MARGINALISATION DOES NOT ENSURE OPENMINDEDNESS.

I remember a conversation I had with my father, over the telephone, when I was in my second year of high school. where he asked if I called any of the first year students “vegies.” My response was “No,” and he replied, “Well, I guess you don’t to do to others what you didn’t like done to you.” I remember my disgust with a kid who was a bully calling two kids in their first year by that name and one of them gave him a fair show of the middle finger.

Why do people do such things? Well, some people feel they are so inadequate that they can or should pick on people they see as below them. Some bullies are being tormented at home or by other kids and they then try to find somebody weaker than them to put down to make themselves look good. I remember a kid younger that me who had thin arms and was shorter than me and had a very thin build trying to torment me, and yet he was in a losing fight against another kid. A kid I was friendly with told me that the kid was a real wimp. I thought, “Well, if he thinks he’s tough by picking on someone who won’t thump him, that’s what he is.”

I have seen people from marginalised backgrounds, like people from different ethnicities being homophobic, LGBTIQA people being racist, and the like.

If we examine Australian history, some right-wingers bring up the fact that the union movement was racist. Well, the first fact to that is, so was every damn political party in the country. The one piece of legislation that all political parties agreed upon was the Immigration Restriction Act. The union movement had furniture that was made in Australia by Chinese workers stamped with, “Made with Chinese Labour.” The union movement and some other politicians, were opposed to Chinese and Japanese immigration to Australia because they were work for lower wages and they feared that European workers would lose their jobs to them. Some right-wing politicians saw them intermarrying with Europeans as a threat to racial purity and that, in itself, was on par with pre-Holocaust Nazi ideology, as a person was considered Jewish by the Nazis even if a person only had one Jewish grandparent.

I saw some immigrants, who would have been called racist names in the 1950s and 1960s supporting a preposterously dangerous right-wing populist who wanted to be able to use such racist names without penalty or censure saying that they voted for her (hanson) because they were opposed to marriage equality. (I know Bernardi is an idiot and comparing it to bestiality was a nonsensical argument).

Conversely, I have seen some LGBTIQA people who are racist. And some of them are right-wing voters for whom marriage equality is their only liberal principle.

I have wondered why immigrants subjected to racism would support a racist and I have wondered why people who were marginalised would want to marginalise others. I go by the principle that if you didn’t like it being done to you, then don’t do it to other people. So, in an ideal situation, LGBTIQA people should not be racist. Immigrants, even if LGBTIQA rights are not commonplace in their country of birth, should think, “Okay, we have been subjected to racism and discrimination, so we should stand against discrimination against LGBTIQA people and help them fight for what we fought for.”