Recently, I had a discussion here with a friend of mine. I held that it is perfectly coherent to publicly support basic equal rights for ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities, while still making privately jokes about their ways of life. My friend accused me of hypocrisy.
Now here’s a quote from Bhikhu Parekh:
“In most societies libel is an offense. Broadly speaking it consists in making public, untruthful damaging remarks about an individual that go beyond fair comment. Libel is an offense, not so much because it causes pain to, or offends the feelings of, the individual concerned, for the damaging and untruthful remarks made in private do not constitute libel, as because they lower him in the eyes of others, damage his social standing, and harm his reputation” (bold emphasis mine; italic emphasis in original).
[source: Bhikhu Parekh, “The Rushdie Affair: Research Agenda for Political Philosophy”, in: Will Kymlicka (ed.), The Rights of Minority Cultures, OUP, 1995, p. 314]
The legal distinction between private and public shows that there are things you can do in private, but not in public. So it is perfectly coherent to publicly support, say, the rights of gays, while still be able to have a good laugh when you hear, in private, a good joke about homosexuals. But is it also a moral thing to do both? I think so. A simple joke is something which is not serious: neither in its content, nor in its purpose. This is why a joke cannot be considered as “libel”: it does not intend harm (it does not intend to demean the social status of a gay person). We “just” joke (now we’re laughing at you as a gay, and then probably we’ll be laughing at me as a blonde). Of course, this is totally different from taking a stance in mass-media and saying that homosexuals are ill, disgusting, etc.
DISSENT! 