Mark Kenny has an oddly peevish piece in today’s Fairfax papers, headlined ‘Naive campaign against marriage equality plebiscite made some serious miscalculations’.
It fits within a long-standing tradition in which gay people are characterised as infantile, emotional, short-termist, not fully rational — the same treatment accorded to women.
Kenny trots out a very tired set of descriptors. Gay people are naive, unquestioning, gleeful, and unable to assess what’s in our own interests. In need of a sober, rational, white middle-aged middle-class man to explain it all to us.
Despite its obviously self-serving nature – denied publicly but acknowledged privately by senior Labor figures – the opposition’s decision to block the plebiscite, was greeted last Tuesday with universal acclaim by the broad left including the LGBTI community, the ALP’s activist base and that of the Greens.
Mark, sweetie, we fucking know it’s political. We don’t see Labor as our rescuers. We haven’t forgotten how Julia Gillard made exactly the same bargain you describe Turnbull making — trading off support for gay marriage to win the support of her Right wing.
What grates here is the combination of an explanatory tone (“Let’s be clear… What’s more…”) with a fatuous lack of analysis, one that lumps queer people and Labor together as ‘the broad left’ who are in ‘universal acclaim’ of the ALP decision.
Um, have you ever met a lefty, Mark?
The piece excoriates ‘the left’s high-mindedness’ while ignoring the facts of Australian homophobia and transphobia. Kenny dismisses out-of-hand “the inherently unprovable claim that a public plebiscite would unleash a vile tidal-wave such that sexually conflicted and alienated youths would suffer inordinately, and would in some cases take their own lives.” He doubts that “the inevitable discomfort caused by the aforementioned hate-speech would be so profound that it would not be assuaged by the broad condemnation of said hate-speakers by civilised society.”
First of all, all predictions are inherently unprovable at the time they are made. Congratulations, Mark Kenny, you’ve discovered the arrow of time. But you can look at what happened in the past, e.g. the Irish marriage referendum, and connect it up with what we already know about predictors of distress and suicidality. Like I did in this post.
Secondly, to a kid bullied at school using words and phrases taken from the ‘No’ case in a plebiscite — i.e. exactly what is happening to Latinx kids as a result of the Trump campaign — it is no comfort that Turnbull, Shorten and Di Natale take different positions.
Kenny offers a fantasy vision of rational prejudice, where it is possible to calculate whether ‘sexually conflicted and alienated youths’ (what. the. fuck.) suffer inordinately, and to total up the nasty things in one column and the nice things in another and cancel them out to the extent they overlap. (I’m not kidding about this: Kenny refers to it as the ‘balance-of-harm consideration’.) And if people who experience homophobia and transphobia experience more pain and fear than is rational, then we should dismiss that.
To put it mildly, as someone engaged in full-time study of stigma and discrimination, that’s not how this shit works. Vulnerability is not evenly distributed. You can’t average it out across a population and calculate it rationally. People have different life experiences and live in different geographical places, religious communities, remote vs urban settings, etc. These differences pattern their past exposures and sensitivity to discrimination.
We’re not saying every queer kid will be put at risk of suicide: we’re saying we know that some will be. And what Mark Kenny is implicitly arguing is that’s worth trading for same sex marriage. And what the queer community is saying, with near unanimity, is no, we’d rather wait.
Kenny concludes with this: “A lesson for same-sex couples who right now could be further away their goal of legal marriage than they thought a few months back.”
Thanks so much for that, Mark.