Do You Support LGBTQ+ Rights?

 

I was recently asked by a student if I supported LGBTQ+ rights. I asked them what they meant by rights. It quickly became apparent that this student had not seriously considered what counts as a right and what it might be based upon. In essence, their belief in LGBTQ+ was the practical equivalent of being a sports fan. They were not asking me whether I agreed with their beliefs as they had no beliefs for me to agree or disagree with but merely if I cheered for their particular team. Their teachers had taught them that to be a good person, they needed to recite the credo "I support LGBTQ+ rights." For all intents and purposes, the students could recite something in Latin and it would be equally meaningful. To be clear, I do not question the intelligence or decency of this student. The fault is not with them but with the educational malpractice that they have been subjected to.   

What might it mean to support LGBTQ+ rights? One possible response is that LGBTQ+ people should be equal to heterosexual and cisgender people. This has a surface plausibility to it. LGBTQ+ people are human beings with rights who deserve to live with dignity just like everyone else. Now, what might this mean in practice? Consider that people with poor social skills, nose pickers, and MAGA Republicans are all human beings with rights who deserve to live with dignity. This certainly means that they have legal rights. If you are committed to civil liberties then there should be no moral difference between the police beating a confession out of someone with a pride flag or a MAGA flag. This is distinct from any kind of social right. In the real world, people are going to lose out on friendships and jobs for failing to follow all kinds of random social conventions that could never be defended simply on rational grounds. Furthermore, these social failings may be so subtle that neither party can even articulate the rule that has been violated. As someone on the autism spectrum, I am forced to reckon with this fact on a daily basis and pay a heavy price for it. Once we accept that society can penalize nose pickers, the burden of proof falls on anyone who objects to society penalizing anyone for violating a social convention. If people have the right to arbitrarily give nose pickers a look of disgust, they have the equal right to arbitrarily give a person in drag a look of disgust.    

I believe that LGBTQ+ people have the right to negative liberty. This means that the government should not cause physical harm to people it classifies as LGBTQ+. Such people should be able to engage in consensual behavior between adults as they wish whether that is non-heterosexual sex or gender reassignment surgery. As language is an arbitrary social construct, LGBTQ+ people have the right to call themselves married or members of the opposite sex. If they can convince the majority of society to speak their language, all power to them. This would be no different from the advocacy of Esperanto speakers. 

I would not be willing to grant LGBTQ+ people positive liberty but then again I do not believe that anyone has a right to positive liberty. I am willing to accept a legal obligation under the social contract to be drafted and have to mow down, with machine gun fire, a mob of theocrats trying to violently stop a gay orgy from happening. I am not willing to execute Christian bakers who refuse to bake gay wedding cakes. 

In any argument, it is crucial to control the terms used. Once the issue is framed in terms of supporting or opposing LGBTQ+ rights, the LGBTQ+ side is guaranteed to win. My students may not know what rights are but they have been raised to believe that rights, whatever magical black box they might be, are an important good to such extent that your support or opposition to them is what makes you a good or bad person. If we are going to change minds on LGBTQ+ issues, we are first going to have to get them to think seriously about what rights mean.