Gay Marriage Debate

Despite the fact that gays are clearly becoming more accepted on a daily basis in this country, gay rights is still a relatively new concept. That is not to say that being gay is a new concept or fad, but the ‘coming out of America’ and the demands of equality that come with it have really just begun to develop on such a national level. People are opening their minds and accepting the gay lifestyle more and more. According to Bidstrup (2009), nearly seventy per cent of Americans support gay rights which essentially promotes equal opportunities and equal access to the things that all other Americans are privy to. However, almost the same amount of people opposes legalizing gay marriages. How is that possible? How can a majority of people agree that homosexuals deserve equal protection from their country and in the same breath wish to restrict a very basic right? How can this one word, marriage, create so much polar opposite thinking within one person’s head?

The short answer is people are scared. Just as when the world was flat. Whether they think something is right or not, sometimes it is easier to just continue on living on a flat world. Change represents fear. People know gays should have the right to marry, but what if it changes everything? What if there is an unforeseen circumstance? Maybe we should just put it off a little longer. If only we had some proof that everything will be OK.

Well there is proof because, surprisingly, other countries in the world have to deal with the same issues as us and some of them actually take action in a timely manner. According to Bidstrup (2009), gay marriage has been legal in Denmark since 1989 and in most of Scandinavia for just about as long. They’re still on the map aren’t they? In fact some of gay marriage’s harshest critics, the clergy, have fully accepted that it has been good for the country. Seventy-two per cent of the Danish clergy were opposed to allowing gay marriage at the time it became legal. A poll taken six years later revealed that eighty-nine per cent of the Danish clergy admitted the law is good and had positive effects on their society including reduced suicides, less spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and less promiscuity and infidelity within the gay community (Bidstrup, 2009). Instead of the straw that breaks the world’s back, it almost seems like the allowance of gay marriage may actually be a step closer to a utopia on Earth.

References
Bidstrup, S. (2009, June 3). Gay marriage, the arguments and the motives. Retrieved June 7, 2009, from http://www.bidstrup.com/marriage.htm

Challenging Norms

Everyone is born into a time and place on Earth. The setting for which your time is spent is based on the evolution of your environment up until your birth and the continuation of such as your life plays out. It is not just the turn from monkey into man that represents evolutionary change. It also encompasses changes in ideals, challenging of norms, and striving towards understanding. Being ignorant to truths is not necessarily a shameful thing. While it is true that the world has always been round, it existed as flat in the collective consciousness for generations. No harm, no foul. Generations later had the luxury of having the truth as knowledge and all of the other findings that continue to be aided by it. However, a shameful act would be to torture and imprison the person that had the insight and human curiosity to challenge the old belief. That is what allegedly happened to Galileo Galilei in 1633 by the order of Pope Urban VIII who, for whatever ideological or political reasoning, would not accept the change (The New York Times, 1878).

Galileo had the courage to challenge an idea so grand and vital to the understanding of life itself: the ground we walk on; the sky we gaze at; the forces that keep us grounded. So what is the big deal about marriage? Is the concept of two people getting hitched as scary and sacred a concept as having the idea of our world almost literally flipped upside down? In our time and place, there is a fight over who has the right to wed. That is not to say there is a fight over who is intelligent enough, who has proved themselves to be mature enough, or even who has established a long enough relationship to take it to the marriage level. The battle is being fought on a more basic level than that. The fight is about whether legally practicing homosexuals should be allowed to marry their partners in the same way that legal practicing heterosexuals can. And while Galileo had to endure physical torture for his personal obligation to science and understanding, the homosexual community today faces the torture of being denied a basic civil right.

References
The New York Times, (1878, March 24). Was Galileo tortured? Retrieved June 9, 2009, from http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F0CE4D6113FE63BBC4C51DF B5668383669FDE

Understanding Personal Contructs

The judgments we make about people are not all without merit. We have spent our whole lives trying to figure out other people and our judgment skills have been honed and well practiced. However, as we blindly assess the people we are in contact with we sometimes forget how much alike or not alike we really are.The Personal Construct Theory explains that we create certain truths about people and things to help explain the reality around us. For this post, I did an exercise in constructs by comparing people I know by simply writing down a few words that come to mind when I think of them. I think the results of this exercise show how things can easily seem so different at first glance and how relationships help to dictate our thoughts.

I first compared my sister, Bridget, with a kid I knew from high school, Dave, who I did not like very much. I must preface this by saying that I have always been friendly with Dave and we were more friends than rivals. But I always knew he would be someone I did not stay in contact with all my life because I just did not like certain things about him. The similarities between the two were their stubbornness and selfishness. Their differences were Bridget I saw as smart, shy, and nice while Dave I saw as vapid, loud and materialistic. Next I compared one of my best friends Peter and one of my best female friends Andria. I wrote that they both were nice and generous. For Peter I wrote loyal, easy going, and goofy. For Andria I wrote caring, engaging, and pretty. Lastly I compared myself with my sister Bridget. Like her, I wrote down smart, shy, and stubborn. However, instead of selfish and nice, I saw myself as calm and calculating.

