In defeat of HERO, civil discourse also lost
Shortly after Houstonians rejected Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), a map surfaced on Google revealing the proposition’s fate in each of the town’s precincts. It’s a fascinating graphic, not least because it reveals how big Houston is — 627 square miles and counting, Google tells me. But beyond the city’s bigness, the map is most remarkable for throwing in stark relief its deep political division. Districts dyed magenta and violet, corresponding with high pro-HERO percentages, cluster around the inner Loop, and are swallowed by a sea of suburban saffron, signifying districts whose voters opposed the ordinance two-to-one. The impression is meteorologic: a hurricane hovering over the city, which is a bit what last week’s vote felt like — capricious, blustery, foul, a spectacle for the nation’s onlookers. The map is a satellite image of our tempestuous political weather; a high-water mark for civic divide.
Locating my own precinct, safely ensconced in blue (over 50 percent pro), buffered by zone of purple (over 60 percent pro), it was hard to shake the notion that the barbarians are at the gates; that beyond the pale lies territory befitting Hemingway’s dig about his hometown: a place of broad lawns and narrow minds. This, of course, is too facile; and more to the point, unfair. But the impulse to demonize the opposition, to don the mantle of righteousness and bask in history’s assured vindication, is as widespread now as ever. It’s hard to say why this is. But what does seem certain is that everyone seems more certain — of themselves, their convictions, their causes; most of all, of the other’s villainy.
‘Othering’ may be at work
On Facebook, a friend writes that throughout history, the “other” has been painted as a suspect, a deviant, a threat. I don’t doubt this, and know how my own Irish forbears were disparaged as libidinous reprobates. Still, I wonder if there isn’t some “othering” at work in the opposite direction. It’s one thing to disagree with your opponent, to point out the fallacies of his position. But to cast him as a bigot, to write him off as retrograde, hypocrite, hateful: This tactic is of a different sort. The implication here — the adversary’s unworthiness of civil engagement — seems not only destined for political failure; it seems to betray a lack of imagination. A closed mind is not an evil mind. And to change a mind requires more than shouting down injustice, however satisfying shouting may be.
If it isn’t obvious from the foregoing, let me be blunt: My sympathies lie with HERO. I understand the arguments against it: its redundancy, the impropriety of legislation as symbolic gesture, the bureaucratic meddling of an inspector general with the latitude to investigate discrimination. And yet in Texas, it remains legal to fire someone because of whom they love, or to deny service to someone because of their gender affiliation. This meddling, with a group beleaguered by longstanding oppression, seems more pernicious than a bureaucrat vested with the power to fine. As for symbolic gestures, repealing the ordinance was as symbolic as its preservation would have been: a misguided expression of moral opprobrium.
Let’s be blunt about another thing, too: Those who propagated the fallacy that HERO would let predatory men into women’s bathrooms deserve to have their actions labeled for what they are: cynical, deceitful, cheap. That these distortions were disseminated under the banner of “women’s rights” makes it all seem worse. Women’s rights is a cause for which the social conservative has been a fickle political ally.
Mistrust rather than intolerance
Nevertheless, most Houstonians who vetoed the ordinance didn’t do so with hateful hearts. No doubt there were those who believed the bathroom nonsense. (Misinformation is dangerous an age of selective listening.) But for those who saw through the ruse, and rejected HERO out of discomfort with a people they don’t understand, their choice seems less evidence of wicked intolerance than corrigible mistrust. To win over these people — earnest folks, whose country is moving a direction different from where it came — requires more than harangues about hate or broadsides against bigotry. Equality advances best not by conquest but by conversion.
Conquest, I fear, combined with contempt, may have clouded the minds of many in the pro-HERO lobby. This includes our mayor, who’s doubtless feeling the perils of letting politics get too personal. When my beloved Lance Berkman, he of late inning heroics and Ruthian clout, came out against the law, Mayor Annise Parker mocked him, calling him a hypocrite. This seems counterproductive, and contributes to the feeling that the real loser on Election Day wasn’t just equality, it was civil discourse.
That this squall made landfall in tolerant Houston makes it seem so much the worse. Ever the latecomer to prevailing trends, Houston, I’d hoped, would be spared a theater in the entropic culture wars. When Parker first ran for office, hardly a disparaging word was said of her sexual orientation. And when she won, it was widely celebrated. This, we progressives like to think, is our Houston, a peaceable if quirky kingdom, where who you are matters less than what you can do. Maintaining this vision will require more than easy indignation or confidence that the long arc of the moral universe will veer justward. It will require fair-minded engagement with the other, even if that other declines to return the favor.
Put otherwise, it will require something heroic, which I remain confident Houstonians are capable of.