How to not be that guy

I was struck by this comment in a Washington Post article on Warren’s gay marriage joke:

“It’s about telling people who don’t agree with you that they are backward by definition,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic strategist who advised Bill Clinton’s presidential reelection campaign. The line was a “stab” to those who don’t agree with her, he said, and “it is a battle cry for men to turn out against Elizabeth Warren.”

I think this is way off base because it completely misunderstands what the culture wars are all about. They were never about belief in God, they were always about identity and bullying.

Lets just take a look at that joke again:

Warren (D-Mass.) responded with a theatrical seriousness. “Well, I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that,” she deadpanned, pausing a beat for the audience to catch the joke. Then she added, “And I’m going to say, ‘Then just marry one woman — I’m cool with that.’”

She finished with a zinger:
“ ‘Assuming you can find one.’ ”

There are people who seriously and sincerely believe that marriage equality is a sin against God etc. They have a bronze age approach to religion in which it is the duty of all to appease the wrathful Gods or they will vent their anger on the whole tribe. And they are a tiny but very vocal portion of the electorate, maybe ten percent at most. And they are the same ten percent that have fixed views on guns and on abortion rights and that a woman’s place is in the kitchen and that Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Communist. And they are not voting for a Democrat and probably not for a Republican either.

Much larger than the people who strut about with pillowcases on their heads or wear swastika armbands are the casual bigots who don’t believe they have an objective scientific justification for their hatred or even a hatred at all. The casual bigot doesn’t hate, they just dislike ‘those people’.

The fear of upsetting the casual bigots is of course the reason that the beswastikered bigots get to rule the roost. Soft bigotry gives power to the hard.

The soft bigot is not driven by hate but by admiration for the exercise of power. They don’t admire Trump because they believe in what he does, they admire him for his ability to do it. And the best way to peel off these soft bigots is to prevent him.

So the gay marriage quip plays out very differently to the way that th journalists imagine because they are focused on the wrong group. They imagine the bigots to be a homogenous group of hatemongers whose manhood is threatened by the joke. What they do not see is that the joke divides the soft bigots from the hard with a jibe directed at the latter.

This is the reason that opposition to marriage equality collapsed so fast and so far. There is a majority for marriage equality in every age group. And what the quip is doing is stealing the Republicans’ clothes because the heart of the joke is what used to be Reagan’s theme; get the government out of our lives.

Very few men are going to hear the quip and feel threatened. Almost all are going to hear it and smirk because they don’t see themselves as one of the targets. In fact they will define themselves as ‘not that guy’ even though they might well have been before they heard it.

And that is how humor shifts public opinion. Millions of casual, unthinking bigots decide to ‘not be that guy’ and forget they ever were.