September 2020 - Page 2 of 2 - We Are Not Divided

Victoria was sitting on the hood of a parked car looking down at the number she had been given by a staffer at the Planned Parenthood clinic where she’d had her abortion a few days earlier. She felt sure she had made the right decision by terminating the pregnancy. She was just 20 years old, holding down three jobs and on the cusp of finishing college.

Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had let her Catholic, pro-life family down. “It felt to me to be very shameful,” she says. She called the number and, before she knew it, she was telling the woman, a peer counselor for an organization called Exhale, about a recurring dream she had been having. “I would be speaking to my sister, but she would not turn to face me when we talked — no matter how I walked around her or asked her to.”

The counselor listened intently and helped Victoria — who asked that her last name not be used to protect her family’s privacy — to reflect on her experience. “It was really good for me to put everything on pause and be like, ‘Oh, this is actually a little bit confusing what I’m feeling,” she says. She called the talk line a few more times and each conversation was the same. “Nobody said anything except things like, ‘You deserve to heal’ or ‘You deserve peace.’”

At a time when attitudes toward abortion are deeply divided along ideological lines, organizations like Exhale — whose clients include both feminists from California and churchgoers from the Bible Belt — are a rarity.

Most abortion counseling organizations are either pro-life or pro-choice. Pro-life organizations believe abortion is morally wrong and often see counseling as an opportunity to “save” women who have committed what they view as a grave sin, sometimes through shame or coercion. Pro-choice organizations seek to normalize abortion and often downplay or dismiss women’s feelings of loss, confusion, or regret after having one.

“There’s really no space to wrestle with it because we’re just screaming over one another,” says Susan Chorley, a Baptist minister and president and co-founder of Exhale. Chorley got pregnant for the second time when her son was two and her marriage was on the rocks. The thought of having another child overwhelmed her and she chose to have an abortion. After the procedure, she didn’t dare talk about it with people at her church for fear of being ostracized. At the same time, pro-choice groups didn’t acknowledge the full range of emotions she felt about her abortion, which included intense sadness.

Both sides made her feel judged. “It was like, ‘Just do it and who cares’ or, ‘If you do that, you’re forever damned,’” Chorley says. “It’s so much more complex.”

The isolation she felt led Chorley, who is still a minister, to co-found Exhale, a non-profit that helps people process their experiences around abortion without any preconceived notions about what that should look like. “It doesn’t matter where you are on the political spectrum,” says Chorley. “Your experience, your questioning of what it means, your questioning of who you are as a result of it — all those things are in that conversation. And there’s no space to have that conversation if we’re just talking about whether it’s right or wrong.”

exhale staff — Staff and volunteers at Exhale. Photos courtesy of Exhale

Founded in 2000, Exhale is staffed by 40 volunteers from across the country trained to act as non-partisan, non-judgmental sounding boards for women (and sometimes men) who have experienced abortion. It has staunchly resisted pressure from donors and others to plant its flag in either the pro-life or pro-choice camps. Instead, it has tried to carve out a space, which it calls “pro-voice,” in the sparsely occupied territory between the two extremes.

“I think that some of the division and isolation that we’re experiencing in this country has been because there haven’t been enough opportunities for people across those quote-unquote divides to find one another, to know one another, to listen to one another,” says Chorley. “Ultimately, that’s what we want to create in this space.”

The organization recently hosted a series of virtual healing circles for people who have had an abortion and have also been victims of violence (many women make the decision to abort because they have been victims of sexual assault or domestic abuse). The circles consisted of three activities per week, including journaling, yoga and weekly group discussions, for a period of six weeks. At any time, people can connect with a counselor via the organization’s text line (this year, Exhale transitioned management of the talk line to another organization, Connect and Breathe).

Most people reach out because they have nobody else to talk to or are afraid of what people will say. “You need to sit there and hold a safe space for them so they can talk about their feelings,” says Jenna Sprague, a peer counselor for Exhale who also sits on the organization’s board. “It’s giving people the chance to actually use their voice.”

Crushed by negative news?

Clients set the agenda for the conversation with peer counselors following their cues, right down to what language they use. “If they say baby, we reflect that back and talk about their baby,” Sprague says.

Text line counselors attend eight hours of virtual training over two weekends, where they role play situations they may encounter with clients — a college student grappling with the decision, a father wanting to support his teenage daughter, a grandmother coming to terms with an abortion she had years ago.

