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Analysis of radical religious right attitude towards homosexuality 2007 W/OJun 28 '07 (Updated Jul 06 '07) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line 9000 words--it took a while to write, it will take a while to read. No one has ever accused me of being brief ;-p, 2007 GL Write/Off
Introduction I am currently reading Chris Hedges's American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. I will review the book in its proper place, but for the June Gay and Lesbian 2007 Write Off, I wanted to contribute analysis of the chapter specifically covering gay issues, “Persecution.” The book mentions homosexuality liberally, but this is the chapter devoted only to it. For clarity, I will go point by point, as I see them, and respond to each. Two people factor in this chapter: Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, a clinical psychologist who believes that homosexuality can be cured; and Mike Haley who considers himself ex-gay. They are the main speakers at the event held in Tremont Temple Church in Boston. Threats posed by homosexuals James Dobson’s Focus on the Family created a group called Love Won Out. The organization is primarily controlled by people that consider themselves to be ex-gay and “brand homosexuality as a disease and condemns it as a threat to the family, the health of the nation and Christianity.” They seek to cure homosexuals and to attack the “unrepentant” homosexuals as militants and say “there should be no tolerance or acceptance of gays and lesbians who refuse to seek help. And America will soon pay a price . . .for permitting gays and lesbians to live openly in defiance of God.” (97) First, Love “Won” Out, assumes something that isn’t and certainly never will be true. It assumes that the struggle is over. This may seem like semantic nitpicking but since so much of their rhetoric depends on semantic slight of hand or its own semantic nitpicking, I am well within logical limits to use it. Obviously “wins” is the correct word. I can’t cover the disease issues yet because the “symptoms” occur later. The main point here is that homosexuality is such a threat. Even if you use Kinsey’s somewhat questionable numbers that one in ten men and women are primarily gay, that would mean there are 30 million of us. I tend to think the number is no greater than half that which creates 15 million. Of that number many are still in the closet, fewer than half are politically involved in gay movements (charities are excepted because they cannot, by 5013(c) rules, use the charity to be political), and this portion, maybe in the neighborhood of 4-5 million cannot agree on much except that we want acceptance not tolerance. Since we do not brainwash, each of us can do things on his or her own (yes some gays mindlessly follow whatever movement is popular, but we cannot count on this). It is inconceivable that a number that small could threaten much of anything. We cannot threaten the country—if we could, none of the state initiatives against recognizing same-sex marriages or specifically defining marriage of one man and one woman would have passed. Obviously we are no threat to the nation. By the same token, I’m not at all sure how we can be a threat to “the family.” Even if they use the very narrow definition of family as father, mother, children, as a group we cannot affect this configuration. It is possible for one person in the family to say “I am gay” and affect that specific family. If you use family more broadly, then it is even less possible for us to affect anything because the larger the group the less any individual person has the ability to affect change. The threat to Christianity is the most strange. Evangelicals put their numbers at between 20-30 million (if you look at people who call themselves Christian the number surpasses 200 million). The number of political gays, if you accept my number is 4-5 million (increase it if you like). The number of Jews in America is a little over 5 million. Oddly enough the number of Muslims in the US is around 5 million (I got these numbers from census data). I pick Jews and Muslims because they are believers in the same god but not the Christian tradition. Let’s say that all Jews believed X as a political factor and Muslims believed Y as a political factor (I don’t think it is any more likely that each is a political force that musters all members to the same cause or action of 5 million each, but let’s assume they can). Jews and Muslims can be considered a threat to Christianity, though you would still have to use a tortured argument to prove it. Those two groups tend to glom around a few different political theories. Homosexuals cross all lines and all bounds. Of my closest friends, about a dozen are active Christians, about three times that number consider themselves passive Christians, and about twenty or so are atheists if they bother to consider themselves anything. These people are of various political stripes and different economic theories and very different incomes. Those who believe