EDITORIAL – Day of Silence says more than words can

If the normally talkative kid in your class isn’t raising his hand today, there’s a reason for… If the normally talkative kid in your class isn’t raising his hand today, there’s a reason for that. If you see people on campus with their mouths shut, handing out little cards, there’s a reason for that, too.

National Day of Silence, presented by Pitt’s Rainbow Alliance and sponsored nationally by several other gay rights and student organizations, is today. As part of the Day of Silence, those within, and supportive of, the gay community don’t speak in order to protest the unfair silencing of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students. The day’s goal is to make others aware of the discrimination and harassment these students face as part of their daily existence.

Seem like a good enough idea, one that people, no matter their views on gay rights, could agree on? After all, it takes some chutzpah to argue with silent people.

Well, the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal group, has that sort of homophobic chutzpah. Rather than living and letting live or loving their neighbors or some such thing, it’s running what it calls a “Day of Truth,” an event meant to counter the Day of Silence. Focus on the Family, that lovely organization that brought up the possible un-square-ness of SpongeBob’s pants, is also participating.

Now, some of us are philosophy majors, and we’ve spent some time thinking about the concept of “truth.” Whatever it is that Alliance and its allies want to accomplish by countering a silent protest, it’s certainly not truth. It’s perhaps faith or beliefs or any number of other things, but it’s not truth.

The truth is that groups like these give mainstream Christians, and the conservatives with which the Christian right aligns itself, a bad name. Many Christians know the difference between holding a belief — that homosexuality is a sin — and acting on it in an obnoxious way.

True conservatives, those Bill of Rights-publishing, strict constructionists of yore, would rather swear oaths to Stalin than govern people’s sex lives. “Christian” and “conservative” are not synonymous with “homophobic,” which is exactly the kind of thinking that the Day of Truth advocates.

Of course, they don’t have the guts to say it out loud. The Alliance purports that it’s running the Day of Truth as a way countering the silencing of those who’re opposed to homosexuality. (Just ask Sen. Rick Santorum how silenced he’s been.)

An Associated Press article reported that one of the Alliance’s attorneys cited a case in which a student was forced to change his shirt, which read, “Homosexuality is Shameful,” as an instance in which the student’s beliefs were unfairly silenced. (Would, by this logic, a “Black People are Shameful” shirt be OK? We’re guessing no.)

Here’s where the difference between holding beliefs and imposing them on others comes into play. The Day of Silence seeks to end discrimination, not to impose an agenda. The Day of Truth seeks to allow little punks to wear hate shirts to school as a way of intimidating their classmates — just the kind of thing the Day of Silence wants to end.

So we’d like to give a very quiet shout-out to Rainbow Alliance and to all those students whose voices have been silenced by homophobes. Any fight worth fighting means that you have to encounter idiots, jerks and haters, and these are idiots, jerks and haters of the worst sort. Stay strong and let your voices be heard, even if they are silent ones.