Co-opting Love

Co-opting Love

Third grade can be tough for husky-gened boys with dual penchants for strawberry-scented redheads and other boys. Elementary schoolyards can easily become home base for meanness and reductionism, two proclivities that inhabit most eight-year-old bosoms. Those same third graders easily immerse themselves in the rhetoric of love: in the clear and unambiguous enunciations of who is and is not deserving of one’s love. Implied in such proclamations is ownership of love, that it is somehow off limits to those not included in the normative society of lovers. In my 1983, love and hate coupled and grew alongside the concepts of “opposites” and “revenge” with as much ferocity as long division and times tables. 

In the intervening three decades, I’ve learned that “opposites” are odd constructs and that there are far more nuanced spaces available between love and hate. Such space has revealed that the opposite of love is not hate; the opposite of hate is indifference, a far more sinister foil. Hate should stand on its own in a different dialectic made for mean third graders (or for presidents with a similar level of maturity for whom “revenge” also endures in its pettiness).  

And then we all grew up and, by the time we reached adolescence—or our early twenties, at least—we realized that everybody was capable of love. Everybody was capable of being loved. 

In my early twenties, I found my first love—a ginger boy, bucking two third grade trends at once—giving form to the theory of everything that flowed from the wellspring of affection. If I could turn a redhead (or maybe, oppositely, be turned) anything was possible: romantic love had become real and accessible to all—even me! 

We’d learned that love could be many things: brotherly, romantic, affectionate, Jesus-like and unbounded. One word, many things. But a strangeness happened on the way to equality. Love was co-opted as a political term—stripped of its intrinsic joy: a slogan meant to divide rather than multiply. 

While a whole new generation was reaching out for validation, love became re-acquainted with hate, but in a sinister way. There was, as if in third grade again, no space between the two. If one could not love, we were re-trained, one must hate: the childish dialectic made for powerful memes and demagoguery. 

Pulling on heartstrings is a partisan tool nearly as popular as loosening federal purse strings. In, perhaps, the most wonderfully powerful precedent for gay marriage advocacy, an activist honed in upon Loving v. Virginia in which the 1967 SCOTUS declared, “Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man’, fundamental to our very existence and survival.” They were right and concurred unanimously, nine to zero. The Supreme Court struck down bans on interracial marriage as the template for rights-fighting. Whether the surname of its star was an accident or not, “loving,” became the battlecry that has echoed ever since.

As well-intentioned, yet horrendous-in-practice policies like Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell and Defense of Marriage gained traction, the push from the activist-Left was to claim “love” as a rally.  “Our love is legitimate: Redefine marriage. Else, you hate us.” 

Unanswerable and true on their faces, brilliantly conceived examples such as  “Love is Love,” “NoH8,” and “Love Trumps Hate” emerged across the decades as slogans meant—not only to be incontrovertibly true—as partisan mindfucks. 

In response, confused families of men and women—now “traditional” families instead of merely “families”—fought to maintain the tradition of love that their kind had owned for millennia. Loving made sense, but the new evolution of love raised discomfort and ire—they called it hate. Legislation like Prop8 in California and the spate of similar initiatives concurredly (sic) confirmed the reaction. There was no room among the lovers for incrementalism. Love and hate became more like dodgeballs aimed at the least agile in the schoolyard: mean and haplessly cast in vengeance.  

By aligning love with a political stance in an unapologetically dialectic paradigm, the ability to freely and openly love eroded: for everybody. Without love, civility quickly followed.

When gay politics adopted love and marriage—the great political horse and carriage—as its betrothed rallying cries, how could anybody respond rationally without seeming callous or heartless? If love, it turned out, is owned by one’s political foes, what does one have left? Or right?

And so it was that the right,  guided by an odd mix of laissez-faire and Christianity was denied its partial ownership of its signature, Jesus-inspired emotion. That expression of adoration between a mother and her child, between a husband and wife, between a messiah and the forgiven was appropriated. More specifically, it was confiscated. “Loving” became a rhetorical 

banner draped over everything we, as Americans, had left.

Unlike “democracy,” “rights,” “constitutionality,” and even “equality” itself, “love” snuffed out its opposition, smothering it under oxygen-capturing, flaming rainbow flags. Proclaiming one’s love became as rhetorically charged as welfare checks and Obama phones. And in this new CO2-rich atmosphere, where things were not only (ostensibly) warming but combusting, if one did not endorse gay marriage, they were filled—in a third-grade way of bifurcating a simple, unnuanced world—with “hate.” 

At the same time, the right—for so long lording jealously over love’s body of rhetoric—seemed to nail it up on a cross of dramatized schoolyard martyrdom. The best they could muster was “Love the sinner, hate the sin” which neither fit well on bumper stickers nor resonated outside of orange juice commercials, Papal proclamations or fundamentalist pulpits. Eventually, red-faced and tea-partied, the right waved its white flag: “Fine, we didn’t want it anyway.” 

Had that “loving” rhetoric been contained to the specific issue of marriage—where the link between icon and actuality was less tenuously related—perhaps the conflagration around hate could have been contained. Instead it spread like a drought-fueled wildfire across issues and candidates and political enemies. 

Having lost the power of the soundbite within the twenty-four hour news cycle, love became a whispered secret among  traditionalists. “Of course, I love. I know what love is. I love my son and my spouse and my neighbor. I get that you love. Don’t we all love?” Then, sheepishly:  "Will we see you at Thanksgiving dinner?"

“No,“ they were told. “You don’t love like we do.” And further, “You hate.” YOU HATE US. 

Now owned as a political word, it could not be claimed without retorts of hypocrisy to drown it out. 

And that is how the right lost love. 

Once deprived of love, the right was left, clearly and unambiguously, with anger, and hurt, and resentment. And so, when a firebrand straight-talker emerged as a political leader, even though he spoke about trade and immigration and straight-talking itself, a slice of America heard a strategy for reclaiming its piece of love. 

In the interregnum—well, between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s—the right was left behind. Family feasts were boycotted and then the inauguration. Strangely enough, love, now owned by the left, was transferred into its own anger and resentment in the wake of the democratic transfer of power. Already divided and  isolated, the right turned the fraction of love that remained toward itself; it confirmed the narrative that had been forced upon it. 

Love has been squandered, rhetorically and actually. 

In order to save it, may we redistribute love? Populists and progressives—even traditional Conservatives—should agree on this. Even once off-limits, strawberry-scented gingers in their forty-somethings can agree. Love does not need hate to define itself, it only needs love. This Valentine’s Day, let’s decouple them and stop acting like a bunch of third graders. 

This Valentine’s Day, let’s return to multiplication tables and deny division. Let’s simply love and let love.  

Read more of my poetry, essays, and stories at Momentitiousness.com