Tomorrow is the Day of Silence.
Tomorrow various students will not speak; they will instead have a card which will speak for them. This card says that many students must go silent every day about their sexuality because they fear bullying or harassment, and so the student with the card has taken a day-long vow of silence to show solidarity and to educate the public.
I myself will not be participating. For one, I am that geek in the back of class whose hand skyrockets every time the professor asks a question, and for another, I consider myself a truth-seeker in the Gandhian fashion and I have not yet worked out all the whys and wherefores of the Day of Silence.
Unfortunately, a cursory reading of Gandhi offers no ideas for how to fight the current social mindset against the LGBT community. Gandhi focused the majority of his attention on the discrimination and crimes of sight-being, whereas the concerns of LGBT students fall into the realm of discrimination of thought-action.
The discrimination of sight-being divides people into categories based on physical differences: white and black, male and female. These are categories which, notably, are constant (shy of surgery or extreme exposure to the sun) and easily perceptible at all times.
But today the issue of gay rights falls into the discrimination of thought-action, which divides people into categories based on differences in their actions. By changing one’s actions or the appearance of one’s actions, one changes from a given category to another, such as a gay man who, by not bringing up the subject of his sexuality or acting upon it, appears straight.
I have heard some people claim that because LGBT concerns are a matter of the second form of discrimination, they cannot compare their struggles with those faced by blacks or by women. That’s true in a trivial way, but dodges the fact that discrimination in either case is bad: A law which made it impossible for a given political party to vote disenfranchises people just as much as a law which made it impossible for a given gender to vote.
The problem is not which type of discrimination is worse than the other, but how to enact change. And herein lies the rub: Crimes of state-being take something everyone can do and restrict by law who can and cannot do that thing. So when Britain held a monopoly on salt in India, Gandhi made salt of his own, and when buses said a black person must move to the back, Rosa Parks stayed in the front.
But that doesn’t work for crimes of thought-action. In order for civil resistance to be effective, you must still be able to do the thing the government or institution attempts to prevent you from doing. You cannot protest your inability to vote by voting; you cannot protest your inability to get married by getting a marriage certificate; you cannot protest being denied a job by having that job. These are abilities not just controlled by an institution, but created by them as well.
I do not believe Gandhi knew how to fight against such laws. For everything else he had a method: Disobey the law which is unlawful, obey all others to the fullest extent even if they are an inconvenience. By doing so, he showed that a person could be just and honest and a model citizen while disobeying an unjust law.
But resistance to crimes of thought – action does not provide impetus for change. Events like the Day of Silence can educate for the public and support those who are afraid, but they by their very nature avoid addressing the ones who are the cause of the mindset. They do not help the one perpetrating injustice see that he himself would be better off changing his mind.
Although I do not believe there exists a perfect method to stop harassment and to change the public image, I do have one thought to leave you with, dear reader.
One day, Gandhi received a letter from a man who said he was the only man in his village who sought truth. How could he alone enact change if no one supported him, if every action he took would be ignored? Gandhi replied that he should act as a good and honest man in every regard nonetheless.
For those who are good and honest never stay alone for long.
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