One of the goals of the training is to unpack participants’ assumptions about abortion.

“Your experience, your questioning of what it means, your questioning of who you are as a result of it — all those things are in that conversation.”

When Sprague trained with Exhale in 2016, the organization was doing in-person sessions at their now shuttered office in Oakland, California. In one session, the trainer asked participants questions like, “Do you believe abortion is a form of killing?” and “Is abortion a form of birth control?” “We had a ‘Yes’ section and a ‘No’ section and you could stand anywhere along that wall,” Sprague recalls. After hearing why other participants felt the way they did, several people shifted from their original positions along the wall.

For Sprague, this simple exercise was revealing. “It was a great way to tangibly see that it’s not a black-and-white issue. There are different layers to this.”

That approach reflects a level of empathy and complexity that is arguably missing from the abortion debate — but it hasn’t been an easy sell.

“The middle ground isn’t flashy,” says Sprague. “Being on the extremes…it brings in more money, it brings in more followers, it generates more conversation.” In recent years, the organization has struggled to attract donors and funding constraints have forced it to scale down, including divesting the talk line.

Despite these challenges, Chorley isn’t budging. “I’ve given up on trying to fight to belong,” she says. “I am committed to creating space for people who want a nuanced conversation.”

As the pace of change in our world accelerates, humanity is confronting unprecedented challenges: the climate crisis, economic inequality, endemic military conflict, the coronavirus pandemic, police brutality and systemic racism. At a deep, primal level, this degree of transformation triggers anxiety both about the future and about who we are. We often wonder, will we even have a future?

But as we approach uncertain futures, there are many paths we can take. Some incite more fear and polarization, while others encourage cooperation, collaboration and solidarity. One makes the “other” a source of that fear and anxiety. A more hopeful approach sees each other as a source of connection and possibility.

This is the time to discern the difference between them — between actions that can instigate what we call breaking, and those that can lead to what we call bridging. Breaking causes fractures; bridging fosters cohesion. When we break, we propagate a fabricated notion of separateness. When we bridge, we soften our identities. We discover multiple identities.

But bridging is not same-ing. Colorblindness, assimilation and smoothing over difference as though it does not matter bypasses much needed repairs we need to make.

solidarity — Credit: Neil Moralee / Flickr

Bridging is about increasing acceptance of diverse peoples, values and beliefs while giving us greater access to different parts of ourselves. Building bridges can help expand our social networks, revitalize our communities and establish a more fair and equitable society. It can help us build a large “we” that does not demand assimilation.

So we have a choice. We can either turn on each other, or toward each other.

We can turn our attention to the version of our current reality that says that our common bond is wearing away. Or, we can pivot toward ever-present examples of hope, and find that solidarity is the modality that enables us to thrive.

We find hope in stories of the Jewish and Arab women in Israel driving hundreds of Bedouin women from their remote villages to polling stations to protect their right to vote. We find it in the youth soccer program in Lewiston, Maine, where Somali refugees play side by side with their American teammates to set an example for the rest of their community. We find it in the NFL’s reversal of its position on players taking a knee during the national anthem, and the league’s eventual support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

We also find hope in the fact that BLM is widely embraced by Americans: two-thirds of U.S. adults support the movement, including majorities of white (60%), Hispanic (77%), and Asian (75%) Americans. The growing diversity within the movement is illustrative and informative.

These examples and statistics signal a sea change. Both individuals and institutions are dislodging entrenched belief systems and rebuking pressure to “stick with the party line.” While there’s still much work to be done, these are important representations of bridging in this historic moment as we work to abolish long-standing oppression.

Stories of bridging not only offer a salve in a fractured world, they provide tangible frameworks and replicable strategies. They teach us that oneness is not sameness, and that we can overcome the false illusion of separateness by honoring our differences to weave toward common purpose with many tributaries. We can transcend the notion that difference divides us, and instead see that it makes us stronger.

This moment finds us at an inflection point. We can choose to continue the well-worn path of exclusion, supremacy and othering, fueled by narratives of fear and threats. Or we can elevate stories and practices of mutuality and interdependence. We can interrogate the stories we have and identify what might be the most productive and life-affirming story we can inhabit. We can co-create stories where we care about each other. We don’t yet know how our story will end, but this is a great place to start.

