The gay marriage campaign has worked chiefly because it borrows the right’s language of ‘family values
The role model for converting the enemy is Nelson Mandela. He was never interested in just preaching to the converted. Instead, in jail he literally learnt the language of his white South African oppressors, Afrikaans. (The whole story is beautifully told in John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy.) Mandela practised Afrikaans on his Afrikaner prison wardens. He studied Afrikaner history. He told fellow prisoners that Afrikaners weren’t colonialists but Africans. And in 1989 he met the unbending Afrikaner president P.W. Botha and charmed him. Mandela spoke Afrikaans with him, knowledgeably discussed the Afrikaner struggle in the Boer war, and told Botha that the black struggle was its modern equivalent. Mandela was practising what he and his comrade Walter Sisulu called “ordinary respect”: show your enemy respect, and he will reward you.
