Want to know what bugs me to no end? It’s when I see evidence of many of my fellow Americans refusing to study history, or any other major subject in high school such as mathematics and science, to understand how human beings arrived at the point that we are today. The evidence I call out here is all over the Internet, whether it’s in the form of a subject of a news article or the abundance of uneducated-sounding comments left by my fellow internet surfers in the comments section. And I cannot leave out the king of all comments sections, Facebook. My heart sinks every time I read comments by fellow Facebook users who end up sounding uneducated and hateful when commenting on the most reviled subject according to their perspective: gays.

Before I continue with this subject, I must take a long detour to write about discrimination, and how so few people in America study or teach fellow Americans about the underrated force of discrimination in human history. Years ago, I was selected as the Equal Opportunity Representative (EOR) of my unit, and my job was to understand the laws, rules, and regulations that govern the military’s Equal Opportunity program. The moment I uttered the word “EO” to friends or colleagues, I paused to listen carefully to the groans and to feel eyes rolling by the folks standing behind me because they equated EO training as an annual burden that forces them to sit through a mind-numbing class about red-light, green-light and sexual harassment. In fact, most EORs come to be known as the sexual harassment officer, a completely unflattering term, especially since sexual harassment is only a small aspect of Equal Opportunity training. Very few other EORs will bring up the fact that discrimination, if unchecked, can lead to more intense levels that eventually end in extermination of a targeted group.

In 1954, a psychologist named Gordon W. Allport contributed greatly to the advancement of Equal Opportunity when he created the Allport Scale of Prejudice and Discrimination, a measure of the levels, or manifestations, of prejudice in society. In fact, my Equal Opportunity Representative training course went into great detail on this scale, which at the time I expected to be a fundamental topic embedded in anti-discrimination training in the military. Unfortunately, the Allport Scale topic does not ever make it past the EOR course or passed down to the required annual EO training for the mass of troops. Today, most EORs stick with the easy way out, talking about red-light, green-light, and sexual harassment. The scale ranges from the cognitive (e.g. name-calling, jokes, etc.) to extermination (e.g. genocide).

The five stages of the Allport Scale of Prejudice and Discrimination are:

1. Antilocution: This stage occurs when a majority group (normally those in power in a society) freely makes jokes about a minority group. This is where the scale begins. Negative stereotypes and negative images set into jokes reveal a deep disdain for the minority group in the individual’s psyche. How many service members have actively engaged in scathing jokes about gays? Before the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, members of the military actively participated in such cruel jokes and perpetuated negative imagery of gays and lesbians. Thus, it was vogue to joke about gays in order to create laughter in a stressful environment such as the military, and part of the justification was that many thought that gays would never be allowed to serve openly and there would never be any repercussions for jokes. Though jokes and speech are normally seen as harmless by the majority group, it sets the stage for more intense levels of prejudice.

2. Avoidance: Members of a majority group actively avoid people in a minority group. Although normally seen as a passive act, it is active in promoting isolation of the minority group. Isolation is the end state.

3. Discrimination: Once isolation is achieved through avoidance, discrimination becomes the next stage. Any negative thoughts or misgivings about a particular group are manifested into actions such as denial of opportunities and services. Discriminatory behaviors have the specific goal of harming the minority group by preventing them from achieving goals, getting education or jobs, etc. One of the most discriminatory laws passed against gays and lesbians to date is the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996. While supposedly the intention was to define marriage as between a man and a woman, the destructive effects were immediate and undeniable. Under this federal law, gay spouses are not extended the same protections given to their straight counterparts because the federal government does not recognize same sex marriages for the purposes of federal benefits protections for spouses. Federally taxing an inheritance received from a deceased same-sex spouse is currently the subject of a Supreme Court case that is challenging the constitutionality of DOMA. (Under Federal law, a personal estate valued up to $5.25 million left as an inheritance to a straight spouse is not taxed). Another heart-wrenching example is the story of Donna Johnson who died in combat action in Afghanistan and whose wife, Tracy Johnson, was denied the benefits of being notified properly of her death and of death and gratuity benefits received by the spouse left behind by a straight service member.

