IS THE "not gay chant really controversial? Before Alex Cortes wrote his guest column ("Not gay and proud of it," Nov. 14), for aspects of which he has since apologized ("An apology," letters, Nov. 19), it did not look that way in the opinion section of The Cavalier Daily.
The opposition to the chant was well represented here by columnists Josh Levy ("How best to silence homophobes," Nov. 12) and Alec Solotorovsky ("The new 'Not Gay,'" Nov. 7), in a guest column by Wyatt Fore and Patrick Lee of the Minority Rights Coalition ("Where all is bright and decent," Oct. 12), in an editorial ("Not OK," Oct. 15) and in an editorial cartoon by A.J. Kornblith (Oct. 15). But one side cannot have a controversy: A "controversy" is a dispute between sides that disagree. When only one side is represented, something is missing. Yet Kornblith, an opinion editor, said he didn't recall seeing a defense of the chant in this section this semester before Cortes's, and I came up empty-handed looking for one.
The nature of this issue makes clear that it really does have two sides. The fact is, people do the chant. If no one did the chant, its opponents would have nothing to oppose. And it's not a big assumption to suppose that at least some of the people who say the chant think it is OK -- perhaps even good -- to do so. The alternative would be that they are all doing something they believe to be wrong.
If there are people who believe in the chant, they ought to have their views in these pages. Yet Kornblith said there has been a dearth of pro-chant material submitted. So the newspaper had good reason to publish Cortes's column, and we should all hope that more defenders of the chant submit columns or letters. Both sides need to be heard. Errors that go unspoken go unrefuted. When we do not take our opponents in a debate seriously and examine their arguments, we handicap ourselves and risk weakening the norms of mutual respect by making our opponents feel excluded from a public debate that's important to them. And that's unwise, especially for a minority--sexual, political or otherwise.
Cortes said he was writing from a Catholic perspective, and he has been accused of failing to understand what his own religion has to say about the issues surrounding sexual orientation, and of presenting Catholicism in a false, and disreputable, light. One reader even e-mailed me with the theory that Cortes was mocking the chanters rather than defending them. At a forum he held in Minor Hall on Nov. 16, Cortes said, "I'm not a scholar on Christianity." This weekend, he told me on the phone that he had a Catholic-school education, but had learned more about the religion from his parents than at school. He said that he plans to do more reading over winter break, and that he wants to take religion courses at the University. He knows he has more to learn.
Yet we cannot expect everyone who offers an opinion in this or any newspaper to be a scholar, and even scholars have more to learn--that's why they do research. People must write from the knowledge and beliefs they have, and while one should strive to have an accurate assessment of how confident one should be in one's beliefs on particular subjects, human beings are as fallible on this point as on any other.
What we can expect is that people will take the time to think through what they want to say before they say it in print. They may still err, but they are likely to make better contributions to the discussion than if they write in unnecessary haste. Cortes had no deadline: The sooner he submitted his column, the sooner it could be printed, but it did not have to appear the day it did. He could have taken more time to think, to make sure he was saying exactly what he wanted to say--to occupy ground he would have been willing to defend. He should have done so. Instead, he said, he wrote the piece at 3 a.m. That was unwise. "I just thought the issue was hot," he said.
There was plenty of heat once the column was published. Cortes said he received an e-mail "basically every minute" for the first day. Some of them were quite hostile: One person, Cortes said, told him he and everyone who knows him should be "exterminated." But some of it was well-thought-out opposition, Cortes said. And well-thought-out disagreement is something people who write columns ought to hear.
Cortes said it was not the hostility that led him to apologize, but the "good pressure" to rethink what he had said. He apologized for some of it--both to "the Christian community" and to the "homosexual community." But he said that he has not changed his fundamental view of homosexual activity, and that he wants to take up the issue again.
It could be interesting.
Alexander R. Cohen is The Cavalier Daily's ombudsman. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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