Very close friend had his birthday a few days ago, and i was invited for the party. Good fun, and the people who knew me from college got a genuine shock to see me sing and play the guitar. The others just applauded. The trick’s called practise, and well, in to old house (remember that place, defined by just a three digit number?), I had innumerable chances to perfect the four (note, only four) songs that I can do reasonably well, and an audience (albeit reluctant) ….. but that’s another story. Enough of bragging.
This post is on a comment in that party….
In the middle of California, country of free love, there was this question raised within a group of young, knowledgable guys and girls, mostly unknown to each other previously. The topic of discussion was gay marriages and the acceptability of homosexuals in the society. Voices rose, sides were taken and points fought with vigor…. There is this guy i know from college, Beck, stays right next doors to where the party was, the ex-pseudo-rockstar, not given to intelligent conversation…. and he comes up with this sudden bit of clarity…
The question was ‘What will you do if your son turns out to be gay?’
And he replies, ‘I will not shoot him or anything for sure ….. I will be heartbroken and disappointed, yes, but hey, what could I do? I cannot convert him to straight, no? So I willl make do’.
We, straight men, are all homophobic, as an acclaimed blogger had once (yesterday?) put it. And we, as men, will at some level generalise that women are a certain way; and we as Indians, will generalise that the whites, the blacks, the hispanics and the orientals will be a certain way; and if i am a north indian, I will generalise that south indians are a certain way.
And we, as normal human beings, will always have our biases and our prejudices and out own ways of looking at people who look different from us, talk different from us, follow a separate god, or are different in any other way. And that’s what makes us human, and not androids.
We analyse, we think, and we can have viewpoints.
The important point is, our prejudices should not force us to act inhumanly. We humans should first and foremost be creatures of logic. And in personal interaction, not fail to look at an individual objectively, separated from the external images of that individual that we have in our mind, created by our biases.
Our biases should not drive us. Logic should.
I would be shocked if my offspring turns out to be gay. Almost as much as when my mother figures out I drink. Or I have discovered sex.
The problem is decoupling the sense of morality from what we observe.
But that’s the topic of another post.
[...] yet, I bring it back to Beck, who famously said, he would accept his gay child, but note the usage of the words “I will be heartbroken and [...]