This exercise made me realize how the type of relationship I have with someone may affect my initial thoughts about them. I do feel, at least in written form, that my values could be unrefined because I kept going to similar adjectives. I think I may have stereotyped a bit based on the relationships I have and gender. For instance, when I started the list for my sister, I went straight for her faults even though I am closest with her than most on the list and think very highly of her. With my two friends, I immediately wrote loyal for my male friend and pretty for my female friend. Loyalty is generally a best friend quality. Pretty, on the other hand, is not something necessary for a friendship. However, since she is a female the first thing to come to my head was how pretty she is.

As far as being fair and complete; I think that is almost impossible. While the assessments I made were fair in my mind, they are far from complete. All of the constructs I used could probably be applied to everyone on my list in some capacity. We are all made up the same traits but some are more prevalent in others. I did judge myself very favorably because I have a favorable view of myself. I included some of my faults because I am very aware of them. I think for people to develop rich and complex constructs they must first realize how much they have in common with the rest of the world. You could be just like your worst enemy and nothing like your best friend even on the surface. They key is to respect people’s strengths and remember your weaknesses when criticizing.

A More Perfect Union

The Constitution of our nation was intended to design a form of government that would nurture in time a “perfect union” free of tyranny and persecution. It is written in plain English that within our democracy that all citizens would be treated equal under law. What is haunting us now over 200 years later is what President Obama described as our country’s “original sin” of not initially heeding those words. While we make strides everyday towards a perfect union, the fact that we had nurtured separatism for so long is the reason we still have racial resentment today.

At the core of resentment and anger on both sides of the racial divide are fear and worry. There are major problems within this country that aren’t strictly race-related yet it always seems to be at the end of the discussion. The black community harbors the resentment of being second-class citizens pretty much under law up until some fifty years ago with the ramifications still being felt in their communities today. The white community feels persecuted for sins they personally haven’t committed while they watch their jobs get outsourced and the separation between rich and poor grow rapidly. Everyone would appear to be in the same boat when it comes to fearing for the security of their livelihood and for the country as a whole and that is why it is counterproductive to turn our anger towards something as simple as race.

We are all in this together. In order for the dream of a perfect union to be realized we must become a trans-racial society that doesn’t see race as the problem. As I implied earlier, Jim Crow laws and segregation were only a half a century ago. That means generations alive today witnessed and lived through something so blatantly Unconstitutional. Part of bringing about a perfect union is the time and generations it takes to heal such wounds. We need to come to a point where instead of fighting against each other we fight with each other as Americans regardless of race, color, or creed.

Intercultural Communication via Virtual Worlds

It is a small world and after all the years of discovery and settling we are left with people who are defined and act in ways according to where they were raised. People are different and alike within and across cultures. People are people. But the same human emotions we all share also create some of the most powerful barriers to communication between cultures. Mainly fear and anxiety hinder our ability to feel comfortable around people from other cultures. Through internet globalization and the concept of virtual worlds the world is getting smaller because we have access to each other with a simple mouse click. These new channels create new relationships and learning possibilities between people of different cultures that could vastly improve the way we think about others.

Intercultural communication is basically communication between different cultures. It seems like an easy concept to grasp but recognizing the level to which it affects the way we think about others is much harder. On the surface, simple language barriers restrict our contact with other cultures but what about other cultures that do speak the same language? On the surface people fear Arab looking people because they may be a terrorist but what about the people that fear African-Americans because they may be a “thug” or a criminal? The cultural divide is not restricted to people from other countries or skin color. Cultures are different whether you fly half way across the globe or half way across the country. The fact is you are comfortable with people from your own culture because you know what they are like. And you know what they are like because you have spent a lot of time around them. And spending time around a culture eliminates the fear of unknown that restricts us all.

Virtual worlds are places on the internet where people get together and socialize. They can take many different forms. It could be just a casual setting, a game setting, or even a classroom setting. The actual world may be simulated but the interactions are real.
Being in a virtual world can loosen major barriers for intercultural communication that would be harder to do in the real world. First of all you are (ideally) in the comfort of your own home in a safe environment. You also may have a greater feeling of anonymity because you are interacting with people outside of your everyday life. Both of those factors contribute to relieving anxiety. According to Jandt (2010), in the presence of strangers (or people of different cultures) our anxiety level is high which ultimately leads us to avoid interactions. It is the same anxiety we face our first day at a new job or at a new school but at least if we are around people we can relate to we are more likely to attempt interaction. Interacting with a stranger has a high probability of being awkward. In a virtual world you can worry less about awkwardness or embarrassing yourself because most people will be strangers to each other.

Interaction in the virtual world as it is now is still limited compared to the real thing. The major difference is reading people’s nonverbal behaviors. Simple behaviors such as facial expressions can say more than actual words during an interaction. Smiles, frowns, or fright (just to name a few) are a universal language of humans and even animals. Another nonverbal behavior restricted in the virtual world is proxemics. Different cultures have different “personal space bubbles” meaning how close we get when communicating with each other (Jandt, 2010). Standing too close or even too far could mean different things to different cultures.

Basically our interactions with people are vastly different based on our comfort level. We are restricted by fear of being embarrassed, clueless, or misunderstood. Intercultural communication raises the level of fear and anxiety because we are interacting with strangers with customs we are unsure of. Virtual worlds help to close the gap by allowing us to interact with different cultures from our home. They say familiarity breeds contempt but being unfamiliar breeds fear and results in less interaction. What virtual worlds do is allow new access to different cultures and the possibility of familiarity.

References
Jandt, F.E. (2010). An introduction to intercultural communication: Identities in a global community (6th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage