What to do when personal experiences cause prejudice?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Last week, I got into a discussion with some coworkers about whether gay men should be able to be involved with Boy Scouts. The issue wasn’t whether it is legal or illegal for them to discriminate, but rather whether it is fair to do so.

I voiced the minority stance in the room: Gays should be allowed to be involved because they are no more likely to sexually assault children than straight men. As support, I mentioned that most molesters of boys are straight, married men. I didn’t have an exact statistic to cite, but I’m confident that this is the case.

One of my coworkers thought it was obvious I was wrong. If a man molests boys, it’s obvious he’s not straight. He’s a homosexual. Thus, homosexuals should not be allowed, since including them increases the risk that sexual misconduct will occur.

But I continued to argue that banning them would do no good for the simple reason that all a molestor would have to do is claim he’s straight. Then he’d be good to go. Also, there’s also a risk that straight women involved with the Boy Scouts (“Den mothers”) could sexually assault their charges. Are you going to ban them too?

I mentioned that growing up, I attended sleep-overs at friends’ houses where the man of the house was present (in another room, of course). My parents weren’t worried about me being raped or molested. Nor were my friends’ parents worried when their children slept at my house, just down the hall from my heterosexual dad. Why not? Because my mother was there all the time. Just as there are other adults present when Boy Scouts go camping.

I ended my argument by saying that people’s bigotry seems to behind all the bad-mouthing about gays. Because no one likes to be called a bigot, my coworkers scoffed and told me that I was wrong, saying that they don’t care what people do in the privacy of their bedroom BUT blah blah blah blah. Well, I told them that I would take what I said back if they could provide a rational argument against gays being in the Boy Scouts. They couldn’t, so we ended the discussion with a little tension between us.

Fast forward a few days later. One of the coworkers pulls me aside and tells me that before I call him a bigot, I need to understand something about him. He lets me know that he was attacked by a gay guy a while back. Apparently the guy got him liquered up and tried to have sex with him. “He didn’t do anything to me 'cuz I fought him off” the guy told me. But the event was still traumatic, he said.

I have no doubt that it was, and I really really feel bad for him. I apologized and told him that I was sorry if what I said the other day offended him (me and my big mouth, I thought). However, I still feel that the guy is a bigot against gays, and not just because of what he said about them not belonging in the Boy Scouts. He dislikes gay musicians (citing their gayness as the primary reason). He has frequently voiced his disapproval of homosexuality. He says he doesn’t care what people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms, but I know he doesn’t believe that gays should be granted equal rights under the law. To me, that speaks of bigotry. I don’t know what else to call it.

I fear that this guy, who I consider a friend, will never be able to change his mind about gay people, due to the traumatic event that he had. I wish I could remind him that women are routinely traumatized by men (1 in every 4 women has been sexually assaulted in their lives), but that doesn’t stop most of us from giving men a fair break. But I know the comparison to women would only offend him since he’s a “manly” man. Plus, I know he would try to convince me that a man being sexually assaulted by another man is somehow different, more traumatizing, than a woman being assaulted by a man. I don’t think I would make much headway with him, so I’ve decided not to mess with him anymore about it.

But I do wonder if it’s possible to show someone who’s had a negative experience that their views can still be the result of prejudice and irrational hostility, and that having a negative experience does not make you immune to charges of bigotry. Has anyone been successful at changing the mind of someone like my friend? And I also wonder if you should try. Maybe you should just let people have their views, just as they let you have yours? I dunno.

2

Oh I agree, he’s a bigot. He needs to understand that crimes are going to be committed by people regardless of sexual orientation. I think it can be said that if his alleged attacker was a straight man, that your co-worker would not have been assulted that night, but rather a woman somewhere else would have been assulted. It just so happens that this man was definitely going to commit a crime, and that he was attracted to men, and your co-worker just happend to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time. The crime would have happened regardless of his orientation.

I’ve known people to have a hatred of black people because, a long time ago, they were robbed by a black person. So now all blacks are robbers. :rolleyes: Race and homosexuality are only descriptors. Not causes. But I’m sure you already know that.

