The Wrong Side Of History
If North Carolina saw this picture, Amendment 1 wouldn't have passed.
As both a history buff and a big fan of worrying about
totally pointless things, I spent a lot of time in high school worrying about
just how big of an asshole I would’ve been if I’d been alive in another time
period.
For example, I’ve never really given Thomas Jefferson a pass
for owning (and fucking) slaves while simultaneously penning the ‘all men are
created equal’ parts of the Declaration of Independence. A lot of people in my
AP US History class in high school argued that he was alive during a different
time, and his actions were reflective of a society that erroneously believed
that black people weren’t people, just like how nowadays we erroneously believe
that Kim Kardashian is newsworthy.
I always felt like that was sort of a cop out, though –
there was an abolitionist movement at the time and all of the other founding
fathers eventually freed their slaves, so clearly some people were feeling guilty about the whole deal, but there’s
Thomas Jefferson, one of the architects of freedom and democracy, basically
acting out the lyrics of Brown Sugar until his last dying breath.
What I think is that he knew, on some level, that slavery
was bad news, but that it was such an inconvenient truth that he kept it buried
and tried not to think about it that hard, seeing as slavery was making him and
his friends very rich. In the end, Jefferson had the good fortune to die long
before it became clear that he was on the wrong side of history.
That’s the thing that I worried about – The Wrong Side Of History.
I like to think of myself as a pretty open minded guy – a 21st
century liberal looking back and condemning a couple centuries of America’s
truly impressive prejudice – but there was always that voice in the back of my
head:
Get off your high horse, asshole. The
rude voice would say. If you were born and raised in a time where
everyone you knew took some grave social injustice for granted and only an
entrenched minority opposed it, you’d probably go right along with the flow.
Remember how stoked you were for Snakes on a Plane?
I mean, it’s a valid thing to ask – if, say, I grew up in an
upper middle class white family in the Deep South in the 1960s, would I just be
cool with racism, or do I, Truman Capps, have some sort of superior ethics
hardwired into my DNA that would make me realize the injustice of it all
regardless of what society thought?
I’d really like to think that I’d recognize the evil of discrimination
and post lots of Martin Luther King Jr. quotes on Facebook or whatever the hell
people did back then, but if I’d grown up in a loving family where the Civil
Rights Movement was looked on as a bunch of rabble rousing and I had no
interactions with black people to teach me otherwise, I can see how easy it’d
be to go with the flow and wind up on the wrong side of history.
Now, I don’t want to draw too many parallels between the
Civil Rights Movement and gay rights today, because there’s a lot of
differences between a thoroughly disenfranchised minority group descended from slaves
struggling against a violent establishment for the basic rights to life and
Neil Patrick Harris having to go to New York to get married, save for the fact
that both are shitty things America has done to people who should’ve been
treated as equals.
That being said, I think the gay rights movement now is
certainly the closest we’ve been to that sort of upheaval in some time. Unlike
abortion, which is going to divide America forever, public support for gay
marriage has been steadily growing, and I predict that those of you who have
children will one day tell them about when gay rights had to be fought for and
weren’t just taken for granted - sort of a How I Met Your Other
Mother situation, if you will.
I mean, people at my high school were publicly saying things
about gay people that you wouldn’t say now. During a class debate, one of my
teachers pointed out that if we legalized gay marriage, next we’d have to let
people marry their dogs. When Measure 36, Oregon’s equivalent of North Carolina’s
bullshit, was up to a vote in 2004, a girl in one of my classes blurted out,
”Gayness is wrong!” when the teacher
called her name during roll call, and most of the class was fine with it.
Hell, one of the most popular people at my high school was
openly gay, and his best friend was a conservative Christian girl who I watched
argue against gay marriage right in front of him, talking
about how it was against God’s will or some bullshit like that.*
*Gay marriage is as much against God’s will as wearing a
polycarbon shirt. Leviticus 19:19.
That sort of bigotry is becoming increasingly taboo outside
the Bible Belt. Alternative lifestyles are moving closer to the mainstream,
thanks to Lady Gaga, Glee, and It Gets Better, among others.
I’m not 100% clean, either – the word ‘fag’ gets
bandied around a couple times in Writers, which, while far
from a massive affront to the gay community, is still considerably less
acceptable now than it was when we wrote and shot the show four years ago. At
the time, we didn’t think twice about having Mike call me ‘faggotpants’ in an
episode; now, although I may be overly sensitive, I don’t know if I’d write
that line again. Yep, 2008 was a simpler time…
So yeah, what happened in North Carolina makes me mad, and
what President Obama said made me happy, and the Republican response made me
mad again, but in the end I’m smiling, because I know how all this is going to
end.
I try with limited success to present my political opinions
as just that – opinions. I can understand why some of my friends will vote for
Mitt Romney or post Tea Party images on Facebook, and I they’re not necessarily
any more right or wrong than I am for feeling the way they do. But gay marriage
is different.
If you’re opposed to gay marriage, you’re wrong.
You’re on the wrong side of history. You may disagree with
me, but in 15 or 20 years you’ll know that we were right about this thing and
you were wrong. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It doesn’t mean you’re
stupid. It does mean you might be a little sheepish about admitting your
support for a number of contemporary politicians and public figures in your
later years.*
*If this offends you, feel free to shoot me a Facebook
message. I’d really like to discuss this with you in a rational, profanity free
manner.
Rick Santorum will be the new Strom Thurmond, while the rest
of the GOP will, in the coming years, tone down their anti-gay rhetoric and
pretend it never happened, just like they do with literally everything else.
The next generation is going to be shocked that Rick Perry could ever be a
contender for the presidency after releasing a commercial where he says that
gays serving openly in the military is destroying America.
”It was a different time,” we’ll explain.
”His actions were reflective of a society that erroneously believed
that homosexuality was an unhealthy lifestyle choice. People weren’t too bright
back then – Truman Capps’ blog was getting, like, over 100 hits a day at the
time…
Truman Capps wasn’t kidding – he’s seriously
topping 100 hits a day.