Tomorrow is (inter)national coming out day.
I strongly believe that coming out – if you can do so safely – is both personally and ethically imperative. The personal imperative behind coming out is to live ones life in the light rather than in the closet. As LGBT writers and activists have made clear, living life in the closet, though it may be a necessary survival strategy, has extremely perverse effects. The Wikipedia article notes that reasons not to come out include (a) societal homophobia and heterosexism, which marginalize and disadvantage LGBT people as a group, resulting in potential negative social, legal, and economic consequences such as disputes with family and peers, job discrimination, financial losses, violence, blackmail, legal actions, restrictions on having or adopting children, criminalization, or in some countries even capital punishment as well as (b) internal conflicts involving religious beliefs, upbringing, and internalized homophobia in addition to feelings of fear and isolation. Coming out of the closet has even been shown by researchers in Montreal to have significant positive effects on health.
As an ethical matter, one should come out – in Western democracies at least – because the right to do so has been hard-won, and because doing so makes it harder to discriminate against ones community. It encourages others to follow in ones own footsteps, diminishing the personal cost to them of living their life in the light. It also avoids the risk of being blackmailed when ones sexual orientation inadvertently comes to light, and of living ones life in fear. For persons in the public eye this is particularly important.
The Montreal study cited above also contains the interesting observation that “contrary to our expectations, gay and bisexual men had lower depressive symptoms and allostatic load levels than heterosexual men.” (emphasis added)
This may well have been contrary to the researchers’ expectations, but it perfectly coincides with mine. We heterosexuals live our lives in the closet in numerous ways, including but not limited to the sexual. For my part, I can share that I am “monogamish” (that is, de facto socially but not sexually monogamous) and to some degree heteroflexible. In both regards (social monogamy merely being a choice of lifestyle and not an orientation), it is my belief and current understanding, as frequently argued on this blog, that I merely represent what a typical male of our species would be if social restrictions on these ways of thinking and being were removed.
Since I therefore belong to the entitled majority – albeit that majority may beg to differ – it shouldn’t be too difficult to out myself as a member of it. But it is non-trivial all the same. First I had to understand these facts about myself and accept them, which has taken half a lifetime (on an optimistic reckoning: and there may well be more I do not yet know) and then I, just like my LGBT brothers and sisters, have still needed to look societal prejudice in the eye (as well as consider the interests of my family) and say: tough, this is me (and by the way, it’s quite likely to be you too). Like I say, I don’t consider this act by a typical member of the entitled majority particularly brave. I think if I could not say these facts about myself publicly, I would be an outrageous wimp and betray generations of civil rights activists who have fought for the freedoms I now take for granted. I would be free-riding, and possibly living on borrowed time, instead of making my own contribution to a better, more tolerant and loving future for all of humanity. The ethical imperative is so overwhelming it is the greatest no-brainer I know of.
Today I read – I believe it was in Flemish daily Het Nieuwsblad, though I haven’t found a link to the article – that new rules requiring telecoms operators to log internet use are likely shortly to become law in Belgium. According to the article, these rules go beyond a European guideline of 2006, and it has been argued by police and judicial authorities that they need to do so in order to keep up with technological developments and stay ahead of criminals using new technology to dissimulate their plans. The article didn’t talk about civil right safeguards or give much detail on the specific arguments behind the plans. Although I certainly start from a position of caution regarding limitations on freedom, I don’t want to judge these plans here, and certainly not on the basis of that one article. But what does seem to be the case is that the space for freedom of expression which the internet has opened over the last decade and a half is starting, globally, to become a little less private than we thought it was. And this means, the closet is being busted into. Aside from the benefits of coming out, the closet is no longer a safe place to stay.
In the space of only a few years, we have become used to a freedom we never before imagined. The internet has been so tremendously successful as a social platform because it addresses basic human needs to communicate and build community. But long before the state surveillance angle became a topic of discussion, it was already clear that the explosion in the social use of the internet and in self-publishing meant that society was faced with a choice between one of two paths: either to embrace greater tolerance and diversity or to foster an environment in which everyone was enabled and hence driven to share, but nervously required, like in the communist societies of the past (and many of course still today), to look over their shoulder at the possible worst-case social consequences of their sharing.
As time has gone on, this social choice has become more and more stark. It is now certain that both governments and major corporations have the means to put together a very detailed picture of any internet user, even the more careful – their political and religious views, sexual orientation, fantasies and paraphilia, their friends and family, socioeconomic status, and a host of consumption preferences. To some extent the use of this information is constrained by the law: currently insufficiently, but conceivably and hopefully more robust legal safeguards will be put in place. Jurisdictions with stronger rules on online privacy may find themselves at a competitive advantage to host social internet services. Strong encryption systems and distributed peer-to-peer application topologies may wrest a certain level of control back for the user.
But I suspect it will always remain an uphill battle. And the consequence of this is that anything about which you may feel personal shame, or which may be societally disapproved of, always may come to light. Unless, that is, you bury it deeper than your relationship to it may make possible.
