Truth, Facts and the American Way

Those in Favor of Gay Marriage in California Were Stunned By the Response to Prop 8

California's Proposition 8 stirred up a lot of activism on both sides of the issue. We all read the news stories of gays protesting at Mormon temples or interrupting church services. We've also seen a rise in marriage supporters in legal activism and blogging.

But at the heart of the issue is a basic difference between ideologies. With an ideological view, you can't change beliefs with facts. That's the main problem we, as bloggers, face getting out our version of reality in favor of marriage. Ideologues, such as gay activists, don't respond to facts but only to their particular system of being - their "creation" story if you will. Pro marriage bloggers do it all the time from our point of view, represented by the Bible, traditional values and morals, a strict interpretation of the Constitution, conservatism, and so on. Any facts presented to us will be filtered through our ideology and expressed accordingly.

It seems obvious to us, for example, that gay sex is wrong. (The idea is stoutly creepy to a lot of people.) But to ideologues without traditional standards (such as social norms, the Bible, and so forth), the wrongness of gay sex isn't so obvious.

What if someone doesn't have a system of belief, an ideology that has a concept of traditional values? Of God and His law? What if their creative story, their "god" is based on a convoluted idea of what the US Constitution says? Their world is as alien to us as our world is to them. They think a belief in God is an aberration of a demented mind. We think that their aberration of sexual practices is totally whack. We believe what we do because of feelings of faith and hope with a standard in the Bible or in the Constitution. They believe in what they do because of feelings of fairness (and selfishness, and lust, and greed, and lack of self control, and hopelessness in death, and opposition. But I digress.) Obviously, any research conducted by such ideologues will be skewed in favor of gay sex. Just as any research conducted by those with our point of view will demonstrate the bad effects of gay sex. Where the texts are uncertain, interpretation of the text will depend on the ideology of the reader, not on the ideology of the writer.

This is the basic problem that pro marriage bloggers have encountered by trying to present facts from sources that gay activists will undoubtedly discount or reject all together. Our facts simply can't get in the way of the gay version of truth. And visa versa. Gays' facts can't get in the way of our version of truth.

Our goal as bloggers should not be to combat those who would destroy marriage by presenting facts. Neither we, nor the opposition let facts get in the way of our beliefs. We have to take a look at the belief system, the ideology behind the activists. We must present our beliefs, not as a series of facts, but as a presentation of our world view, our creation story so-to-speak, as the Truth. We weren't converted to the Truth by facts were we? We were converted by the underlying story - the hope of Jesus Christ, for instance, or the unwavering belief in the US Constitution as the best form of government ever created. When we get bogged down in the "facts" of the matter, instead of spreading our version of truth, the opposition wins. We get caught in the net of argument and counter argument instead of rising above it to present truth as we see it.

Those who recognize truth will see it for what it is and join with us. Those who don't see it will never accept the truth. There's a story in the Gnostic text of The Gospel of Philip that came from Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Jesus is teaching his disciples and he says (I'm paraphrasing): "A blind man and a man in a dark room are the same. But when the light comes on, he who can see, sees, and he who is blind remains in darkness still."

I understand that we are crippled by the constraints of blogging, by political correctness, and by the simple fact that so many people have rejected the truths that we take for granted. But we plug along and do the best we can.