that perhaps many of us get tired of combating the same blindness with what feels like duh- answers. In this grey world moral-ambiguity, this sort of legal decision-making is one of the few things that is so unequivocally wrong. What are the words I am looking for with all of this? Oh, here they are: Fuck this Shit. But, fuck it any way you want.
No comments:
Post a Comment