Human beings have a great capacity for love and compassion, and they also have a great capacity for egotism. Most of us are guilty of wanting to believe that we’re better than others in some way from time to time--smarter, more attractive, richer, more charming, funnier, more influential, cooler, better educated, more moral… There seems to be only a hair’s breadth between having a healthy self-esteem and being arrogant. When it comes to maligned minorities--the poor, those who aren’t white, women, those considered less attractive, LGBTs, etc.--there are a host of hostile clichés ready to be pulled off the shelf and hurled at a convenient victim if a person is in the mood to feel superior. Bigotry is a bad habit. It gives you a momentary high, but you have to cut yourself off from your natural love and compassion for the person or people you’re attacking.
For many, simply getting to know a few LGBT people is enough. The love and compassion for the real people they know overtakes those hostile clichés for a nameless, faceless mass of homos. For others, just a little bit of common sense and logic will do. But there are some who are going to fight like hell to hold onto their bigotry because they have grown addicted to sniffing that glue. They feel superior, and they want to go on feeling superior. NOM is so driven by bigotry that they have actually made this one of their talking points. They actually think this is a valid and persuasive argument. “We can’t let LGBT people win, because if they won, we would lose, and, as a result, some might think of us as bigots.”
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