This essay is adapted from On Bridging by john a. powell and Rachel Heydemann.

Last fall, Jax Richards ducked into a coffee shop near the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis to talk about criminal justice reform at a discussion hosted by a student organization. Richards is a junior majoring in economics and public policy, so he is no stranger to discussing hot-button political issues. He considers himself politically liberal on almost every issue though he emphasizes that he doesn’t “walk the party line.” He’s been called a “baby killer” by conservatives for believing in a woman’s right to an abortion and “incompetent” and “stupid” by those to his left for not supporting Medicare for All. A lifelong Boy Scout, he was labeled a “fascist” by some for attending the national jamboree in 2017 where President Trump spoke.

With criminal justice reform, however, the issue is personal. Richards survived childhood abuse at the hands of his father, who is now a convicted felon. When he sat down with eight other students at the discussion, hosted by the OSU chapter of a national student group called BridgeUSA, he had a hardline view of how the U.S. should treat people convicted of crimes.

“We should throw the book at them,” he told them. “I believed in the death penalty and that prison should not be a top priority when we start addressing social justice and social change.”

When students started making the case for a rehabilitation rather than punishment model for addressing criminal justice, the conversation could have easily gone off the rails, with Richards drawing on his backstory to shut down dissenting views. “I did what a lot of people do with an emotional issue,” he says. “I came right off the bat and said I think rehabilitating the prison system isn’t feasible and my personal experience was what I used as my evidence.”

But the conversation did not devolve into a shouting match. Rather than push back or retreat to their preconceived views, the other students were empathetic to Richards’ experience. They asked him questions to better understand his mindset. Some brought more empirical evidence to the conversation about the disproportionate incarceration rates of people of color and offered up alternative European criminal justice models that focus on reintegrating convicted criminals into society.

An hour and a half later, Richards had begun to soften his view. “That conversation with BridgeUSA opened up new possibilities and curiosities for me to learn more about alternatives to hardline punishment,” he says. “It also provided more objective opinions from my peers and was a supportive environment that understood why I would hold those views.”

While Richards didn’t walk away that fall day with his convictions changed, it sparked him to explore the issue more in depth in his classes, through his own research and in conversations with others. Several months later in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, he has come around to a different attitude. “At the end of the day, rehabilitating individuals is a lot more beneficial as opposed to putting them in a horrible system.”

BridgeUSA is a national campus-based organization working to promote civil discourse in an increasingly polarized era through facilitated small group discussions. As higher education institutions struggle to balance free speech policies, safe spaces and deplatforming, BridgeUSA is one of several groups working to foster intellectual tolerance on college campuses. For Richards, the experience captures the best of what the college experience can be for young people still working through their opinions and worldviews.

“Bridge isn’t even at the level of contentious political family dinners,” says Richards. “The closest comparison I can make to the conversations I’ve had at Bridge are the long midnight car rides I’ve had with some of my best friends — not debates, but conversations of mutual understanding.”

That spirit of friendly, empathetic curiosity was sorely lacking at the University of California, Berkeley on February 1, 2017. That evening, right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to give a speech amid a climate of rising ultra-conservative and white nationalist views just weeks after Donald Trump was inaugurated as U.S. president. Student protesters attempted to block the event nonviolently. They were eventually joined by self-identified anti-fascists who turned the protest into a riot by launching fireworks at police, then smashing store windows on campus and in downtown Berkeley. University police put the campus on lockdown and canceled the speech.

“The only dominant narratives are the extremes. Not extremes in political ideology but extremes in terms of temperament. The norm is crazy discourse.”

BridgeUSA co-founder Manu Meel was a freshman at the time. He was leaving math class when he found himself caught in the melee. He later ended up in a campus building watching CNN, which was broadcasting a live feed of his own college going up in flames.

“I was shocked at the state of democratic engagement and what this means for higher education and learning,” he says.

In the aftermath of the February riot and subsequent campus unrest over controversial conservative pundits like Ben Shapiro and Ann Coulter, who were met with a sometimes violent response from far-left demonstrators, the university appointed a free speech commission to examine the recent events. The commission grappled with UC Berkeley’s legacy as the bastion of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, when students protested for the right to discuss political issues like the Vietnam War on campus. In 2017, the Berkeley College Republicans and invited speakers, who ranged from political commentators to fringe alt-right activists, argued that they also had a right to free speech for their views.

