Doug PollardFamily Values
November 8th 2009 06:13
image: mypieceoftail
Well, after last week’s column I received a barrage of comment, for most of which, thanks. The rest – you know who you are.
That leaves the one that accused me of fomenting division and discord in the community, rather than working for unity and harmony.
But there is, and never can be, any unity. We’re not a community, with a common heritage, or a common culture, like Italian-Australians, or Greek Australians. We are a disputatious multigenerational family, a squabbling coalition.
Some of us want to get married. Some want to recognise different kinds of marriage. Some of us want to be parents. Some of us reject the whole idea of societally approved relationships.
Some of us wish the homo-oligarchy would shut up about marriage and concentrate on anti-discrimination law. Or hate crime. Or healthcare. Or aged care. Or sex-ed. Or whatever law or structure or system does not yet address our specific needs.
Some of us want to be accepted by our churches, mosques and temples. Some of us want to tear all the temples, mosques and churches down. Some couldn’t care either way.
Some of us are hot to ban hate-speech and hate-crime: others recoil from the totalitarian notion of criminalising thought and won’t have a bar of it. Some say DILLIGAF to politics (Google it).
Most obviously, some of us are men who love men: others, women who love women.
But overall, we are not defined by what we are, so much as by what we are not. The ever-growing acronym – the latest version, from Canada, LGBTTI2Q – is a list of people who are not quite the same as ‘us’, but on the other hand, are more like ‘us’ than ‘them’.
I’m not sure if this (yet) includes MSM – men who have sex with men but don’t identify as gay, and their female counterparts. Or SSA – attracted to the same sex but not necessarily doing anything about it. But the acronymic family keeps growing as we admit more people.
We are diverse, not unified. We are male and female (born & made), old and young, left and right, multi-hued, multi-nationed. We are the non-straight, the sex and gender non-conformists. We are The Different, the Not The Same As You.
We are defined, not by what we are, but why what we’re not. And hence, forever disunited.
But the idea that we should ignore internally divisive issues and push forward only with what we can agree on is a recipe for impotence. We need to think less like a political movement, and more like a family.
We need the attitude that loyalty to our divided squabbling family comes before loyalty to church, employer, state, ethnicity or political party.
We need to say to each other “I disapprove of what you want, but since it’s important to you as a member of this community, I will work with you to help achieve it.”
We need to be like the loving parents who support their son as he studies to become a portrait painter, even though they’d rather he became a lawyer.
In other words, what we need if we are to progress and prosper are good old fashioned family values.
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Comment by Morgan Bell
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ask an Arican American civil rights activist what the spearhead of their campaign should be and you would also get a myriad of responses, African Americans can be conservative or liberal, some embrace the N-word while others seek to stamp it out
what makes us (queer people) a community is that we have an understanding of diversity when it comes to matters of sexuality and gender, its an understanding the average person is not born with and probably not taught so it is unique to have a whole room full of people who have it
gatherings of queer people, and queer venues, are safe spaces for people who are made to feel unwelcome elsewhere, we support each other, we just developed a stronger air of nonchalance and dry humour from all the years of being bullied at school