So, California’s decided to re-ban gay marriage. And rightfully so, people protest it. Things even went as far as the LA Police, in their usual way of handling things, deciding to beat a protester. But this isn’t about the civil rights and liberties of homosexual couples in California (or anywhere else for that matter) or even about the police brutality. This is about self-examination.

From what I understand, this protest began outside an LDS temple in Los Angeles. I’m not sure where it ended up, but again, that’s not the point here. The point is how I would have viewed this entire situation a year ago and how I view it now.

Having recently become an atheist, I’m still trying to weigh and measure many different points of view, paradigms, and philosophies of life. Now that I no longer have this dogmatic lens that tints my paradigmatic glasses, I am free to choose what I value, what I see, and what I consider right or wrong - even if it disagrees with “doctrine”. I am now free to be able to look at things objectively, to analyze them, look at them from all different sides, and figure out what I feel good and right and proper. It wasn’t always this way.

Many times in life I’ve been often confused because, for the life of me, I could never figure out how some people could see the world the way they did. I could never understand seeing someone as inferior simply because they had a different skin colour. I could never understand why people would subject themselves to addictive drugs. I could never understand why people would choose to be gay. Then I would tell racist jokes and laugh (I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with racists jokes if we laugh at all races, including our own, and if they’re not overly hurtful). Then I would smoke my first joint at 15 and experience several years of chaos and misery because of my drug habit. Then I would learn that homosexuality was as much a choice as my heterosexuality - no one chooses who they’re attracted to.

So over time I slowly learned tolerance and acceptance. Part of this learning came with being open-minded to the fact that I didn’t have all the answers to life, part of it came with dealing with the issues that lead me to escape in drugs, and part of it came with simply growing older and learning more about life. Ah, the cock-sured nature of youth!

I remember considering myself to be fairly liberal and tolerant of many things. When I accepted that homosexuality wasn’t really a choice, I felt like I was being understanding and tolerant – even though I recognized that attraction wasn’t a choice, I believed that practicing a homosexual lifestyle was. It was this kind of justification that allowed me to feel tolerant and accepting while still supporting the suppression of gay marriage. How could I do otherwise when I submitted myself to the authority of an all-encompassing institution that dictated my beliefs (I’ll address the issue of social coercion in a later post)?

After experiencing some time away from Big Brother, I now look at things like these protests and suppression of gay rights, and I can’t help but shake my head. I shake my head at the fact that there is still this kind of intolerance in the world, but mostly I just shake my head at the fact that mere months ago, I probably would have voted in favour of rebanning gay marriage. And that thought horrifies me.

Now that I wear a more objective lens (at least according to my best judgment), the ethical problems surrounding these issues become self-evident. The only reasons why people are against gay marriage are either because the church tells them so, or because it disgusts them – and somehow I feel like those two aren’t entirely disconnected. So, if I eliminate the institution of the church, and I begin to exercise more tolerance, there’s no reason I should ever consider why the civil rights and liberties that I now enjoy should not be extended to everyone. But again, this isn’t about that (although somehow I fear my point is getting lost in it).

The bottom line, the entire point of this post, is that I look at the kinds of things I support now, and the kinds of things I supported when I was religious, and some of them are vastly different. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I am humbled to a very deep level that I could ever be capable of such intolerance – especially when it was disguised as its opposite. I don’t beat myself up over it, however. I may look back on it with regret, but more importantly I am beginning to recognize some of the things I learned in Social Psychology – how the power of the situation is often more powerful than the individual; how social persuasion and coercion can influence people to do things they might not otherwise do. It saddens me that I was ever capable of such thinking, but I try not to be too hard on myself. In recognizing this, it helps me to be less judgmental of those same people who now exercise that same intolerance, and to not judge them for it. I was once like them.

This doesn’t excuse intolerance or prejudice behaviour, but we can combat these without hating those we combat. You never know when fighting for what’s right, with compassion and understanding for those you fight against, may cause a soldier to cross over. And that, I think, makes it worth it in itself.