will not subvert their traditional religions that practice. Passive Christians don’t bother with church at all. The atheists don’t mess with church either but they don’t mess with churches or believers; it is a fight not worth beginning and anyway, at this point the argument is about atheism rather than homosexuality. How are we a threat to anything but the amount of vodka in any bar? This is one of the very few traits that go across the broadest swath of gay men anyway, but that is still far from universal. This is a serious as it is glib. Why would the US be punished by God because some of us live openly gay? There is no way to know or even guess at the number of closeted homosexuals—if there is any threat this is it because they represent UBoats for gay and straight (gay because it is a psychological drag due to the shame that is still wrapped so thickly around the closeted and to the straight because if they are married they can screw up not only their own psychological state but those of their potential mate and potential children). Why would homosexuals be any more likely to cause God’s ire than adulterers who represent a huge number of the population or murderers, rapists, coveters, people who work on the Sabbath? Homosexuality is not in the Ten Commandments, so why, especially gay people over larger groups committing crimes specifically forbidden in the purported basis of Western law? ”Masculine inferiority” apologies for the heavy use of quotes, but they are necessary Dr. Nicolosi says “’the gender identity phase’ is when the boy begins to realize that the world is divided into male and female. Children who cannot disconnect from their mothers and identify with their fathers . . . become homosexuals.” He goes on to say “[t]he job of the child is ‘to dis-identify with the mother and bond with the father.” Dr. Nicolosi creates the paradigm of the “weak and unmasculine father (sic), and perhaps beaten down by the mother” and “mothers who do not cede authority to the father who do not represent to a boy that the dad is the leader of the family, contribute to the child’s homosexuality” (98-99). From the Focus on the Family website I found the following information. “Beginning around 18 months, the child begins to tell the difference between male and female. The boy will notice he is different from his mother and his body is like his father’s. The father becomes more significant.” A receptive and warm father can, the site says, help the son move toward gender identity. If the father is other, “the boy will experience a hurt and rejection, which is what we call a ‘narcissistic hurt.’ That is why narcissism . . . is a large part of the homosexual condition.” Further, a mother who does not support the “traditional” role of the father will cause the boy, no matter how young, to devalue masculinity. The site carefully points out that it isn’t the father but the rejection that causes the problems. From ages 5 to 12, “[p]eer relationships in grade school can be either intimidating or wonderfully affirming experiences.” Dr. Barb Durso says that “most children develop stereotypic behaviors appropriate to their gender identity. She says girls refuse to wear pants because pants are for boys and boys “may become intensely interested in playing ‘army’.” Also in this age range, “’pre-homosexual boys are very polite, responsible, clean, neat sensitive to other people, especially their mothers’ (sic) needs . . . [i]t is like a false role. And that is why men finally come out of the closet, they can act up and become bad little boys (sic).” Post puberty, “boys tend to withdraw from the family” and “[t]een boys needing privacy often cede from the family and become moody and uncommunicative.” Finally, “even though homosexuality is becoming more socially acceptable and even promoted as an attractive and preferable way of life . . . most boys in junior high and high school to not want to be gay” (emphasis mine). Before I get to the analysis hard and heavy, I must bring up what is going to be obvious to many, but also must not go unstated. Only once in this chapter and once in the article on the Focus on the Family website is the word lesbian even used. The development of girls as a whole is completely ignored. I cannot let this go without listing a set of motives. The first one is the one that is most obvious: females do not matter except as seedpods. The second is that, since this is an all male priesthood, if you will, they cannot even imagine how a woman can become homosexual (again not that this matters because women are only seedpods, capable of being so even if gay). Third, they realize that their argument falls apart here. If it is mainly the mother’s fault (along with a distant or henpecked husband perhaps) it would only be logical that the father is mostly responsible for the girl to become a lesbian. The active and sovereign father cannot be blamed for any issues. Dr. Nicolosi asserts something that I think is impossible for the family structure that Focus on the Family requires. The assertion is beginning at 18 months the