Crushed by negative news?

Meel volunteered on a student council advising the commission, which concluded that students are either apathetic about politics or, if they are engaged, they take radically polarized approaches like right-wing trolling or anti-fascist property damage because violence and destructive engagement is the only model of discourse.

“The only dominant narratives are the extremes,” says Meel. “Not extremes in political ideology but extremes in terms of temperament. The norm is crazy discourse.”

That conclusion inspired Meel to engage with what he saw as a silent majority — those who were neither rioting in black bloc nor reveling in right-wing provocateurs — in the hopes of fostering an alternative mode of political discourse. Soon after the Milo riots, students at Notre Dame, which had started a non-partisan political discussion group called BridgeND, reached out to their Berkeley counterparts. In the heat of the moment, the concept took off at Berkeley. Over 100 people showed up at the first BridgeBerkeley conversation in mid-February to debrief from the Milo riots.

From Berkeley, the Bridge concept spread to 24 campuses. Meel graduated in June 2020 and BridgeUSA has since become a non-profit start-up with Meel its first CEO, working out of a San Francisco apartment with a handful of Berkeley alumni.

“Our theory of change is that you have to show young people what it means to engage with democracy,” he says. “We elevate young people who believe in empathy, respect and engaged dialogue as a prerequisite to action.”

While BridgeUSA chapters occasionally host speakers — provided they have a history of constructive engagement — the organization generally eschews lectures. “Talks are a one-way mode of engagement. The core principle of Bridge isn’t about presenting your views, it’s about listening and engaging,” says Meel.

Instead, Bridge favors small group discussions like the one Jax Richards found his way to at Oregon State, where Bridge-trained moderators facilitate the discussion parliamentary-style, so that speakers address the moderator rather than someone else in the room with whom they disagree.

A student discussion at UC Berkeley organized by BridgeBerkeley. Photo courtesy BridgeUSA

Not that there aren’t moments of tension. Meel recalls an immigration discussion with thirty-odd students in attendance where a DACA recipient, or “Dreamer,” made her case for why she believes Dreamers have a right to stay on campus. At the time, Trump was pushing Congress to cancel the DACA program and the university administration reacted by providing financial and legal support to undocumented students. A white student from El Paso, Texas stood up to rebut her argument. He put on a red “Make America Great Again” hat before stating his views that allowing so-called “illegal immigration” is a bad precedent that risks crime and violence, making him scared for his family.

Rather than the Dreamer backing away and leaving, or shouting in response to his argument, she responded to his values by expressing her fear of deportation and likening it to his fear of crime. After their back-and-forth, the moderator asked if anyone else had something to add. The other students, who had quietly let the two debate, didn’t talk about immigration. They latched on to the level of understanding that the two students, who couldn’t otherwise be more different, had reached.

“While they had totally different policy positions, they shared the same notion of safety, security and stability,” says Meel. “The process of empathy is to get at the level of values, and at the level of values you can break down arguments and find common purposes.”

Observing the process was at least as important as actually discussing the issue at hand. “A lot of kids have never spoken with anyone they disagree with politically,” says Meel. “The chapter builds the clout for them to do that.”

Flying book

Moderation is also the key to success at Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, Oregon, which serves a politically mixed student body of more conservative Linn County and more liberal Benton County. Communications professor Mark Urista advises the student-led Civil Discourse Club, which arose in 2017 following controversy over sexually explicit artwork displayed on campus.

“What stood out to me right away was a clear divide between those who were enthusiastically supportive and those who thought it was completely inappropriate,” says Urista. “They were talking in their own echo chambers but not with each other.”

Promoting a collegewide discussion is difficult for a commuter campus, as many community colleges are. One experiment the club has tried is a public whiteboard that asks controversial questions like “Should vaping be banned on campus?” so respondents can weigh in at different times of day. While comments can be made anonymously, moderators from the club erase personal or partisan attacks.

“We have an etiquette sign,” says Urista. “This is not a free expression whiteboard — we are trying to teach people how to do civil discourse.”

