Why Do We Need Equality?
I have always viewed the goal of equality to be a self-evident truth. I believe in equality because it makes sense, irrespective of whatever thing it is that is being fought for.
Today, I was asked by a good friend, in a purely curious and non malicious fashion, why gay people are fighting so strongly for the right to marry given that marriage is at its core a religious institution and that civil unions offer essentially all the same rights as marriages anyway.
I started off as I usually would, arguing that marriage is as much a secular institution now than it is a religious one and that religion should form no basis in the making of our laws in a secular society.
As the conversation continued, I started actually thinking about why equality was so important and attempted to, for the first time, put that into words in order to explain in a larger context what the fight was about. This is what I came up with.
If I think of myself, as I am want to do, I have largely equal standing in this country (Australia) although I am a minority (coloured South African). At no time, under the law anyway, do I feel that there is a thing that my race stops me from being able to do. My heritage is South African, my parents lived through Apartheid and told me infinite terrible stories about it, but the thing that has always stuck with me is the notion that in South Africa there was a set of laws in place that would prevent people from just going to places purely based on the colour of their skin.
In Australia, that idea seems fucking ridiculous, largely because it is. Aside from secure areas etc, there is no place in this country that I am not allowed to go. I can talk to whoever I want to, I can be friends with people of all creeds, genders and religious persuasions and all of us are considered equal in the eyes of the law.
Where I do feel that inequality has an effect on my life is in interactions with some people. Something as simple as walking around in Westfields Miranda is difficult for me, not because I’m not lawfully allowed to be there, but because I feel through small interactions with people such as sideways glances and such that it is not an area where I am welcome. Is all or part of that in my head? Probably. In my entire life, nothing “bad” has happened to me there and in all likelihood that would probably continue to be so, but still, through the experience of things like the Cronulla riots and stereotypes of people that live there (uncultured opinion yes, but nobody is perfect), it’s not a place where I feel as if I am welcomed on equal footing with somebody who is a different colour to me.
Because of that feeling, I don’t go to Westfields Miranda. I have no desire to participate in anything that results in Westfields Miranda being a start, mid or end point, and generally I don’t want to have anything to do with the place.
In reality, this is a pretty meaningless story because it’s just about a person not going to a shopping centre, and I am fully aware of that fact. Thinking about the entire situation though makes me feel like this represents a microcosm of all desire for equality.
Society is often thought of as a perpetual construct that humanity perpetuates which people are forced to fit into. While society does cause a lot of people to conform to particular norms simply because of the large numbers of people that tend to follow the same trajectory, it could also be seen as a living thing that we as people contribute to and change every day simply by being a part of it.
When somebody isn’t made to feel welcomed into society through inequality of any kind, that person inherently has a reduced desire to interact with and most importantly, participate in that society. The cost of doing that in order to maintain any prejudice that a person might have seems negligible given that the value of a single person’s opinion is difficult to quantify, much less average out, but over time mass disenfranchisement removes the voices of many whose particular experiences and voices may contribute so much uniqueness, and potentially improvements to society as a whole.
That, as an idea, especially phrased in that fashion, sounds entirely unreal and idealistic. While I would agree with that entirely, there are also significant practical examples of the positive results of inclusiveness. Think about almost any area of your life you enjoy and I can pretty much guarantee that it has been affected by and probably made better by groups of people that aren’t the same as you.
In essence, this is what every fight for equality is about, no matter what specific thing it is over, or what group of people are fighting for or against it. A person labelling a right, like gay marriage, as being covered by something else, or being generally unimportant compared with larger problems of our time does have a veneer of truth to it, but taking any course of action that serves to narrow the number and variety of voices that actively participate in our society is not just ethically bankrupt, it’s robbing the future of the species to appease a largely irrelevant now.
I’m sure that these thoughts aren’t new, no thought is, but coming to this conclusion has made me understand a lot about what these things are really about and has made me view things a little differently, which is not something that I ever expected, especially given the origin of the thought process.
