Reply #30: Enlightenment: Propaganda, Truth, and Basic Principles [View All]

You are not wrong in your analysis of the political situation. You are not wrong in the internal contradictions.

Realize, however, that in your correctness, you are simplifying a complex reality in order to present a clear and convincing argument, with the goal of achieving a specific political aim. With the goal of creating a specific opinion in the mind of your audience. As a civil rights activist with the specific goal of equal rights for gays and lesbians, you may be effective with this approach. You may be one of the more clear-headed propagandists the gay rights movement has had in some time.

Ask yourself if you want to be a propagandist, or if you want to be a truth-teller.

Propaganda is clear in its objectives. It is not necessary that propaganda be false, but it is often necessary - as you have illustrated - that propaganda simplify the truth. Propaganda is not about enlightenment and understanding, it's about getting people to believe what you want them to believe.

Also, consider not just what is right for the moment or for this particular goal, but for your essential principle. If you are ready to go down this path of influencing people, you will be responsible for your own success.

The essential principle behind gay rights, abortion rights, the right to die, and the rights of transgendered people is that individual human beings have sovereignty over their own bodies.

In short, any adult human being has the sole right to determine what is done and what is not done with his or her own body, to the extent that his actions do not restrict the right of determination of another adult human being. Neither society nor the state has a legitimate interest in what one or more adults do with their bodies which supercedes the interest of the individual. Society's interest in propagating itself through childbirth does not supersede the right of a woman to sterilize herself, even though the woman may not have produced children, for example. The interest a family may have in keeping one of its critically ill members alive does not supercede the interest of the critically ill individual in determining the time and manner of his own death.

A citizen's body is his own, to do with as he likes. His dietary habits, his recreational preferences, his sexual and romantic relationships, his risky behaviors, his tattoos and his haircuts are his own.

The state and society have no more of a legitimate interest in stopping a transgendered person from modifying his body to suit his mind than they have in stopping a nontransgendered person from having rhinoplasty or dying his hair, or having surgery to correct a harelip, or refusing to have surgery to correct a harelip.

When an appeal for gay rights stems from this basic political principle, the 'nature' argument becomes irrelevant.

When an appeal for gay rights stems from the inborn nature of homosexuality, what principle is active then? We have the right to be as nature made us. Do we not have the right to be other than what nature made us? Which elements of inborn nature are to be defended as acceptable ways of life, and which aren't?

Without an overall guiding principle to determine that answer, you may end up building an argument you did not intend to build.

Such as, all inborn and natural behaviors are to be defended.

Or, similarly, no inborn and natural behavior should be corrected through medical or psychiatric treatment.

Who decides?

If not the individual, then who?

Who gets to say if a particular human variation, once accepted as natural and inborn rather than acquired, is pathological or benign?

What could go wrong?

These are the kinds of questions that are worth considering when you become not a conveyor of truth, but a sculptor of it.

Incidentally, nature made the transgendered, too. They want what you want, the ability to be as they are, and the right of self determination over their own bodies.

In that, both movements share a common goal.

What makes both movements natural allies is a common opposition. Anti-gay bigotry comes from the same source as transphobia, from an unrealistically rigid concept of gender roles. You transgress expectations through the body of your partner; TGs transgress expectations through their own bodies.

With a clear vision of fundamental principles of human rights, and a sharply focused understanding of the fundamental principle underlying our common opposition, we can make common cause--we being gays and lesbians and bisexuals, we being transgendered people and intersexed people, and for that matter, deaf people, little people, and mobility-disabled people.

Without that clear vision, we work at cross purposes, and the success of one group will come at the expense of another.

Tucker


(I am deeply indebted to UncleSepp for much of this post. He is unable to DU from work, so I asked for him to throw some logic at this thread. All the best points, especially about propaganda, are his, edited only to put it into my voice.)