Perspective

21 March, 2010

How a small intolerance exposes a big one.

Columnist Rosemary McLeod has declared herself a homophobe. I have no doubt that she wouldn’t see it that way, but that is exactly what it is.

I refer to her Sunday Star Time article (21 March 2010) where she steps directly into what looks like an orchestrated press campaign about MP, Charles Chauvel’s irritation at a noisy child on a flight between Auckland and Wellington - see Kerre Woodham's effort in the Herald.

Surely we have been exposed to sufficient prejudice and bigotry through years of relative enlightenment to know that the oxygen for this attitude is ignorance and spiteful innuendo. So Rosemary McLeod doesn’t directly say that gays (like Charles Chauvel) are stuffy little nancy boys who are not like us normal people. Gays apparently don’t have a clue what it’s like being a normal hard-working person and the proof is that they prey on innocent little children.

If Rosemary McLeod doesn’t say this directly, she certainly leaves no doubt that that is what she thinks. “I can imagine the theatrically loaded tones in which he told his partner he wished a crying child would shut up. A gay friend of mine would do the same: he has his own outrageous thing about pushchairs in cafes” she asserts. Note the innuendo and quaint righteousness – some of my best friends are gay!

So why does Rosemary McLeod feel so emboldened to "imagine" Charles Chauvel's tone and believe that she can publish what amounts to ‘hate’ without challenge? The justification is that Charles Chauvel is apparently a childless gay man (does she know that or does she imagine it?) and cannot possibly know what it means to have children. That’s why the article is largely devoted to evoking the trials of the embattled mother – “I have had years of sleepless nights, the fears and anxieties, the guilt and the responsibility of trying to produce kids who will survive and even cope in the world, and if you think that’s easy, you’ve never done it. We who have, or have had, screamers on planes can be boring about it, I admit, but we have to be to justify the enormousness of what we’ve done” she writes.

Justification and taking the moral high-ground is the stock-and-trade of orchestrated bigotry. Black people in Mississippi and South Africa were once segregated and even killed because they were not like the clean living and Christian white folk. Rosemary McLeod’s article might have worked in a Mississippi newspaper if the word “gay” had been substituted for “black” and “mother” substituted for “white Christian”.

Of course the irony is that we can all be the victims of ignorance and innuendo, albeit that it’s usually the preserve of an elite or majority group against those who happen to be different or are in the minority. The irony for Rosemary McLeod is that it’s not so long ago that hard working mothers were themselves so easily the victims of ignorance and innuendo. Many small towns, and not so small towns, witnessed the insidious persecution of the newly separated mother. Without a ‘man’ to keep her at home and on the straight-and-narrow, an honourable woman could easily fall fowl of the lace-curtains gossip brigade, simply by talking to another man.

Rosemary McLeod does herself no credit, as a mother, attacking a man simply because he is a high profile politician who happens to be gay. I bet too that she won’t be meeting him for a coffee to ask that he mend his ways when travelling on planes. If the opposite of ignorance and innuendo is understanding and tolerance, perhaps they could learn something from each other?.

 

Footnote: Charles Chauvel has apparently agreed that he may have overreacted on the plane, probably realising that he is attracting an unusual amount of attention because of his high profile as an MP. But in his defence, I happen to be friends with many mothers who might also eventually be irritated by the rantings of a noisy two-year old.