boy begins to realize his body is different from his mother's and like his father's. The only thing the child of that age would recognize the difference is with breasts. If the boy is to realize that pubic areas are different would mean that each parent would have to be naked long enough for the boy to even begin to understand this. The mother, and most surprisingly, the toddler are responsible for determining the boy’s early gender identity. The mother must do all the work to give the child to the father. The paradigm here has the male doing nothing but waiting to be served, having the male child given to him. It is also funny that the only thing the active father has to do is be around in a supportive way. Neither American Fascists nor Focus on the Family give any specific requirements to the father but there are specific requirements for both the woman and the child. This makes disingenuous the concept that mother and father create a “parent team;” this is no team unless the father is considered a near silent coach. In the first paragraph of this section, Dr. Nicolosi presents a series of steps that are based on old and disabused psychological ramifications. 1) The boy is rejected by the father, 2) this causes the boy to turn inward creating narcissism, and 3) narcissism “is a large part of the homosexual condition.” This is an outdated and simplistic reading of the way Freud viewed the possible causes of homosexuality. A rejection or just disinterest from the father is no doubt a painful thing, but he is just one member of the family. The nuclear family can consist of older brothers; if you look at the atomic family, it will almost certainly contain uncles and grandfathers. The concept of the family in both sources so far is so tiny that it makes it appear that the family consists only of a mother, father, and one male child. Narcissism has many causes and is far more dependent on the child’s or person’s relative psychological stability. It is possible to create narcissism by simply having one child on whom the parents heap praise or on children equally treated and both heaped with huge praise. A rejection will not necessarily create narcissism but has about an equal chance of turning more to a self-doubt or even self-loathing which can include symptoms of narcissism, but is not singularly narcissist. Finally, I will grant that there is a point where nearly every homosexual is narcissistic: when they come out (this is understandable given that we have been living under what Focus on the Family rightly calls false roles; the simple release of this anxiety creates its own high). Some of us get stuck in that phase, but just because some of us do doesn’t mean all do. Still, narcissism isn’t only a homosexual pathology; any person regardless of status or preference can be narcissistic; also, the treatment for the homosexual can be the same as for the heterosexual which is just one more piece of evidence that indicates just how clinched is the pigeonholing of gay men. We are told that at five and soon after, children will generally show “stereotypic” behaviors specific to gender. The only thing we are told about girls is that they may refuse to wear pants (nothing about their play) and that boys will become “intensely interested” in military play. What is most surprising about this “analysis” is that a woman did it. She has nothing to say about girls just like the men have nothing to say. Her evidence about boys seems to be not only anecdotal but totally stereotypically (just because she admits this generally doesn’t mean that she is free from specific uses of stereotypes). Anyway, I and many of my gay friends loved playing army. I and my friends from 7 or so to 14 played army and pirates (cowboys and Indians were not popular, so we didn’t do that). The older we got, somewhat obviously, the tactics changed; the enemy was as often imaginary as it was just a different team. Not all of my gay friends were what I call “all boy” as children, but I could only be kept inside if there wasn’t lightening in the sky and I’ve been told similar stories by my gay friends from multiple locations. The quotes that “’pre-homosexual boys are very polite, responsible, clean, neat sensitive to other people, especially their mothers’ (sic) needs . . . [i]t is like a false role” is so hypocritical that it causes any argument using it to fall to pieces. In order to be a good Christian in the eyes of Focus on the Family and similar groups includes being polite, responsible, clean, and sensitive. Since this is the case, along with other traits, then wouldn’t the gay boy be a far better example of what is expected of a Christian than boys who actively engage in fights and couldn’t give a crap about the feelings of anyone else and fight taking a bath. So many of the arguments offered by these bigoted preachers and “leaders” contradict their own edicts of how life must be lived. “[B]oys needing privacy often cede from the family and become moody and uncommunicative.” This is how teenage years can be generally applied to nearly all teens. For either