Survey data and scholarly research on the political views of higher education instructors suggest that creating intentional spaces for students to share contrary views is necessary. In a 2019 survey on campus expression by Heterodox Academy, a non-profit advocating for viewpoint diversity on college campuses, 55 percent of students reported that the on-campus climate prevents them from saying something they believe, with one in three students reluctant to share political views in the classroom. Republican students were more reluctant than Democrats or Independents to talk about controversial topics like race, sexuality and gender, although not religion.

That sensibility is backed up by the ideological tilt of professors. In a 2018 paper, Mitchell Langbert, a business professor at Brooklyn College, analyzed the political affiliations of 8,688 professors at 51 liberal arts colleges. He found the Democrat-to-Republican ratio at an overwhelming 12.7 to one. In several colleges’ humanities and social sciences departments, he found consistently there were zero registered Republicans.

John Wood, Jr., Vice-Chairman of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County, and Ciaran O’Connor, a campaign staffer for Barack Obama and in 2014 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, speaking at a Respect + Rebellion event at UC Berkeley in 2019. Credit: Loren Curry / BridgeUSA

Debra Mashek, a tenured psychology professor at Harvey Mudd College who is now Heterodox Academy’s executive director, identifies as very liberal. She knows the problem all too well. “One of our founders spoke at a psychology conference where I was in the audience,” she says. “I remember him asking if anyone who was Republican could please stand up. One person did.”

Mashek’s field of research is close relationships, which is also where she finds the seeds of successful efforts to overcome division. “We need to cultivate the habits of heart and mind that allow you to engage constructively across lines of difference,” she says. Those habits start with relational aspects. “You need to know enough about the other person as a person, not as an avatar, to actually see where they’re coming from,” she says. “You have to take the risk of letting yourself be seen and known. When you do take that risk, it tends to resolve in more connection.”

Finding those relational aspects is at the heart of Respect + Rebellion, which brings so-called “divergent speaker pairs” to college campuses who disagree vehemently but remain friends through a cross-cutting bond. With names like “Black & Poor + White & Privileged,” “Anti-abortion Feminist + Abortion Access Fanatic,” and several variations on “Red + Blue,” the framing of the pairs goes straight for the jugular of ideological divides. But by going to the precipice of fundamental disagreements over hot-button issues while ending in agree-to-disagree comity, the speaker pairs serve as models of successful relationships across political and ideological differences.

Inside the Student-Led Movement to Depolarize College

Jacob Hess, one of the organizers behind the project, is himself a participant: A politically conservative adherent to the LDS church, he pairs up with Philip Neisser, a Marxist atheist. They disagree on everything. Almost. “We’re both into uber-healthy stuff,” says Hess. “We both think Monsanto is the devil.” That connecting thread, plus their shared professional background in academic research, is enough to forge a friendship that can soften student attitudes when displayed publicly.

“I have seen the shift firsthand with students who show up ready to fight us,” he says. “After they see that we’re just being real and human with each other, it loses the charge.”

Respect + Rebellion brought its divergent speaker pairs to over 2,500 students during the 2018-2019 school year and conducted surveys at eight events across four campuses, drawing responses from 400 attendees. Overwhelming majorities responded that the event helped depolarize their views. 73 percent agreed with the statement, “I understand and/or like people who I disagree with at least a little bit more than before.” 78 percent agreed with the statement, “I feel like it is more possible that I could learn something from people on the other side of the aisle.” And 83 percent agreed with the statement, “I’m more optimistic about conversing with people whose political views are different than my own.”

Shortly after the hotly contested 2018 midterm election, Linn-Benton College hosted the “Red Mom + Blue Mom” speaker pair. Several instructors brought their classes to the talk and built assignments around the presentation. “Students claim they really appreciated seeing two people model what civil discourse looks like in the flesh,” says Urista. “For a lot of people, civil discourse is this abstract term. They don’t know what it means or how to do it. Those results gave me tremendous hope about the future.”

Meel feels that same depolarizing effect at work when students find themselves in a BridgeUSA-moderated conversation as opposed to yelling at each other across the campus quad.

“I almost feel like I’m not a part of my generation when I talk about the need for relationships,” says Meel. “Social media has hampered our ability to engage.”

With that uphill battle, Meel said, their work is cut out for them. “We have to figure out unique ways to market empathy to my generation, which is very pissed off and very angry.”

