Here’s Janice Shaw Crouse at the CPAC Conference. She’s obviously thinks someone is threatening the family. Based on her prior work, I think she’s talking about us.
Small problem: A gay couple with kids could agree with just about everything she’s said.
Big problem: Janice doesn’t realize that.
Let’s check this out:
✓ Family is the glue that holds society together? Yes.
✓ Family is more than just a group of people living together? Absolutely.
✓ Children need authentic moral absolutes? Of course.
✓ When truth is not upheld, lies and distortion take their place? That’s the great struggle.
✓ Mao and Hitler? I cringe at the rhetorical overload — but the idea that children raised without morals will create an amoral society? You bet.
Janice can’t seem to realize that conservative Christians don’t own these beliefs. She’s a tragic case of conservative Christian privilege. She assumes if we don’t share every particular of her moral code, we must be against morality all together. If we don’t fit her definition of a traditional family, we’re not a family at all. We’re nothing more than a group of people.
I have to wonder about the reasoning behind that. Does she think that gays can’t love their kids (what a bigot that would make her). Or that adoptive children aren’t really part of a family (what a monster that would make her). What makes our families not families?
Here’s where I run into trouble. I don’t want to think she’s a monster. The only alternative, though, is that she’s profoundly ignorant of gay people. But when I think of her on this crusade, earning a living as a professional conservative, I realize that if she’s ignorant after all this time, she must be deliberately ignorant. That seems impossible. Perhaps she needs to be ignorant. Perhaps she just doesn’t care.
I’ve rewritten that above paragraph over and over. I’m trying to transition into a great rhetorical wrap-up, but I can’t make it work. I don’t want to think she’s a monster. I didn’t start out this post thinking she was a monster. My original title for this entry was a snarky, Look, Lady, We’re Not From Mars, but at this point I can’t be light-hearted about it. We all have blind spots. We all have dark corners of ignorance and bile. But we don’t all go on lecture tours and write columns and make money by crusading against innocent families. There’s something inside her that keeps her from seeing us as fully human, that forces her to think we don’t know what families are and can’t possibly be part of one — can’t possibly be more than a group of people.
The harder I think about it, the more horrifying it feels.
Anyway, here’s that rhetorical flourish I was trying to build up to. I never did work up a smooth transition. It’s what I wish I could tell Janice, if only I had the confidence she could hear it:
Gays weren’t hatched from eggs and raised in a lab. We come from families, just like you do.
We know what families are, just like you do.
And that’s why we want them, just like you do.
Thank you so much for posting and keeping watch of the crazies. I am currently going to a very religious school where when it comes to the marriage and family debate only one side is spoken of: gays are rebels before God. You’re one of the few strands of sanity that I have these days! Thanks again! I’ve become an avid reader of your posts!
Rob,
Your empathy and compassion are commendable, but she is either a monster, or completely brainwashed by conservative evangelicals.
-jeff
No, she’s not a monster.
She’s simply an asshole.
I find it interesting that she uses the Nazis as an example of an amoral society, given that the Nazis were a very conservative party who placed huge importance in the value of the “pure” family.
I don’t mind ignorance – there are things we are all uninformed about – but WILLFUL ignorance – the refusal to educate oneself and to think beyond one’s limits – is unacceptable.
I’m going to echo what Alex said about the Nazis. As a Holocaust scholar, I’ve been confronted, again and again, with the fact that the Nazis considered themselves “pro-family.” Their behavior was (initially) motivated by a desire to “regain” whatever moral center they felt had been lost in order to reestablish Germany as a strong, safe, and industrious nation. A LOT of the rhetoric I hear coming from the far right (and, really, the not-so-far right) smacks of the rhetoric the Nazis used in the early to mid-30s. Vigilance is required, People; don’t think it can’t happen again.
Just so you know, our state House defeated two bills this week – one to overturn our 6 week old gay marriage law (that was killed by a vote of 210-109) and one to narrowly define marriage as man-woman (that one tanked by a vote of 201-135). A week or so earlier, the Judiciary Committee refused to consider a measure that would kill gay marriage and one that would put the matter on the November ballot here. You can be damned sure I’m going to find out how MY representative voted, but I’m very proud of my state government in general right now.
Everytime one of these assholes uses the term “Nazi”, they need to take a good, long hard look in the mirror. The evils that are rampant in society today, are the ignorant attitudes of people like Janice Shaw. They are a cancer on humanity, society and freedom everywhere.
Wow, pretty good rhetorical flourish after all. Sums it up quite nicely, too – and with style.
I think they /do/ willfully stay ignorant. and push it away, and lie to themselves, and make excuses for their cause. having been taught that bible is absolute, some christians will do anything to be sure that their perception of the world around them is absolute. If what she’s seeing of gays doesn’t match the “gays are an unnatural abomination” mentality, and the only thing that MAY NOT CHANGE is the biblical truth, then the one right in front of her has to somehow skew in order to keep the biblical view firm.
at least, that’s my perception. I used to do just that, described above, and now I’m pansexual and am making editorial illustrations for gay rights.