Politics and Easter Eggs

So the Family Pride Coalition is organizing gay parents for a "family visibility action" at the White House Easter Egg Roll. They won't carry signs or shout slogans; they'll wear rainbow-colored leis to identify themselves. All of which sounds like a great idea to me.

Predictably, some people see this as 'politicizing' the event:

"For crying out loud, at the Easter Egg roll? This is a family event," said an exasperated executive director Andrea Lafferty, who called it "very distasteful" and inappropriate to politicize the occasion and to use children to do so.

It's not politicizing the event to say gay parents aren't welcome; it's politicizing the event for them to show up. Right.

But it isn't just them. The whole article, in the way it's framed, buys into the politicization storyline. For that matter, most people (I imagine) would buy it without thinking twice. And that's the problem. For millions of Americans, it's a political act simply to be visible--because it is perceived as political. Which is to say their existence is perceived as political.

(I think it's not easy for us heteros to internalize this. We can talk about our significant others without it being 'political'; we can talk about dates without someone thinking why do they have to rub our noses in it? I've lost count of the well-meaning, relatively tolerant heteros I know who get really uncomfortable with 'flagrant' displays of gay identity.)

And here's the important point: it isn't 'gay activists' who created that perception. Ever since 1977, there has been a concerted, widespread, well-funded effort by the homobigots to politicize sexual orientation. (Yes, homobigotry goes back thousands of years...but the current campaign began in 1977.) Because somewhere along the line, they realized that it's much easier to sustain mass hatred toward gay people if homosexuality is seen as political, as 'controversial', rather than simply human.

So what the Family Pride Coalition is organizing isn't really political at all; in fact, it's anti-political. The point of it is not to politicize but to de-politicize. And that's what makes the homobigots so upset.

[That's all, folks]