Looking back at his somber life of 62 years, Finbarr O’Brien sees some silver linings. The births of his two sons. Afternoons spent with his grandchildren. And an autumn day in 2012 that began like most others, with Finbarr driving his postal van through the small Irish town of Macroom.

That day he drove across rolling green hills and narrow stone bridges, filling 540 mailboxes. On his way home, after delivering all of his letters and packages, he stopped for a cup of coffee. He was sitting at a table alone when a woman entered the café. Finbarr, a good postman, knew that her name was Caroline and that she worked for some sort of polling institute.

Finbarr, she asked him, would you fancy going to Dublin once a month to discuss a new constitution for Ireland?

Finbarr laughed. Surely she was joking.

She wasn’t. Caroline explained that she had been assigned to find ordinary citizens to participate in a so-called constitutional convention. No special skills were required, and it didn’t pay, but travel costs would be reimbursed.

At the time, Ireland was facing two crises: one of economics, another of trust. People had lost faith in the political system, so the government decided to try something. Why not let the citizens have a direct say in the issues? Reforming of the electoral system. Abolishing the Senate. And one of the most controversial: legalizing same-sex marriage.

finbarr large — Finbarr O’Brien. Credit: Kenneth O Halloran

The prohibition of same-sex marriage was written right into Ireland’s constitution, and this, combined with the power of the Catholic Church, made reform seem highly unlikely. But public opinion was slowly evolving, so the government decided to re-examine the issue. It would do so through the civic experiment of which Finbarr was about to become a part.

The experiment was this: 66 citizens would be selected from the electorate, a cross-section of Irish society — male and female, old and young, urban and rural, high and low earners. They would be joined by 33 politicians as well as an expert who would serve as chairman to the constitutional convention, for a total of 100 people.

This group of 100 would discuss amendments to the constitution that were being considered by the government. No expertise would be required. Each weekend in Dublin, the group would be given time to learn, examine and debate a different issue. Scholars and advocates from both sides would be brought in to make their case. At the end of each weekend, the group would make a recommendation to the parliament, which could either accept or disregard it.

Crushed by negative news?

This is how a woman named Caroline came to stand in a cafe in the rainy town of Macroom 250 kilometers southwest of Dublin, and offer a chance to determine the future of Ireland to a stocky postal worker with a round head and a timid smile, who would thank her for considering him and politely decline the offer.

If Finbarr O’Brien were an American, it’s easy to imagine he would have voted for Donald Trump. He was the Irish version of the angry old white man. He hated politics and politicians. The way that they promise you the world and after the election can’t remember a thing! Yet, today, Finbarr is the proud owner of a leather-bound copy of the Irish constitution. Sometimes he flips through it, poring over the signatures and notes from other participants in the convention.

“It was great to meet you.”

“It was great working with you.”

“Thank you!”

Back on that day in the café, Caroline left her phone number with Finbarr just in case he changed his mind. That evening Finbarr caught hell from his oldest son. “Dad,” he said, “you’ll only get a chance like this once. Plus, you can’t keep complaining about politicians and at the same time refuse to make a difference yourself!”

If Finbarr O’Brien were an American, it’s easy to imagine he would have voted for Donald Trump. He was the Irish version of the angry old white man.

His son was right. As Finbarr dialed Caroline’s number, he secretly hoped that she had already found someone else. But she hadn’t.

A few months later, on a Saturday morning in late January 2013, in a hotel north of Dublin, Finbarr found himself searching for his place on a seating chart on the wall: Table four. It was the constitutional convention’s first working session. The question they would consider was whether or not to reform the electoral system.

Finbarr entered a massive conference room decorated in Irish green. There were cameras at the back, a stage up front and big round tables in between. A few people were already seated, but table four, towards the front, was still empty. Finbarr doesn’t like to be late and therefore often arrives early. He sat down.

A few moments later, a young man came up to the table. He had two lip piercings, and his head was shaved, leaving only a single row of spiky hair down the middle. Finbarr saw that the man was wearing eye makeup and had painted each of his nails a different color of the rainbow. He assumed this man must be gay, and in his chest he felt a surge of panic.