4. Physical attack: In this stage, members of a majority group will feel justified in violently attacking a member of a minority group, vandalizing and burning their property. Gays and lesbians living openly in America face these attacks everyday. The most notorious attack on a gay man was to a young man named Matthew Shepard in Wyoming on October 7, 1998. Two men by the name of Aaron Henderson and Russell McKinney abducted Matthew and drove him to a remote area east of Laramie, Wyoming. There they tied him to a split-rail fence and took turns severely assaulting him with the butt of a pistol. The two men left Matthew to die in the cold until 18 hours later when a bicyclist found him. He was pronounced dead four days later.

5. Extermination: This is the final, most intense level of prejudice. The majority group seeks the complete annihilation or complete removal of the minority group. Two undeniable examples are the Final Solution to the Jewish Question in World War II Germany and the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Approximately 6 million Jews and 800,000 Rwandans (including three-quarters of the minority Tutsi population) perished at the hands of the hateful majorities who blamed the respective minority groups for each nation’s socioeconomic problems.

From my observation of people on a face-to-face basis and reading the hateful comments online towards gays and lesbians, it has become apparent to me that the majority of Americans do not realize that their beliefs and actions place them into one of Allport’s levels of prejudice. What’s more dangerous is that they seriously fail to realize that by merely standing on a level short of extermination, they are only a thought and an action away from the next, more intense level of prejudice and discrimination.

You may be asking, why blog about the five levels of discrimination? I recently read a disheartening article about a select group of lawmakers in Olympia, Washington. These lawmakers filed a bill that would allow businesses to refuse service to gays and lesbians based on their religious convictions. This bill would empower religious doctors to refuse urgent life-saving medical care to gay and lesbian patients based on their personal beliefs and convictions. Immediately I imagined mom-and-pop stores putting up signs outside their doors that say “Straights Only”. I am reminded of the Star of David that was required by the Nazi-ruled government to be placed on every Jewish coat and storefront windows to remind the rest of the German population to stay way or to treat them with indignity.

This is why I fight discrimination. I’ve heard some straight people say that “gays are already getting everything they want, and yet they keep stirring the pot and causing trouble.” Meanwhile, these same people turn a blind eye to the lawmakers who are only votes away from taking life and liberty from gays and lesbians.

Many gays have become complacent and believe wrongly that “This is America. That stuff doesn’t happen. It will all work itself out in the end… but not by me. Someone else can do that. I’m too preoccupied with my own stuff.”

Immediately at the end of World War I, no nation, no American, no British, and no French person believed that Germany would ever rise to power again. No one foresaw that during the next twenty years, Germany would re-arm and become twice as powerful and twice as destructive to life and liberty. But yet it happened. And the Germans at the time believed that it was their destiny, while the rest of the world looked on and allowed them to rise to that level. American soldiers were in a state of shock when they stumbled upon the first concentration camps at the end of the World War II and were in a state of disbelief that humans were capable of doing those horrific acts to other humans on such a systematic, massive scale.

Although I believe we have gained enough support from allies that concentration camps are hardly likely, it is scary to watch any progression of discrimination advance throughout our military community. This is why I continue to fight.

Romm Gatongay is an air command and control Marine officer stationed in Quantico, Virginia. He originally hails from Torrance, California, a place that is considered a melting pot of many races and where he learned to accept others for their diverse backgrounds. Romm is happy to lend his time to AMPA, which he admires and considers a viable resource of knowledge and support for the spouses and significant others of gay and lesbian service members. His opinions expressed here are his own and do not represent the United States Marine Corps or the Department of Defense.

Works Cited

Allport, G. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.

La Corte, R. (2013, April 25). KOMO News. Retrieved from www.komonews.com: http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Bill-would-allow-businesses-to-deny-service-to-homosexuals–204788571.html

Matthew Shepard Foundation. (2013, April 27). Retrieved from www.matthewshepard.org: http://www.matthewshepard.org/our-story

Paulsson, S. (2011, February 17). BBC History. Retrieved from www.bbc.co.uk: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/genocide/holocaust_overview_01.shtml

United Human Rights Council: Genocide in Rwanda. (2013, April 27). Retrieved from www.unitedhumanrights.org: http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/genocide/genocide_in_rwanda.htm