My friend Sara, who just got a cochlear implant last week, posed the following suggestion on Twitter and wanted to know if it was offensive, or more like comparing apples and oranges:

Deaf people protesting others choice to get a CI is like ppl protesting gay marriage.

I don’t really find it offensive at all, because I can’t relate the two in my mind. I told Sara it was like apples and oranges.

Those Deaf people who are against cochlear implants – and I am not one of them, I think it is an individual choice – are usually against it because it will damage Deaf culture. Many feel that they are not broken, and therefore don’t need to be fixed with a CI. They feel the same way about deaf children – for many years, deaf children grew into fine adults without CIs, why do they need them now? I don’t presume to speak for all Deaf people who are anti-CI, the argument is fairly complex, but that basically summarizes the idea. If you give a deaf person an implant, you are robbing them of the opportunity to participate in Deaf culture. (Which is patently false, as I know many students at Gallaudet who are quite involved in Deaf culture and have implants. But that’s beside the point.) The opposition says that anti-CI folks are happy to deny deaf people their right to hear. That’s pretty much the only comparison I can make to the gay marriage debate – that denying CIs denies someone the right to hear. But that doesn’t take away someone’s right to live equally to others…it just means their life will be a little different, they’ll get through life in a different way.

Denying gay marriage, though, is substantially life-altering. I’m sure I don’t need to go over the 1,138 rights conferred by federally-recognized marriage, which gay couples are not entitled to. I don’t mean to belittle the experience of hearing – I enjoyed listening to an audiobook in my car recently, it was great – but it’s not something as fundamentally essential as the rights associated with marriage. It’s also not arbitrarily denying one group human rights while awarding them to another. I’m not sure that hearing is a “human right” for that matter…it just doesn’t seem to fall into the same category to me. Hearing is nice, but if you can’t hear and your neighbor can…well, that doesn’t make you unequal as a citizen, it just makes you different. The fact of the matter is that the U.S. government sees me and my partner as second-class citizens compared to our heterosexual next door neighbors. I see that as being on a totally different scale as the “right to hear” that some people feel anti-CI people would deny potential CI recipients.