The phrase “political dialogue” is, in common American usage, criminally broad. To us, a political dialogue is simply any political conversation in which diverse viewpoints get time to state their case. True dialogue involves the consideration not of ideas only, but also of the persons who hold them. The distinction matters only rarely, but when it does, it is critical.
An ideal illustration of this distinction came last week, when Hillsdale’s ever-bubbling gay marriage debate heated to a boil following two public discussions on the subject.
The catalytic event took place last Tuesday, when Sherif Girgis and John Corvino, two oppositely-minded activists, held a public debate on marriage. Their charitable and thoughtful discussion provoked similar attitudes in their attentive audience.
This was not lost on Jacob Lane, regional director of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which co-sponsored the debate. Lane, as quoted in last week’s Collegian (“College groups host marriage debate”), praised the intellectual charity with which “intellectually competent and curious” Hillsdale students had grappled with this difficult issue.
Unfortunately, this healthy discussion would not last. Prompted by this debate, last week’s Collegian featured two opposing opinion articles (JoAnna Kroeker’s “Legalize gay marriage” and Emma Vinton’s “Gay marriage is wrong”); most reactions to them bore no semblance of intellectual charity. Facebook bristled with posts attacking with sneering disdain whichever piece the sneerer happened to dislike.
It is deeply shocking when an ostensibly tight-knit social group suddenly and unexpectedly frays and decays into yammering factions bent on each other’s moral and intellectual denigration. It was even more shocking following the civility of the earlier discourse.
What went wrong? What quality of the public debate allowed both participants and observers to approach the thorny issue of gay marriage with politeness and respect, and why was that missing from the Collegian?
To answer this, we must return to the nature of dialogue. The Collegian “exchange” was simply not an exchange at all. Unlike Girgis and Corvino, Kroeker and Vinton failed to connect to each other, therefore making their respective cases in a vacuum against a faceless, nameless, and silent foe.
This lack of meaningful dialogue exacted an obvious toll from both pieces.. Kroeker’s picture of uncomfortable conservatives clinging blindly to Bibles and heteronormativity, only a few inconsistencies away from believing that “slavery is justifiable and women cannot speak in church,” bore no resemblance to Vinton’s argument. And although Vinton abstained from such ad hominem rhetoric, Vinton’s assertion that homosexuality’s societal acceptance would open the floodgates to incest was perhaps equally regrettable.
When opposing viewpoints fail to engage each other’s terms, the resulting conversation cannot hope to achieve true dialogue. Each side simply becomes deafer and deafer to the opponent’s perspective, and more and more content to fall back on caricatures designed to rally those with whom one already agrees, using the language of bigotry to assure allies that opponents are axiomatically incapable of viewing the light. This gnaws away the very possibility of fruitful human discourse.
This dire situation has but one escape route: True dialogue between persons. To grapple with opposing positions truly, we must treat our opponents with charity. And to treat them with charity, we must accept their humanity, accepting that their positions, like ours, spring not from the dank, disturbed vaults of deviancy or bigotry, but from universal, deeply held, and — above all — human desires. Then, and only then, ought we trust ourselves to speak.
