Kind power

Gay rights has been all the conversation this past week, but one thing started me thinking. I saw an old statement by Ronald Reagan where he opposed both discrimination and acceptance for gays.
To me that is an impossible stance. If you really oppose discrimination, you must be for acceptance. As a victim of non-acceptance, I can tell you how discriminatory it feels. You know you are different, not accepted like others - that is discrimination. This is true even if your non-acceptance is just personal, familial, like it was with me. How much more painful must it be if it is social non-acceptance, which is what he was talking about although he seemed to be treating it as if it was personal. How much of what the dominant culture has always blamed on the aberration of homosexuality comes really from a life of separation, 'otherness'?
But this is only one of two reasons why his statement is far worse than he understood. As bad as the mental and emotional cruelty of non-acceptance is, the physical cruelty it engenders is (arguably) worse. When Reagan made his statement he was grown, even older, long past his youth. But youth is a wild, confusing time and people in this phase take things differently. I once came upon a group of college (!) boys having great 'fun' tormenting some turtles to walk off a bridge into a stream. When I confronted them and rescued the last of their victims, they protested extensively that they were not hurting them. Technically true, but they were inflicting mental pain on the animals - and that was the point. If there hadn't been terror, it would not have been 'fun'. The fear of the animals made them feel powerful and that was what they were after. In youth, particularly for men, one needs to discover and feel power. We are moving from being helpless to being independent and this is one way to do that, the way our culture seems to have stuck with. Sometimes the victim is not an animal, but another child who is easy to attack because he/she is different. Our society tacitly encourages bullying.
But there is another way to feel one's power. Power doesn't have to be about dominating someone/something else. It can be about helping someone/something. Destruction can be powerful, but so can construction. Somewhere along the way, whether in the home, school, or religious institution, we need to  formalize teaching of kindness, and express the power and strength of helping. That may be the best cure for cruelty and bullying.