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We got home pretty early from Jiu-Jitsu class last night and so TheBoyfriend™ flipped on the TV. Apparently Morgan Spurlock (creator of Super Size Me), has now created a TV show called 30 Days, in which a participant spends 30 days living immersed in a situation that runs counter to their normal life and/or beliefs (ie. Football player in a wheelchair, an avid hunter living with a vegan PeTA member, etc.). Well last night, they had a 41 year old Mormon housewife, who was opposed to gay and lesbian adoption, live for 30 days with a gay male couple and their four adopted children.
This isn’t a post to unravel her arguments against gay and lesbian adoptions in part because she gave none in any of the footage they aired (from what they showed she either got angry and stormed off, started crying, or both, every time someone asked her to defend her position). Something else stood out to me as I watched. She seemed genuinely surprised that gay-headed families would be upset that she wanted to take their kids away. The clip below is the first time she mentions it, while attending a picnic for lesbian mothers and their children, but she mentions it else where (and with more apparent sincerity) several times through out the rest of the show.
Shortly after that clip ended she asked the camera, tears streaming down her mascara-stained face, “Why do they have to take it so personally?” And that bewilders me. We know from the beginning of the episode that she has two adopted children of her own. If someone marched into her home and declared themselves an advocate of having her children taken from their home and her family left in pieces, would she not take that personally as well? Yet, I think the inability to walk a mile in another’s shoes is the reason (or defense mechanism by which) opponents of gay and lesbian adoption (or marriage equality for that matter), are able to say (and often sincerely believe) that there is no “hate” in their position. For them, “losing” means no change in their daily lives. They may not like it much, but without a change to their lives, the soreness of not being on the “winning” side will wear off and they’ll mostly forget all about it. It’s just an “issue” not all that different from deciding whether the state cat will be a Siamese or a Persian; sure you might have a preference but is it really that big of a deal if you don’t get your way? For many of them, as appears to be the case with the woman in this episode, they’ve managed to convince themselves that it is more or less the same for folks on the other side of the argument.
But it’s not. Gay people (and their allies) are not fighting to “win” and they’re not fighting to be “right.” They are fighting because their families are in danger, and not in the nebulous vague “gay people are going to destroy marriage” way, but in the very real and concrete “I don’t want social services knocking on my door to take my children from our home and toss them into foster care” way. They’re fighting, first for the very right to even have a family, and secondly for the right to protect that family. If they lose, it’s not a simple matter of “aw shucks, better luck next time,” but rather a devastating blow to nearly every aspect of their lives. In the case of gay adoptions, the hardest hit victims are often the children, who are being torn away from everything they know and love; something that can truly have a permanent negative impact on the child’s life.
As an aside, I have a few issues with this particular episode of the show. If an adult sharp-shooter wants to invite an adult gun control advocate into his house for 30 days, it’s one thing, but in this case I don’t think the situation was very fair to the children. Children of gay couples are exposed to people like the woman in the show, who think the very existence of these kids’ families is wrong, out in the “real world.” Home should be a place where they are safe from that kind of thing.
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June 25th, 2008 at 2:18 pmKipEsquire says:
I wonder what my 30 days of hell would be?
Probably being trapped with Mac users…
…or American Idol fans.
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June 25th, 2008 at 5:23 pmAngel Smith says:
Hi! I just found our blogs on CNN via Sphere, yay!
Anyway, I think that people who oppose gay people having the same rights as straight people have conditioned themselves to see gays as less than human. They will deny it, but if you look historically at any one segment who contends that another isn’t privy to the same rights, (the South with the Slaves, the Nazis with the Jews, the American settlers with the Native Americans, even Men with Women until the Suffrage movement’s success), the common thread seems to be a lack of ability to empathize with the other.
I just completed an American Government class and I had to research and deliver a presentation on gay rights. In my research, I found shameful discrimination based solely on sexual orientation. The most memorable case was a father who had spent 8 years in prison for murdering his first wife being awarded custody of his child based on the single fact that the child’s mother was a lesbian.
The bottom line is that we are all just people. We have different cultures, different religions, different lifestyles, different languages, different appearances, but we are all just people.
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June 26th, 2008 at 10:39 amSouthern Beale says:
I loved 30 Days. Last season was the first season, and the very first episode was Spurlock and his girlfriend trying to live on minimum wage. Forget it! They lived in a dump, furnished with freebies from a church charity, and ate a ton of white rice. She worked in a coffee house, and he eventually got a job as a landscaper, which I think actually paid a little more than minimum wage but wasn’t enough to make ends meet. Then he got injured on the job and had to go to the ER. Well, the budget was completely shot from there.
Anyway, I think programs like this are a wonderful way of starting a dialogue. But I really have to wonder at the Mormon mom who asked “Why do they have to take it so personally?” Was this before or after her 30 days with the gay family? (I didn’t watch the clip, sorry). In my own idealistic naive way, I think a bit of exposure to those who are different from us can be transformative. Maybe in her case it was not. I do know that there are a lot of conservatives, Evangelicals, Mormons, etc. who have gay family members and therefore do not hold the same anti-gay beliefs as others. I don’t know if you ever watch Current TV but just this week I saw a “pod” about a young gay man coming out to his Mormon parents–and the dad was a Bishop in the church. They were as loving and accepting of their gay son as anyone could hope to be.
Anyway, this country has a long and shameful history of bigotry against all sorts of citizens, not just African Americans. In the early 1950s anti-Semitism was codified in all sorts of places: no Jews allowed in certain hotels, jobs, etc. This was years after the Holocaust when you’d think attitudes would have been softened. In Northern California the Chinese were treated horribly, denied basic rights like earning a living as shrimpers and fishermen, told where to live, etc.
But justice comes around eventually to everyone. I have no doubt that GLBT folks will get theirs in time. Some day we’ll look back on all this hooha about marriage and adoption and wonder how we could have been so stupid.
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July 1st, 2008 at 11:52 amdolphin says:
It was several times during her 30 days, including at least once towards the very end. I think spending time with them and others had begun to soften, if not change, her opinions, but then toward the very end she met the biological family of one of the children. Whereas everyone else she’d met in her 30 days was very polite when voicing their disagreement with her, this family was a bit more hostile, and I think that allowed her to feel like a victim and hide behind that instead of facing what the rest of her experience had taught her.