From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: Historical perspective
Date: 8 Nov 92 12:55:28 GMT
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison


In article <1992Nov5.164205.22640@panix.com> mara@panix.com
(Mara Chibnik) writes:

>But the issue where I first felt the fighting back after the
>initial "victory" was the matter of abortion rights.  I have
>been asked -- challenged, actually -- by anti-feminist men
>why feminist groups didn't immediately organize local action
>after Roe v.  Wade, to guarantee the right.  The answer, I
>suspect has to do with exactly this point: We were not
>accustomed to the notion that such a right, once
>established, might be revoked.

I guess this would be a fairly common reaction (maybe just a
hope): that once "fixed," things would stay fixed.  This
illusion rests, I suppose, on the quite mistaken notion that
haters stop hating when their progress has been checked.
They don't; they redouble their determination.  To coin an
aphorism: hate never takes a holiday.

>I feel exactly the same disbelief over the pressure from
>anti-gay activists.

For hate to go away takes at least two things: you have to
wait for millions and millions of people to die natural
deaths; that's a minimum of 60 years, right there.  The much
harder task -- if it could be done in less than 10
generations, I would be very surprised -- is to discover
what it is about human beings that creates and nourishes
hatred, enabling it to be projected forward into succeeding
generations, then finding an effective remedy for this
deep-seated character flaw.

>We must not give up anywhere.  If we are not relentless in
>establishing our point of view, the "center" (in the
>perception of the mass of population) will be redefined in
>terms less and less favorable to us and more and more
>accomodating to the attitudes of the homophobes.  I really
>resent having to do this.

I think you're right about the unrelenting nature of the
task, and of course you're not alone in resenting the
unbelievable amount of human and material waste that's
involved with fighting back.

>As people have said already here, it takes a lot of energy
>and it takes nerves of iron to face this opposition all the
>time and never to be able to consider that a war has been
>won.

We have, of course, any number of inspirational role models
in our historical past.  One of the greatest achievements of
the period since the 70s has been a massive recovery effort
wrt to LGB history.  Somebody surely wants to burn these
books, but for the moment we have lots of real treasures and
new things appearing at a brisk clip.

We have other inspirational models in the histories of other
oppressed peoples, above all those of indigenous Americans
and of slavery and its descendents down to our own day.
That history too is growing rapidly.

>Still, with (dare I say it?) more sympathetic leadership in
>the Executive, we do have some hope that we have the
>momentum moving in our direction, finally.

A slender hope is certainly better than no hope at all,
which is what the alternatives seemed to me to be.

-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
Internet: anderson@macc.wisc.edu <-best, UUCP:{}!uwvax!macc.wisc.edu!anderson
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