Date: Mon, 21 Aug 1995 11:59:49 -0500 From: mohr richard d What "Barney Fag" Teaches Us about Prejudice by Richard D. Mohr (February 1995) Between intention and accident falls revelation. On January 27th during a weekly press interview, House majority leader, Dick Armey, referred to Representative Barney Frank as "Barney Fag." Though the F-word hurled at gay men packs the same wallop as the N-word hurled at blacks and the C-word at women, tapes of the interview confirm Armey's claim that his use of the F-word was unintentional. He hadn't planned to use the term of Frank. It wasn't hurled. It slipped out. But Armey's further defense that the use was purely accidental -- "a stumbled word" -- rings false. Both "frank" and "fag" are common one-syllable words and Frank's name is hardly a tongue-twister. As a fall-back, Armey claimed that alliteration made him do it. The slur was neither an intentional action nor an accidental event. It lies between the two, but well within a zone of personal responsibility. Armey is blameworthy -- in a way that is revelatory for understanding how discrimination frequently works. The relevant moral analogy here is to involuntary manslaughter: because you fail to have your brakes checked, you run over a child in a crosswalk; even though you didn't intend to run over the child, the child's death is not a blameless accident; you are responsible for it. By abiding certain moral attitudes, Armey was primed and so responsible for the distinctive moral form his slip took. By substituting "fag" for Frank's name, Armey's slur obliterates Frank's uniqueness and individuality and reduces him to a type, kind, or status, one which the slur presumes is degenerate and loathsome. To be treated in this way -- as less than fully human -- is the heart of what we mean by inequality in America. So Armey's name-slaughter reveals an important moral truth: inequitable treatments can be unintentional. Ill-will and hatred are not the linchpins of discrimination. Discrimination can be more subtle than that. A number of chilling empirical studies show that discrimination against gays frequently occurs independently of ill-will. One study found that heterosexuals unwittingly but literally distance themselves from gays. Without realizing it, heterosexuals in casual interactions stand on average three times farther from a gay person than from each other. Quite apart, then, from any history of intentional discrimination against gays, the existence of anti-gay stereotypes and biases operating as unacknowledged lenses and inclinations in people's moral constitutions makes it hopelessly unlikely that gays are now treated fairly and impartially -- whether by bosses or legislators. Remedies are needed. The presence of unintended prejudice in policy-making means the Supreme Court should be leery of believing that laws which draw distinctions with regard to homosexuality are impartial. As with laws that disfavor blacks, women, and religious groups, laws that burden gays should be viewed by judges as presumptively invalid. Further, people working for gay civil rights legislation need to acknowledge the subtlety of discrimination. In drafting legislation, they should not limit what is to count as discrimination to "smoking gun" cases, cases, that is, where there is a documented record of intentional discrimination. If such legislation is to redress most discrimination, then statistical arguments must be permitted in order to indicate the presence of effective, if unintended, prejudice. More generally, the Armey-Frank affair should teach us that the most important gay issues are those of dignity and individual worth rather than of liberty and opportunity. Note that Armey's statement, though an inequitable treatment of Frank, does not prevent Frank from performing any action nor does it deny him access to any opportunity. Rather it views Frank as scum. When gays are deprived of life and liberty, as in queerbashing and employment discrimination, the deprivations in the main are vehicles for the denial, by proxy, of every gay person's dignity and personhood -- a moral standing which can never legitimately be compromised. This lesson about gay dignity is one that Frank himself might do well to learn from his experience with Armey. During the recent national battle over gays in the military, Frank, in a desperate but ultimately failed attempt to increase gays' liberty a bit, accepted a political "compromise" in which the only thing that was compromised was gays' dignity. At the time, Frank dismissed concerns over dignity as mere worries about "symbolism." Perhaps now he has experienced worse and learned better. -30-