how Deaf people made me liberal.

I recently used some of my “online viewing” time with Netflix to watch a documentary called “The Education of Shelby Knox.” If you haven’t seen it, it’s an interesting look at the life of a Christian high school student growing up in a Conservative Texan family. What makes her story interesting is that she is on a journey to exchange the “abstinence only” curriculum in her school district for a more inclusive sex education program. What really pulled me in was watching her struggle with the subjectivities of her faith and political ideologies. A scene that stood out for me was a interview portion with Shelby and her parents. Her father recounted the way she had been raised to be a Christian and a Republican while her mother lamented, “How did you become so liberal?”

I’ve asked myself this question many times. As I’ve mentioned, I was raised in a conservative branch of the Lutheran Church, where I was taught that women are subservient to men and a fella called Satan is lurking around every corner tempting me to sin. In 1996, my 11 year old self adamantly campaigned for Bob Dole, mostly on the platform that he wasn’t the immoral adulterer Bill Clinton. I was pro-life and anti-gay for one reason: that’s what G!d wanted — according to my pastors and teachers. Everything I needed to know about how to live a good life was outlined for me by these people in terms that were very black and white. I considered myself a conservative Christian up through the end of high school though, thinking back, I didn’t agree with many of the tenets that I had been taught to accept.

In spite of what I was taught at school, I had a different educational atmosphere at home. As the parents of three daughters, my mom and dad always reminded us that we could do or be anything we imagined without any mention of gender roles. My parents also made a point not to share their political leanings with my sisters and me in an attempt to encourage us to think for ourselves. But are these two experiences enough to have balanced the scales and turned me into a raging liberal? I didn’t think so. So what was it?

Many of my friends are familiar with the fact that my mother is hard-of-hearing and that my father works at a school for the Deaf. Because of this, I was raised not only bilingually but bi-culturally, an idea I didn’t fully comprehend until I went to college. In four years time, I met only one other person who had a deaf parent, but they didn’t use sign language. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded completely by hearing people, by hearing children of hearing people, by hearing people who either “knew someone who was deaf, like, in the fourth grade or something” or had never met a Deaf person before. I was out of my element.

In hopes of getting my “Deaf Culture fix,” I recently rented “Through Deaf Eyes” from Netflix. I had seen half of the documentary when it first came out over the summer and wanted to see the whole thing. It was while watching this documentary that I had an epiphany that explained my liberalism. The beginning of the documentary starts out with Deaf people sharing what it means to them to be Deaf. One example that stood out was this quote from Carolyn McCaskill, a professor of ASL and Deaf Studies:

Maybe a person can’t see and is that normal? Maybe it is. And maybe a person walks with a bit of a limp. Perhaps that’s normal to one person and not to another. What about left-handedness? Is that abnormal or is that normal?

The thing is, this film wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. I grew up with friends who had Deaf parents, visiting my dad at work where everyone used ASL, we even had a TTY in our home so my parents could communicate with Deaf friends and co-workers over the phone. Rhea Rhea, who is studying to be an ASL interpreter, shares with me that her Deaf Culture classes are common sense to her when they seem to be difficult for her peers who did not grow up with Deaf people. Thinking about this is when it all hit me.

I grew up not just thinking, but knowing that being Deaf was a completely normal thing. Just like being hearing was normal or wearing hearing aids was normal. I never saw Deafness as being different or a handicap the way the general population does. Being Deaf vs. being hearing has never been a black and white issue for me because they are not opposites–being hearing is not better than being Deaf. This was the first gray area I had encountered that would set me up for a lifetime of liberal thinking. Even if it was subconscious, so many other gray areas followed. If being straight is normal, does that mean being gay is has to be abnormal? Can they both be normal? Most people think Christianity is the only way to heaven, but some people think Islam is the right path. Why does one have to be right and the other wrong? Christianity is normal for Christians and Islam is normal for Muslims, right?

Conservative thought is often based on a black and white ideology: there are things that are definitely right and things that are definitely wrong. Little is left to the gray area in the middle that says, “Who knows? This can be right or wrong depending on the person or circumstance.” In school, I was taught in black and white terms: what is a sin and what is not. What is acceptable to G!d and what is not. What behaviors are normal and what are not.

Liberal thought does have it’s ethics of right vs. wrong, but much more of it is left to the gray area. At home and in the community, I lived in that gray area–in a place where what is “normal” could only be defined by the individual. Though it’s true that certain other life experiences have influenced my liberal thinking, my liberal thinking has also influenced my experience. I could argue that being gay made me a liberal, but I could also argue that being a liberal allowed me to be comfortable with the normality of being gay. I think it all comes down to that original gray area, the one that I have known all my life.

So that, my friends, is how Deaf people made me liberal.