“At first, I thought I’ll punch him through the window,” says Finbarr. “My thoughts were out of control. In my head I was catapulted back into my childhood room. I was nine or ten years of age. Just as clear as the pierced face of this man in front of me, I could see another man’s face in my mind’s eye. A man with polished manners and expensive suits. This was many years ago, but it felt like yesterday. He was a friend of my parents, and whenever he came over they used to always ask him: Are you staying for the night? Every time I hoped he would say no. But no, he would always stay. He would come into my room at night, for around two years, again and again. It would have been a fine thing if the house fell down and buried us under.”

Credit: mozzercork / Flickr

Young Finbarr endured the abuse. He never told a soul what had happened, not even his parents. As a teenager, he hit the bottle, often drinking himself into unconsciousness. He avoided people, and lashed out whenever a man touched him, even by accident. He drove to Cork, where his tormentor was said to live, and roamed the streets, revenge on his mind. He never found him.

Ever since it happened, Finbarr has seen homosexuality as equivalent to pedophilia. He became a lorry driver, longing for solitude. One time, when he was about 20, he put a rope around his neck and jumped. But the rope snapped. He got away with a few scratches and bruises — and his life.

balanced life

It wasn’t until the age of 50 that he finally spoke to a therapist, who explained to him the difference between homosexuality and pedophilia. It was a revelation. She also taught him techniques to deal with his traumatic flashbacks. As soon as he feels the panic rising, she said, he should lean back, look around and describe what he sees: the color of the walls, the people in the room. This way, he can bring himself out of the flashback and back into the present. To this day, he uses the technique all the time.

And so, Finbarr believed he was ready for the convention, during which he, of all people, was to have a say on same sex marriage. But suddenly all of that disappeared when he saw the man: piercings, fingernails, hair. His chest inflated. Panic.

Finbarr leaned back, looked around: Wood panel walls, beige carpet, a flow of people entering the room.

Seriously? This is the first guy I’m meeting here? I saw him stare on my fingernails, he clearly felt weird about it. I probably went overboard with the gay look. Mohawk, eyeliner, fingernails — I could have done with less. I look at him and he looks up in the air. Okay, gentlemen’s agreement: You don’t look at me, I don’t look at you, and we don’t need to introduce ourselves. Your name tag says Finbarr O’Brien, and mine says Chris Lyons.

In Finbarr, Chris saw the kind of older Irish man he had fought against his whole life. Again and again, he had to explain to them that he was not a pervert, that he was a full-fledged human being. In Cork, at university, Chris had found his place in the small gay community. But even there, men would wait outside the pub to throw bags of beer glasses at him. One time he was hit and cut the back of his head. He laughed it off, but in truth it was devastating.

Chris was 26 when, in the autumn of 2012, the mother of a friend sent him an email about the constitutional convention. She asked whether he wanted to be a part of it.

By then, his unhappiness had morphed into activism. He was angry. Ireland has one last chance, he said at the time. Either he would get full rights or he would emigrate. He had already started looking for houses in Canada.

But when Chris arrived at the convention, his confidence vanished. There were barely any young people, a lot of old traditional Ireland. Then he arrived at his assigned table and saw Finbarr who clearly had trouble pulling himself together.

The participants at the table introduced themselves one by one. When it was Chris’s turn, he was so insecure that he hardly knew what to say. So he said what he was thinking: that he felt out of place. That he would probably not have the confidence to stay. On the other side of the table, Finbarr started to nod.

Seeing that his words were resonating with Finbarr, Chris kept talking, saying that he didn’t know why he was here, among all these important people. Finbarr was now agreeing so emphatically that Chris thought he might climb right across the table.

Then Finbarr burst out: “Thank you for saying that. That’s how I feel.”

At lunch, Finbarr and Chris sat next to each other, and during dinner they shared a laugh about all the experts with their complicated formulas and numbers and graphs who had taken the stage that day. When, at some point, the moderator had asked whether everyone was able to understand the presentation, Finbarr’s hand went up, and he said no, that now he understood even less than before. Chris had been glad, because in truth, he had been just as lost.

In the evening they met at the bar for a pint. Finbarr’s fear hadn’t quite disappeared, but he was surprised by the discrepancy between Chris’s appearance, which conformed exactly to Finbarr’s expectations, and his straightforward manner, so similar to his own.

As the weeks rolled on, Chris arrived in Dublin for convention weekends to find Finbarr, always early, waiting for him at the hotel bar. They would talk late into the night — about Finbarr’s grandchildren, about Chris’s job in IT, but also about the issues being debated at the convention. Should the president’s term be reduced to five years? Should the Senate be abolished?

