Images Of The Great Divide
The past few months, as I’ve said to a few folks recently, have been the perfect time to be a writer writing about gay issues. Never in our history has the gay community been at the center of so much attention, and never in our history has the gay community had so many allies – and enemies. (Of course, except during the Holocaust.)
I read so many blogs and stories and newspapers and tweets every day. My eyes are always tired, my brain is never off, and all these months I’ve been looking for new ways to communicate what’s in my head, what’s going on, what people are thinking and feeling, saying, and doing. Today, I thought I’d take a different approach. After I wrote, “Only In America: Double-Plus Good?” I got a lot of folks asking me who these organizations were, and what were they really about. (Surely a sign that I was on the right track!)
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, let me share with you a week’s worth of information in a few images. Here are the tag clouds of six of the most rabidly anti-gay blogs around, surprisingly, beautifully rendered with the help of Wordle, “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.” To be fair, I used the main blog address of each of these right-wing organizations, on the same day (today) and used the same parameters: maximum word count, language, no numbers, etc. I selected visually interesting, random image generations.
Honestly, I assumed that I’d find pictures filled with hate and anger and anti-gay messages. Instead, I was surprised, and I realized something: all of us, all of us who write about civil rights, news, politics, marriage equality, family, freedom, all of us often use the same words, often surprisingly with the same frequency. It’s the meaning of those words, what those words mean when we read them, and the meaning the authors impose on us when they write them, that makes all the difference. It’s not our words that separate us; indeed, it’s our words that link us, that, in a way, unite us. It’s what we do with them that is the great divide.
Click on images for larger size. Click again for full size. Left to right, top to bottom: Beetle Blogger, National Organization For Marriage, United Families International, Family Research Council, American Family Association, Protect Marriage.