As Hardaway As He (Or You) Wants To Be

So, another stupid athelete.

I'm with Dan Savage:

[The Hardaway Affair is] a perfect opportunity for gay groups and gay people to patiently make a this very important point: No one has to like homos. You can sign off on full civil rights for gays and lesbians without having to think we’re nifty or be all that comfortable with the idea of sharing a locker room with us. (Hell, I’m sometimes not comfortable sharing a locker room with other gay men.) The gay and lesbian civil rights movement would make more strides if we could separate the issue of liking us from the issue of not discriminating against us.

Personally, I’m not interested in being liked by the likes of Hardaway. And I sincerely believe that the gay rights movement’s Sally Field complex—“You like me, you really like me!”—is holding us back. We should be out there make this case to bigots like Hardaway and Washington and Dobson and Falwell and Musgrave: No one wants to change your mind about homosexuality. You can think we’re naughty, you can think we’re sinful. And you know what? You can sign off on granting us our full civil rights, tolerate our living openly, marrying, having families—and go right on hating us! Heck, you can go right on trying to talk us out of being gay.

And good luck with that.

But so long as we conflate liking us—or believing that Jeebus loves us too—with granting us our fundamental civil rights, we make winning those civil rights that much more difficult.

Of course as more and more of us live openly—with or without our full civil rights—the hatred and fear that people like Hardaway espouse becomes less prevalent and less socially acceptable. But not everyone is going to like us or approve of us, whatever the law says, however socially tolerant our society becomes. And it is precisely these people—the haters, the Hardaways—that have to be made to understand that no one is going to force them to change their minds.