Equality

For the purpose of discussion, I’ll assume a common starting point. It is certainly my hope that anyone reading this article agrees that equality is and should be a foundational value within our community. Normally where people’s views diverge is in what they understand equality to mean.

There are, I think, a lot of people who think equality in the context of this discussion is the fact that everyone has the equal right to say or do whatever the fuck they want. This is certainly one kind of equality, but to reduce equality to this makes two key mistakes.

First, it treats equality as merely a means to the end of liberty, rather than its own value. We don’t only think people should be equal so that they can be free, we think both that people should be equal and that they should be free. In any case, freedoms are typically constrained by some kind of harm principle. You’re allowed to do whatever you want, provided you don’t harm anyone. So even treating equality as a libertarian principle, we run into some hurdles in justifying the use of homophobic slurs.

Second, it’s disingenuous to talk about people enjoying equal freedoms without an analysis of the status quo. For example, we might imagine two people applying for a job being told that they are to run a race in order to determine who gets the job. They both have equal opportunity to get the job, and the job is being decided on merit. So far everything seems good. However, what if one of the people only has one leg? Suddenly the situation doesn’t look so equal or fair. Why are people with one leg being asked to run a race against people with two legs?

Another way to look at this is to imagine that life is just a game which some people are able to play in easy mode while others are forced to play in hard mode. Lets imagine that across both easy and hard mode the basic rules and physics of the game are the same, but in hard mode there’s simply extra challenges that don’t exist in easy mode. We’d fool ourselves if we thought the game was fair just because similar rules apply across both easy and hard mode. For the game to really be fair everyone should be able to play at the same difficulty.

Would a fair game force certain people to always choose hard mode while others could choose any difficulty?

A similar statement can be made about the social status quo inside our community, and within broader society at large. To ensure equality between those belonging to privileged groups and those belonging to marginalised or oppressed groups, it is not enough to merely say ‘let there be equality’. For a system that is procedurally equal, but substantively unequal, is still unequal.

So, in such a system, where there are groups of people who are worse off than others, in order to arrive at a position of equality we need to do more than simply give everyone equal freedoms or opportunities. We need to actively combat those factors which underpin the existing inequality. We need to ask what is it in our society and that is oppressive to a certain group of people and how can we get rid of that thing?

In what follows, I will argue that taking a casual attitude towards homophobia and homophobic slurs is one such thing — a thing that creates the conditions for inequality and oppression within our community. I will provide first a subjective argument and then an objective argument followed by a few responses to common objections.