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1 Geo. J. Gender & L. 1 (1999-2000)
Homophobia as Terrorism

handle is hein.journals/grggenl1 and id is 191 raw text is: FoREwoRD: HOMOPHOBIA AS TERRORISM* MARl J. MATSUDA** Somewhere today a child stayed home from school fearing violence. Some- where today a mother sits in a hospital, waiting to see a child on hold for suicide watch. Somewhere today a child is self-medicating by sniffing paint thinner to avoid thinking about a scary secret. Welcome to another day for children in homophobic America. There is one thing about this day that is different: we are here talking about homophobic terrorism directed at children. The wonderful staff of The Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law have worked hard to bring a new journal to our Law Center and to organize this Symposium. Through the act of convening, they are saying: we want to know what it is like for children and their families to live in the land of homophobia. We want to know what it is like for them to face hatred and violence in places that are set aside for learning and community. We want to imagine the possibility of a different world. The participants in this Symposium are at the forefront of this struggle. They are making visible a form of child abuse that we are told does not exist, and they are working to infuse respect and care for all citizens into the social and political practices of educational institutions. During the week of this Symposium, in a seemingly unrelated event, the Supreme Court decided a deportation case in which it denied the First Amend- ment rights of resident aliens. In that case, Reno v. American-Arab Discrimina- tion Committee,' the government used the justification of fighting terrorism as an excuse for setting aside the Bill of Rights. Fighting terrorism, like fighting communism during the McCarthy era, represents a belief that there is some Big Scary Thing out there and we have to smash it. The Bill of Rights, if followed to its letter, is a bit of an inconvenience in this more important mission of getting rid of the Big Scary Thing. This is the same kind of thinking that the government used fifty years ago to lock up my father's family in a World War II internment camp.2 It is a form of thinking that views a perceived threat as more important than civil rights. It is a form of thinking that reminds me of and that echoes homophobia: there is something different and we must fear it, we must eliminate it. It is a form of thinking that presages militaristic patriarchy: we need a real man to out-gun the threat. Fighting terrorism thus becomes an excuse for increasing the military * © Mari J. Matsuda (1999). All rights reserved. These remarks were given at the Second Annual Gender, Sexuality, and the Law Symposium, Hostile Hallways: Anti-Gay Peer Harassment in Schools (Mar. 4, 1999). The transcript has been revised and annotated for this publication. ** Many thanks to Kimberlee Ward for superb editorial and research assistance. 1. Reno v. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Comm., 525 U.S. 471 (1999). 2. See Mar J. Matsuda, McCarthyism, The Internment and the Contradictions of Power, 40 B.C. L. REv. 9 (1998); 19 B.C. THIRD WORLD L.J. 9 (1998).

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