So I think it’s ok to feel sorry for your co-worker, but I would never give in to his irrational opinions of homosexuals just because he had a bad experience with one.

I wouldn’t know how to approach him on this subject though, but I agree that he needs a talking to by someone.

3

If your friend had been attacked by a Straight Woman would that give him an excuse to be anti-straight? What’s the difference then, if he was attacked by a Gay Man, or if he (your friend) was a she and attacked by a Straight Man.

In other words the fact that he was Gay is irrelevant. In the context of your friends experience the man was not a ‘Gay Man’ no more than he was ‘man with blonde hair’, he was ‘sexual attacker man’ and sexual attacker men can be Gay Straight Blonde Redhead or have 3 arms. The point is that he is attacker man.

4

As someone who works for the Boy Scouts, I can just about assure you that the Scouts’s ban on gays has almost nothing to do with fears of molestation. It happens to be because the LDS Church, because of its large stake in the BSA, membership-wise (almost 50% on the west coast, I believe) is highly conservative. In addition to this, many people in high council and national positions are very conservative, and believe that homosexuality is a sin, and a gay person should not be put in a position to be a role model for youth. Basically, just good-ol’ gay-hating given the cover of religious conservatism. Fear of molestation is one more cover to hide plain bigotry.

I totally disagree with it, but that is the reasoning behind the ban from where I sit.

5

I used to be a crisis intervention counselor, and you’d be amazed how many times I heard this story, almost never turning out to be true. It’s a textbook case of latent homosexuality, and contains a very common fantasy. In this case the guy “fought him off,” but another version has him waking up the following morning, with “oh man, what the hell happened last night?”

If he had actually experienced this type of abuse and been traumatized by it, I doubt that he would have told a coworker about it. Now obviously I don’t know this guy, and for all I know his story might be legitimate, but I seriously doubt it. And even so, it still wouldn’t justify (or even entirely explain) his prejudice.

6

I think you need to keep in mind that you can’t use logic to reason a person out of a position he did not reach through logic. (Not a thought original to me, a thought I’ve read on this messageboard, possibly posted by tomndebb).

It strikes me that this co-worker’s prejudice is not caused by his traumatic personal experience so much as it is justified by it, which means that I can’t help wonder whether panache45 has a point. Maybe this incident didn’t really occur- but he knows that it is nearly impossible to argue with, so you will probably back off.

I mean, if this guy was being logical, you could cancel out his tramatic experience by introducing him to Steve- a good looking gay guy who would never think of plying a straight man with alcohol in the hopes of getting sex. And what’s more, Steve isn’t interested in molesting young boy scouts. Or find a newspaper article about some apparently happily married man arrested for soliciting a teen-age boy for sex.

But he’s not being logical- so I think you should not waste anymore of your mental energy trying to persuade him that he’s biased and silly.

7

IMO, most people are bigots. Even the ones that often think they are not. Heck, even I hold some bigoted views. I think that it’s a pretty natural feeling. I don’t really have too big a problem with it until they actively advocate legislation, economic discrimination, or violent / destructive protest based on that bigotry.

As far as the Boy Scouts go, I think a cessation of government support for them while they continue their dis-affection of homosexuals would be the best thing to happen. If you can’t get over the fact that the Boy Scouts don’t allow homosexuals, then don’t put your kid in it.

8

:confused: You obviously mean the BSA is highly conservative because of the high %age of LDS members in it, right?

(The way you wrote it implies that the Church would be more liberal if it wasn’t so involved in Scouting. Which is prima facie absurd.)

9

When the OP described this guy as a “‘manly’ man,” I couldn’t help thinking that he could be a classic case of homophobia resulting from denial of homosexual feelings. That could fit in well with what **Panache45 **said.

10

I doubt that his homophobic feelings spring entirely from his “assault.” More likely that experience reinforced existing feelings and made him feel that his opinions are justified.

There are lots of people who have been attacked (sexually or otherwise) and failed to draw overarching generalizations about a perceived group to which their attacker belonged.