gender, this is when the growth towards independence is made. This is fundamentally important that it happen here when the teen has the family safety net. If this only happens after the teen becomes an adult, they will be unprepared for adulthood. Moodiness and a reduction in communication are just symptoms of newly released hormones; yes they can also include behavioral/psychological facets, but the primary reason for this testosterone and estrogen. This is the time when each gender moves away from cooties to the curious stage. Teenage girls menstruate; boys do not. Bleeding, no matter how much they are prepared, has a level of fear to it—this is more likely if the pre-menstrual time comes with severe cramping or excessive moodiness. Boys may have a concept of what happens, but it remains a mystery to most males. The same can be said for female masturbation; it is a near complete mystery to boys. Boys need privacy as mentioned above for a very simple reason. Once they learn how to masturbate they find they like it and often do it more than once a day. Without privacy this could not happen. Focus on the Family and other groups may despise this behavior, but it is impossible to believe more than a tiny percentage refuses to engage in this behavior. And anyway they offer no explanation as to why the privacy is needed other than for jerking off, so . . . we are left only to assume since the old saying 1% of boys/males masturbate and 99% lie about it. How, exactly, are real life gays promoting being gay “as an attractive and preferable way of life?” You can look at gay-for-straight crap like Will and Grace as showing a funny side of it, but it isn’t preferable. For that matter it promotes being wound up as tight as a cheap top and certainly celebrates being a lush. But this is a sitcom. Did we all become more racist because of Archie Bunker? Did we all want to be Sweathogs in Brooklyn? And how many of us became mean-spirited sniveling Manhattanites because of Seinfeld, or Jewish or Spastic, or ineffectual in all levels except sitting in Jerry’s apartment making fun of people? Then the Focus on the Family site says that boys of junior and high schools do not want to be gay. No doubt this is true. Those who are totally or primarily heterosexual have no desire to be gay—the curious probably do not want to be gay, but that doesn’t mean that they will avoid acting on their curiosity. Teens that are totally or primarily gay will stay closeted because this is when the insult “gay” or “homo” or worse get tossed around often. The gay teen knows that he will have no support. On a personal note, and only personal, I outed myself if you will. I left a diary in a desk at school and didn’t realize it. A friend (who stayed a friend) got it, but only after four or five of the most gossipy people had read most of it. She returned it to me with a very grim look on her face. At this point the only thing that kept me from being beaten daily was that AIDS had no treatment, so the boys feared that if I bled on them, they would get AIDS (since I was gay, I was obviously infected). I have no pride about this time and I know I am not the only one who feels that way. On the plus side, I did learn to have a Faulknerian writing style almost impossible for others to read so it couldn't happen again. ”Danger can be fun” Dr. Nicolosi says: “You know the young father tossing the son up in the air and catching him, [a]nd, you know, the father is laughing and the kid is petrified, you know? And the mother is watching this ritual and she has no idea, she’s getting a heart attack watching this (sic). But the father is tossing the kid up and down, because the father is laughing, the son starts laughing. And a very important lesson has just been taught, one that men teach boys: danger can be fun. Even if the father drops the kid and cracks his head a little bit, at least he will be straight. A small price to pay, I tell ya.” He goes farther to say that men don’t see colors as vividly (as vividly as what or whom is left out of the thought) nor do they remember show tunes—a propos of nothing. And homosexual men have a problem in that they “do not trust other men.” Gay boys turn out to be mama’s boys. “They are the kind of boys . . . who leave for school with their hair in place and wearing neat, clean clothes and come home in the same, perfect condition.” When gay men reach adulthood is when they rebel. Dr. Niolosi says that the gay man is “aggressive,” “shocking,” “offensive,” and “provocative.” “While other boys were being bad, he was sitting with mommy in the kitchen.” ”If you walk into a gay bar, it looks like a bunch of men who want to be bad little boys. You walk into a straight bar, and all these straight guys are sitting there, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ because they got [being a bad boy] out of their system a long time ago” emphasis mine. I have seen almost as many mothers throwing a child (boy or girl) into the air and catching. Many children love this play and some do not. Trust more than laughter is what determines