Human Rights Campaign, the Discourse of Equality, and the Joker

Although I don't pay much attention to the same-sex marriage movement as well as its related equal rights movement for the LGBT community, it's almost impossible to avoid these things in our society. There are two facets of the complementary movements that I've noticed that I would like to comment on: 1) its discourse that capitalizes on the ambiguity of key words; and 2) its values that supervene upon this ambiguity.

As with all discourse, there are key words and phrases that set the same-sex equality movement discourse apart from others. One can see these phrases collected or implied on the Human Rights Campaign website, for example, or in their nearly-ubiquitous equal sign logo. This list could go on, but here are some that come off the top of my mind: same, sex, movement, equality (and equal), right(s), human, marriage, love, partners, gays (and variants), choice, freedom, self-determination, tolerance, acceptance, advocate, attraction. These are the positive words, but there are also negative words, such as homophobia, bigot (and variants), fag, queer, unnatural, Bible, intolerant, un-accepting, religion, dogmatic, judgmental, and other vulgar or graphic terms.

Interestingly, when one looks at the broadest of these key terms, the discourse under examination becomes almost indistinguishable from other discourses of a similar kind, such as the pro-choice movement, libertarian thought, modern political liberalism/progressivism, secular advocacy, the advocacy of scientism, etc. These are worldviews similar to what Husserl called the Lebenswelt. They are discourses that collectively organize the perception and appropriation of reality in a way that "makes sense" or that attempts to minimize cognitive dissonance, such as the reality of physical and genetic difference between male and female species, the reality of death, or, above all, the reality of God.

But if these broad key words are shared, then there is a foundational post-Enlightenment political-philosophical discourse that roots those words and makes sense of them; we could call it a "cenoscopic discourse" that gives birth to particular discourses. And these key words are necessarily ambiguous. For example, what is meant by same/equality? The answer is self-evident to a person who unquestioningly subscribes to the discourse. Its answer is as natural as a fish in water, but notice that in order to answer the question, such a subscriber will consult other key words within the same discourse. The web of key words is thus self-reinforced, hearkening back to Descartes' important contribution to the modern mind: self-produced certitude and all the solipsism that follows from that, culminating in Bertrand Russell's own admission of solipsism: "We can witness [only] what goes on in our heads, and [not] anything else at all" (1959: 26). It is literally impossible to think outside the box of a discourse without awareness and external light leading to Lonerganian insight.

The questioning may continue: what does love mean? In what way can one love be "equal" to another? Who/what adjudicates the validity or equality of any love? Why isn't the desire that leads to rape or pedophilia equal to the love that leads to same-sex or heterosexual relationships? Of course, such a question will cause a knee-jerk negative reaction, culminating in accusations of intolerance, judgmentalism, dogmatism, and bigotry. The reason is that even though the question does not declare any explicit judgment, it implies certain judgments that are contrary to the same-sex discourse. These judgments, one could say, are alien, are analogically homophobic to the homo-accepting Lebenswelt, and hence such judgments are seen as a threat. In fact, everyone understands at least implicitly that to frame a question in a certain way requires firstly a certain way of looking at things, because the frame implies the framer and vice versa; this is the possibility for rhetorical and loaded questioning. Discourse is a frame. The question reveals the frame just as the frame of a picture gives finality to the picture itself. A picture without frames, without borders, becomes indistinguishable from the Real.

These questions, however, reveal the ambiguity of the same-sex discourse and its key words. It reveals that such words are not simply used analogically but ambiguously or even worse, equivocally (perhaps because its users are nominalists). And the discourse and all related discourses rely absolutely upon such ambiguity. It is imperative that no one knows what love is, what "nature" is, what it exactly is that one "chooses" or "self-determines" but simply that one has "choice." It is like the anarchic Joker from Nolan's The Dark Knight, who says, "Do I look like a guy with a plan? [...] I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just do things." Oddly enough, the Joker's own discourse falls right into the modern political-philosophical discourse that I've been describing thus far. It is essential to the project (or "plan" or "scheme") that human rights remain floating values that one can pick and choose like apples from a tree, the tree being...what? And who planted it?

If love is an empty placeholder, then why not call it "equal" as well? If sex/gender are indistinguishable, then what is marriage? Yes, the destruction of distinctions leads inevitably to a discourse of "tolerance," which is impossible on its own terms. The discourse of tolerance, as is any discourse by its very terms, is intolerant of other discourses. A discourse, to be distinguishable from other discourses, must be intolerant in its foundation.

Yet again, discourses can be either ideoscopic or cenoscopic, particular or general, but that is another topic.