On the other hand, I can say that after fighting off an assault by a homeless Black man, I was wary of homeless men, and especially Black homeless men, for several months afterwards, and I still tend to avoid alleys. Any traumatic experience will trigger a protective instinct to avoid people, places, etc that we connect to that experience. I think an important part of overcoming a traumatic event is recognizing that not all (homosexuals, alleys, whatever) will trigger the event again. Unfortunately, it’s easier for some people to remain the victim and blame others for their problems.

11

Is there any correlation between homosexuals that fancy other adults, and the pedophiliac homosexuals? Sure, you can technically label them both as “homosexuals”, but does that really shed light on what the true issue is here? I think that’s the point that needs to be focused on.

12

Speaking for myself and for every gay man I’ve ever discussed this with: no, there’s no “correlation” between gay men and pedophiles, regardless of the gender of the child being abused. Child abuse is about power, much more than sex, and is in no way similar to two adults meeting and falling in love and sharing their lives.

I’ve only met one man, a long time ago, who openly admitted that he had sex with boys. Our entire conversation was filled with rationalizations on his part, concerning the “consent” of these boys. I remember feeling that there was some really fundamental difference between him and all the gay men I’d known. Usually, when I’m with other gay/lesbian people, there’s a sort of feeling of commonality that we share, knowing that the other person is “one of us” or “family.” I felt absolutely nothing like this toward that person. In fact, he seemed more alien to me than most straight guys do.

13

I think it is human nature to form generalizations from insufficient data: I mean, if the purple berries made you horribly, horribly ill the first time you ate them, the people that avoided all purple berries thereafter were probably better off than the people who tried every purple berry bush they found, looking for one that was different. If the LAST time you met with the strange tribe with braided hair they tried to kil everyone, better to avoid everyone with braided hair: the lost potential opportunities don’t countbalence the potential harm.

This certainly isn’t limited to race–I teach, and it is so easy to start thinking of kids as “types”, based on kids from year’s past who were similar.

That said, lots of other nasty impulses are also part of human nature, and a lot of what society does is challenge us to rise above our impulses. It’s EASY to make a leap based on personal experiences. It’s hard to fight the impulse. But it needs to be done, each of us within our own hearts.

I don’t know how much responsibility you have towards your shifting your coworker’s POV: perhaps a raised eyebrow and a “But of course you know that straight men attack women everyday?” before letting the matter drop is about all you can hope to do–plant the seed of self-reflection and hope someone else nurtures it. Because you certainly aren’t going to show him the light with a well-reasoned arguement.

14

Either that, or he WAS hit on by a gay man, innocently enough, and considers that an attack. Or even just some sloppy drunk guy in a bar tried to hit on him, and acted like a beligerant sloppy drunk and the guy “fought him off” (read: overreacted.)

15

And just so we don’t let stereotypes run away with us, I stopped making business related housecalls to white senior executives of Fortune 500 companies (even the non-white and/or female ones because it was better to have a blanket policy) after being sexually assaulted. (At one time in my career my job description could be best summed up with “Executive babysitter from IT.”)

16

This is a dangerous topic. I am hearing broad support for doing something to essentially fix the views of somebody who reports having a direct experience himself that created these views in the first place, so that he agrees with your social leanings in support of which you don’t report any of your own direct experience.

I think the “attacked by a gay guy” story sounds fishy. And I don’t think it’s such a big deal, because it happened to me - a man I knew suddenly put the moves on me while we were sitting together on a couch, started kissing me full on the lips - which I didn’t see coming at all. I politely declined, and spent the rest of the afternoon worrying about having hurt his feelings. But, sheesh, it’s not like it damaged or threatened me, and I can’t begin to imagine hitting someone for that.

Your own inclinations sound likeable to me. I don’t object to having gay people around, including working with my kids. But from your description of this man, his reaction is due to his own experience, and not because he decided to have backwards social ideas.

I also think I have to agree that it is obvious that men who molest boys are homosexual, or are at least performing homosexual, because men and boys are the same sex. A finer distinction might provide another “sex” for prepubescent boys, the idea being that pedophilia is a distinct attraction - but I have never heard of this view.

So, sadly, I have to disagree with what I think is the predominant sentiment in this thread, even though I strongly support allowing gays into the Boy Scouts and other organizations.