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19 Dec 2008 04:52 pm

Changing Minds

A reader writes:

All the interpretations of the Warren pick I've read are that he's practicing business as usual, triangulation, appeasing the far-right religious nutters, bashing the gays, and on and on. As a 54-year-old woman, I was fortunate to be born into an era in which the great strides in gender equality were already won by the hard work of our mothers and grandmothers. Yet, I've endured crude misogyny, and have learned that I'm probably not in a small minority.

I run my own successful design business, but spent many early years in work situations where I was the only woman in an all-male shop. The one lesson I learned right off the bat is that equality and acceptance in one's day-to-day life can only be won on the individual level. We all need laws to insure our rights when they are threatened, but one cannot change a closed or bigoted mind by writing an article, or passing laws, or protesting in outrage, or marginalizing the haters, or calling them names, or turning one's back in outrage. The only way to change a mind is to change a heart, and the only way to do that is to open oneself to the other person and slowly slowly allow them to learn that you are not "other," you are not frightening, you are not immoral.

You are just like them. I'm not saying it changes every mind, but every mind that has been changed, has been changed at the personal level by getting to know an individual from the group they fear or despise.

I suspect Barack Obama is exquisitely aware of this from his own life of otherness and assimilation. Has anyone considered that perhaps he chose Rick Warren, not as a maneuver for his own political gain, but rather as a way of keeping Warren close and engaged in order to change HIS heart, therefore changing his mind. Imagine the influence of a Rick Warren telling his followers that he wrong about gays, that they are really OK and just like them? It's an amazing thought, and perhaps improbable, but who would know unless it's tried? I think this is where Obama is coming from, and I, for one, am eager to see just how it will all play out in the ensuing years.

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