Over time, these conversations become more personal. Chris told Finbarr about his coming out experience, about how his mother considered him a pedophile and his father’s only concern was secrecy.

Chris shared things with Finbarr he hadn’t even told good friends, and he felt that the more he opened up, the more Finbarr tried to open up about something, too. One day, their conversation started as usual, but then Finbarr kept talking. He didn’t tell Chris everything, but he said enough for Chris to understand.

In April 2013, the convention finally met for its session on same-sex marriage. Finbarr sat at the very front of the room, Chris a few tables further back. Experts and lobbyists presented arguments. At the back of the room, a scrum of journalists covered the proceedings, typing busily on their laptops. Barely anyone was chatting. The room was riveted.

After many conversations with Chris, Finbarr already knew most of the arguments. He had decided at this point that he would probably vote in favor of same-sex marriage. He knew what was at stake for Chris. But one question still nagged him: If two men have children, won’t their kids get bullied at school?

Then, on that Saturday afternoon, a young woman took the stage. Finbarr was all ears.

“Hello, my name is Claire O’Connell,” she said. “I am 22 years old and I’m studying medicine. We are a typical family, except that I have two mothers. People ask me: what is it like having two mums? My answer usually disappoints them because my childhood was quite ordinary. My parents bandaged my knee when I fell and comforted me when I cried. Then people ask: weren’t you bullied? Again, I have to disappoint. Most of my friends even thought it was cool that I have two mothers. The running gag was that my family is the most normal out of all of them.”

It’s hard to say how many of these votes were influenced by Finbarr O’Brien. But Chris says he has no doubt that Finbarr’s speech persuaded others at the convention.

This speech put Finbarr firmly in the Yes column. That’s when a Catholic bishop took the stage to talk about the Church’s love for the institution of marriage. As he spoke, Finbarr began thinking of the many boys who had been abused by men of the church, just as he was abused when he was a child.

Suddenly, Finbarr stood up.

Wearing a wine-red sweater with a white shirt underneath, his right hand clasping a microphone, Finbarr began to speak. His words were unrehearsed. A camera zoomed in on his face, broadcasting him live to the internet.

“I think the biggest problem with people is ignorance,” he said. “They don’t know enough. Because it happened to me personally years ago. I was abused and automatically from there on, any gay person I came across, I categorized them as the same — the abuser. And I kept that up until I got educated. And then I found out that the gay people — man or woman — they’re perfect person.”

At that point he hadn’t even told his wife about the abuse. Or his sons. After the session, Finbarr headed straight for the bar and downed a double whiskey. As he stood there, adrenaline still coursing through him, people started to approach him, shaking his hand, congratulating him, thanking him. Two people spoke to him, and Finbarr was surprised to hear that they were gay. They told him how much his words had meant to them.

bounding

The next day, 79 of the 100 participants voted in favor of the amendment — 79 percent for the legalization of same-sex marriage in one of the most socially conservative countries in Europe.

It’s hard to say how many of these votes were influenced by Finbarr O’Brien. But Chris says he has no doubt that Finbarr’s speech persuaded others at the convention. Other participants that I interviewed — a teacher from Dublin, a dancer from Kildare, a social worker from Wexford, a political scientist from University College Dublin — said the same thing.

Following the convention’s recommendation, on May 22, 2015, Ireland held a national referendum to decide whether to change its constitution to allow same-sex marriage.

The day of the vote, Chris scrolled through the thousands of pictures on his Twitter feed. Irish citizens living abroad were returning home to vote for same-sex marriage. Marked with the hashtag #hometovote, the photos showed them on planes and buses, young and old, men and women, many holding rainbow flags in their hands.

To Chris it felt almost as if they were returning for him personally, so that he could finally feel like a fully equal citizen in his own country.

Finbarr was at home following the referendum on TV when the newscaster announced the result: 62 percent for gay marriage. The measure had passed. Same-sex marriage would become legal in Ireland.

A version of story originally appeared in the book “180 Grad: Geschichten gegen den Hass” (180 Degrees: Stories Against Hate) by Bastian Berbner. Berbner is the host of the podcast 180 Grad: Geschichten gegen den Hass. Both feature stories of overcoming hate and division.