This in turn means that a host of situations in which collectively vast numbers of people are implicated and which today exist in a tolerated, if sometimes disapproved of, grey area, may tomorrow have to choose if they are black or white. Legal norms against widespread practices are routinely subject to a degree of latitude in their implementation. But if, tomorrow, we cannot leave this equilibrium untouched, we will have to legislate more sensibly and with considerably more regard for the facts relative to populist sentiment. Not only legislation, though, will have to change merely to maintain the status quo: ultimately, it is societal attitudes which will have to become considerably more accommodating if we are not to find the space for freedom and diversity shrinking intolerably and ourselves facing the prospect of a totalitarian control of society which formerly could only be imagined as the grimmest of science fiction.
I want our societies to be safe, and I want us to stay ahead of terrorist and criminal threats. This is not only a legitimate role of government, but one of its basic functions. Both sensationalist reaction and counterreaction are dangerous, and must make way for serious and informed debate. At the same time, democratic controls over the use of personal data by governments and corporations must be put in place and procedural safeguards made robust.
I also value the ease with which the internet makes information available and allows us all to grow in our knowledge of the world and of each other. The benefit to all of humanity of this must far outweigh the danger which this same fact poses in relation to persons with malicious intent.
Ultimately, we are only going to get this balance right if, collectively, we all grow up. In the internet age, every civil rights issue you ever heard of has merged with a host more of which you have not. We are all interdependent and the freedoms of all depend on the freedoms of each. I feel very close to the LGBT community, as I do to feminist thought and anti-racist campaigners. Ultimately, all of these have a single message: my right to be me. Society, whether through government or private initiative, has a right to limit self-expression only when there is an overwhelming, objective need to do so – not just out of political expediency in response to populist sentiment. This basic unifying principle must be placed at the heart of democratic institutions and of the law and replace the partial protections of the past – based on sexual orientation, race, gender, disability or religion – with a full protection of the human being as such. It must be constitutionally guaranteed.
Religion is the best example of what I am talking about, because unlike all of the other attributes it is not objective : I can change my religion in a way I cannot change my race, gender or sexual orientation. In fact I personally have done so more than once in my life, and am still not too sure what term to apply.
Although religion is not an objective attribute, the protection of religious minorities in fact antedates by far the protection accorded to any of the other categories. This is the consequence of one simple fact: the murderous wars of religion and the eventual realization, first tentatively recognized in 1598 by the Edict of Nantes, that it was only if the mutual right to exist was guaranteed by law that sectarian strife could be brought under control and stable, prosperous societies emerge (“Pour ne laisser aucune occasion de troubles et differendz entre noz subjectz, [nous, i.e. the King] avons permis et permettons à ceulx de ladite Religion pretendue reformée vivre et demourer par toutes les villes et lieux de cestuy nostre royaume et pays de nostre obeïssance sans estre enquis, vexez, molestez ny adstrainctz à faire chose pour le faict de la religion contre leur conscience, ne pour raison d’icelle estre recherchez ez maisons et lieux où ilz voudront habiter“).
Yet although religious rights antedate other minority rights by a substantial margin, it is not very clear – any more – what a religion is. Is there a positive list or can anyone found one? In the latter case, is there a presumption of legality, or a process to become included in the positive list? When religions fracture, do all groups acquire the rights of the parent religion, or do some have to reapply? What rights apply to individuals, and which to the religion as such? Do some religions have a more restrictive set of rights than others? What is a critical set of beliefs (or number of adherents) which sets a “religion” apart from a simple philosophical worldview? And so on.
I am sorry if this sounds ill-informed about the jurisprudence on this topic: it certainly is. But the point is that religion, if it ever was a simple matter, is so no longer. The reality is that each of us, today, is free to make up his own religion, and many of us actually do (if you want to try, Daniele Bolelli has even written a “how-to book without instructions“).
In the past, religion involved a choice between a very limited number of options and religions as such could have rights, not just individuals qua members of that religion. Now, many people espouse a religious identity with no audit trail of “membership”, chop and change, may differ widely in beliefs from any sanctioned mainstream dogma, and some religions (such as, to its credit, Islam) never had a single voice of authority in the first place.
Under these circumstances, religious rights cannot mean what they meant in the past – they must extend to the right to live ones life in any way one personally finds meaningful and which is not demonstrably and significantly dangerous to the rest of society or to vulnerable groups (like children) within it, whose constitutional rights may override religious ones. The rest of society may not like a particular worldview, agree with it or (even more likely) for that matter understand it: if it is my own, ever-changing worldview then the latter is certainly the case (not even I could tell you exactly what it is today but it certainly differs from what it will be tomorrow). But my right to hold it must be at least as sacred as the rights of Quakers, or Baha’i, Sufis or whomever. I should not have to seek sanctuary within any of these groups if I do not wish. As I argued in a recent post, true spirituality is creative and actually requires me to be different from anyone else – I cannot follow a dogma.
The internet age demands extraordinary efforts of adaptation on the part of society, but we have the resources we need, in the form of long-cherished principles of political liberalism, to seize this opportunity to build a stronger, better and more inclusive world. By standing up for who we are and what we believe, placing ourselves proudly within the illustrious heritage of all those courageous predecessors, each of us brings that world a little closer.