Brian Vogel: There are a significant set of more radical elements in the gay rights movement [let the pillorying begin] that, in my opinion, set our progress toward equal rights back. They're our community's equivalent of the Fred Phelps-es of the Radical Religious Right.
In any out-group, there are always going to be people whose behavior can be seen as confirming the in-group's prejudicial beliefs about the out-group, and it's "common sense" to think that if they were to "tone down" or eliminate such behavior, it would remove a good deal of the in-group's support for its prejudicial attitudes toward the out-group. But this is one of those cases where some well-established findings from social psychology demonstrate that "common sense" is simply incorrect.
One of the key, and "counterintuitive," findings from the study of prejudice (see, for example, Gordon Allport's The Nature of Prejudice) is that, contrary to naive expectation, prejudicial beliefs are a function of prejudicial attitudes, not the other way around. The prejudiced person will adjust his beliefs to conform to his attitudes, not vice-versa. Allport illustrates this with a (very funny) hypothetical dialog between an anti-semite and a tolerant person. The anti-semite offers his complaint about Jews (e.g. they isolate themselves from the rest of the community and only care about themselves), the tolerant person illustrates how the anti-semite's belief is incorrect (e.g. Jews are extremely active in community organizations), and then the anti-semite offers another complaint which logically contradicts his previous onr (e.g. Jews are trying to mind everybody else's business).
In fact, one of the chief signs that an antipathy toward some group is prejudicial rather than "well-deserved" is that the beliefs that "support" it are contradictory (e.g. gay people are a threat to society because A) everyone is viscerally disgusted by their sexual practices and B) gay sex is so much more pleasurable than straight sex that everyone would turn gay if it weren't forcefully opposed). Thus, strategies that attempt to overcome prejudice by attempting to correct prejudicial beliefs seldom accomplish much. Destroy one myth and another one pops up to take its place (remember the explosion on board the USS Iowa? When the Naval Investigative Service tried to pin the blame on first Kendall Truett and then Clayton Hartwig, what was the primary "evidence" they used to conclude that the two were gay? Reports from other sailors that Truett and Hartwig were not into getting drunk or doing drugs, that's what. The bigot can create the most tortuous double standards imaginable. Also remember Scalia's dissent in Romer, where he argued that the State of Colorado had a legitimate interest in limiting the political voice of gay people because they were more politically active than straight people).
In particular, strategies based on meriting one's way past discrimination (e.g. overcoming an employer's discriminatory hiring policy by being much better qualified than the rest of the applicants) are doomed to failure for the simple reason that invidious discrimination, by its very definitionwithout respect to one's merits.
BTW, probably the second-most counter-intuitive finding from the study of prejudice is that members of groups who are themselves the object of prejudice are not, on average, any less prejudiced than members of the in-group. Black people, for example, are no less homophobic on average than white people in the US, nor are gay people any less racist, on average, then straight people. Both findings make perfect sense if you stop to realize that prejudice is, by definition, an irrational thought process.
Brian: Radicalism must transform into engagement, education, and persuasion by reason and emotion if it is to effect change. If it remains radicalism it's doomed to failure.
The history of social-change movements shows that they require both "militants" and "moderates" to be successful; neither group can accomplish much on its own. The civil-rights movement of the 1960s needed both Malcom X and MLK.
One thing to keep in mind is that, as Philip Slater pointed out in The Pursuit of Loneliness, Americans tend to vastly overrate the effectiveness of dramatic gestures as "solutions" to problems. We often forget that Rosa Parks' decision not to give up her seat wasn't the spontaneous behavior of a rugged individual; it was actually the culmination of a careful deliberative process conducted by a whole group of activists. It was effective only because the groundwork had been laid out in a process that anyone not intimately connected with the cause would have found boring and tedious. And we forget that political campaigns aren't won by candidates making key speeches, but by precinct-level party volunteers doing the grunt work of getting the voters out to the polls (the fact that Maine's gay-rights law was overturned by referendum was largely due to the fact that the anti-repeal forces concentrated their efforts on media visibility, whereas the pro-repeal forces concentrated their efforts on getting the vote out).
But another popular myth is that out-groups have frequently
overcome prejudice and joined the American mainstream through a
process of behavioral assimilation. The problem is that there's no
record of this actually happening. The Irish, for example, did not
achieve mainstream acceptance in the US by cutting down on their
drinking and fighting; they acheived it by virtue of appearing less
"foreign" to WASPs than the Polish and Italian immigrants who
followed them. Obversely, the main reason that the Religious Right
has become so stridently anti-gay is that they've (temporarily) run
out of other enemies.
