Liam Payne: Divorcing Civil Rights from Family Values

First some points that are hopefully common sense:

1) Publicly complimenting a z-lister after a homophobic scandal is not a good idea. You have to know that's going to get a lot of media attention.

2) If you are a public figure, you do not have a personal twitter account. Your social media is just an extension of your business and brand.

3) Young celebrities really want to have their cake and eat it too. On one hand, they want to be respected as true artists, musicians, and want people to think they are intelligent and creative. However, as soon as the shit hits the fan, they start arguing how they are still young and just trying to figure it all out.

3a) Young celebrities don't complain about being in the media until it turns against them. They have no problem taking months to promote their albums and endorsement deals. However, once the media wants to analyze their beliefs, they think the media is petty and needs to focus on more important subjects. Your album release isn't important. You endorsing a family known for bigotry? Much more important.

4) Pop culture often uses, misuses, and abuses the idea of Freedom of Speech. The first amendment was not a free pass to say whatever you want without judgment. It was created to ensure that American citizens could express their grievances about the government without fear of negative repercussions. Celebrities use freedom of speech to suggest that no one can feel negatively about their opinions. However, if freedom of speech protects Kanye West's twitter rants, then it also protects everyone who disagrees with him. Freedom of speech is not one sided.

4a) People calling you out on twitter does not violate your first amendment right. Freedom of speech is an issue of constitutional law, and people not liking your opinion is not a Supreme Court case in the making. Until someone sues you for your tweet, the first amendment is a non-factor.

4b) A person's character is ultimately determined by what they do and say, or lack thereof. It is a rare privilege when people are actually judged by their actions with no consideration of their gender, race, or sexuality. This attitude that an "opinion is an opinion" and therefore all opinions should be taken lightly is simplistic. Opinions/beliefs/values can be wrong. Slavery is wrong. Prejudice is wrong. Racism is wrong. These are not just opinions, these are deeply engrained systems that hold some people are inherently inferior to others. If you are a citizen of the free world, and especially an American citizen, you have an obligation as a citizen to believe that freedom and equality are inherent to ever human being. It's an odd paradox, but yes, freedom has it's limits. You can speak freely, but you can't slander. You can live freely, but you can't systematically oppress entire groups of people. You can do as you please, but you can't murder someone. You can do as you please, but anyone can feel however they please about you doing as you please.

To summarize: Freedom doesn't just protect you. It also protects those who disagree. But through the principles of citizenship and rationality, we are give a framework for thinking, for developing beliefs, that guides us to make good/right decisions. If you fall out of that framework, you are supposed to have the values to change course, not just keep making poor judgments.

***

With those points out of the way, let's get to the main question behind the Liam Payne/Duck Dynasty debacle: Can you support someone's "family values" but not their politics? Is their a difference between being a homophobe and being a great family man?

Liam Payne said he valued the way the Robertson's kept their family together. Personally, my belief, which could be wrong, is the following: The greatest family value is acceptance, true love. Family members may bicker and fight, but at the end of the day everyone feels UNCONDITIONALLY loved and ultimately accepted.

Can the Robertson family claim this? No. If the integrity of your family is dependent on everyone being heterosexual, then that is not unconditional love. If a member of your family is gay and fears your judgment, hates themselves because they think their disgusting and will lead men to hump beasts, and/or sit in quiet agony as they live closeted to maintain family order, then family values have failed.

Furthermore, there is no admirable family value in a father teaching his children superiority and hate. Bigotry being the bonds that unite a family is not something a free world should value.

Gay people have families. Gay people are sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers. To say that you can separate gay civil rights from family values automatically suggests that you can divorce gay people from family. However, just because no one in your family is gay (or has revealed themselves to be gay) and can therefore be happy does not mean you have great family values. Sooner or later, someone in your family is going to be gay. And if their sexuality brings your happy family crashing, or reveals it to just be the facade that it is, then your values were not the bricks that built your home...but instead just a bunch of flimsy cards stacked together to resemble a house.

***

The secondary question behind the scandal:

Let's assume family values wasn't the right word. Let's just say Liam Payne is a fan. Every human being has probably enjoyed the music of a womanizer, racist, or homophobe. Is it okay to just ignore politics and enjoy someone's work?

It depends on one factor: can the said public entertainer keep their mouths shut about their beliefs. I'm not talking about violating their freedom of speech by having an outside party shut them up. No, I mean: Can an individual exercise the self control necessary to not state their politics, whether rationally or religiously justified?

If a celebrity uses the public platform they have built to state their politics, then they stopped being an entertainer and have become a politician. Also they put Americans in the extremely uncomfortable position of having to decide A) if they're going to react and B) what it says about them if they do or don't? Our nation's character is defined by what people do publicly and hence also by our public reaction. Our condemnation of George Zimmerman says something about us, and our slut shaming also says something about us. If we let incident X go and fight Incident Y, then that says we value Y more than X. It doesn't matter how we feel. What matters is what we do. The thoughts we keep inside do not determine our character.

At minimum, we can all agree that Liam Payne thought civil rights was something that did not have to be addressed when he engaged Robertson on Twitter. You may think that is right or wrong, but he prioritized being a fan of a TV show to the point he neglected the value of equality.

Let's illustrate through some more extreme examples. Using extremes can often help clarify the ethics of a situation.

1) If a man said Hitler was a great leader and commended him on unifying Germany as a great nation, would you question this man's character?

2) If you met George Zimmerman on the street and he was very nice to you, would you become his friend? Would you invite him to parties and be seem laughing at his jokes while out at lunch?

3) If a pedophile sang a song that was beautiful, would you go to his concert?

If you can consistently answer "yes" or "no" to these questions, then you have a guiding moral that shapes your actions. This moral can guide you even in smaller instances. If you go back and forth, then you are probably trying to justify your feelings.

Living in a society where gay youth are driven to hanging themselves because of bullying and are attacked by groups of men for holding hands in public, there's a reason why we as a society have to care when a powerful teen role model aligns himself, even accidentally, with a homophobe. In pop culture, "accidental" doesn't matter. What you do is what you do. You are not entitled to have society fish around trying to find ways to give you the benefit of the doubt. Even if Payne's greatest offense was marginalizing the Roberton's scandal to publicly support Duck Dynasty as a show, that's enough to send up a red flag.

Is Payne accurate in assuming the media was lazy to not contact him and ask him a bunch of questions about something he said, not in an interview, but on twitter? It doesn't matter. As a public figure, you're beliefs and values need to be clear in how you express yourself.