whether the child responds by laughing at this. If they have a true fear, the more you laugh the more the child can see it as taunting and reinforcing the lack of trust. Notice that Dr. Nicolosi’s guarantee of having a straight boy isn’t the throwing and catching. The guarantee is the small crack in the skull—that is not a simple, innocuous harm especially for a pre-verbal child since they cannot answer the questions that get asked every hour or so with an older child to make sure there is no brain bleed. There is no mention of daughters here for obvious reasons; if you do that (which does happen) you obviously guarantee that the girl will be a lesbian. They cannot include girls for the simple fact that whatever makes a boy straight will necessarily make a girl a lesbian. Finally for this section, how does Dr. Nicolosi know what a gay bar is like? How does he know that everyone in a gay bar is trying to be a bad boy? He hasn’t been in any of the gay bars I’ve been to. The guys I know who go out aren’t being bad boys at all, they are just hanging out or trying to find someone to hook up with. This is what single straight men do: hang out and perhaps look for a hookup. Anyway, what would someone who Focus on the Family uses say anything at all about going to a bar? Lastly, the idea of the bad little boy is a fetish that some gay young men have and the fetish works generally with an older man playing the disappointed parent. What does this say about Dr. Nicolosi? Mike Haley Mr. Haley is an ex-gay who is head of “gender issues” at Focus on the Family. I have heard interviews with him in the past and they contain the same information reported in American Fascists. He had a relatively abusive father who called Mike his third daughter. He claims to have grown up to be gay and to reject Christianity. He calls random hookups or short relationships as a “gay treadmill.” He says, “It’s not a whole lot different than the treadmill that I see some heterosexual women buy into . . . when they believe they have to be a certain size, look a certain way, dress a certain way, and be acceptable to the heterosexual male population. Well, you take that same phenomenon and put it in the gay community . . . so I was working out three to four hours a day, I was doing injectable (sic) steroids . . . I had to have that perfect physique because that physique was what defined my value and my worth . . . in the gay community.” Later he meets a gay man who doesn’t want to be gay and introduces Mr. Haley to a counselor who claimed to be able to fix the f*g. Mr. Haley claimed that he was rude and hateful to the counselor but finally gave in and . . . tada. The only thing we have to believe that Mike Haley is/was gay is his word for it. He could be a plant or a shill. He tells the listeners exactly what they want to hear. He feeds them the old school stereotype of the gay man: a bar and bed hopping juice pig (gay term for steroid user). It seems so scripted that either he was gay and some of it is true but manipulated to hammer the point relentlessly or it is completely made up. It all just sounds too stereotypical and repeated so often in exactly the same words that it makes me very suspicious. First, “injectable” steroids is a redundant phrase. A gay man would know that and it would make it sound like he really does know what he’s talking about if he uses the proper, not even just gay, verbiage. Oral steroids are used to reduce inflammation and cause no appreciable increase in muscle mass (if that were the case, almost all asthmatics would be hulks). Second, the Mr. Haley chose the muscular stereotype for himself (perhaps compensating for his father’s insults). Body image is personal for everyone who has issues with it. Mr. Haley picked one body type versus any of the many others that would be fine and have men attracted to it. If he was building a particular body, then he was inherently deciding which group of men he wanted to hook up with. Third, this is only assuming that he is/was really gay. THE greatest threat Dr. Dobson says that the “gay movement” is “THE greatest threat to your children . . .It is of particular danger to your wide-eyed boys, who have no idea what demoralization is planned for them.” This is the man who said Spongebob is gay. Drugs, alcohol, obesity are all lower threats than the gay movement. This is absurd on its face. For that matter, premarital sex is a smaller problem even though the fundamentalist or evangelical Christian teens involved in it are significantly less likely to use protection than the established church Christian so it results in higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases and unexpected or unplanned pregnancies. “It is of particular danger to your wide-eyed boys.” Of course, he makes no mention of girls wide-eyed or otherwise—there is a small implication but that carries no logical weight in his ridiculous statement. I want to cover the glib before getting to the meat of this statement. Is it only the wide-eyed boy who is in danger? What is the opposite of wide-eyed? If the boy is the opposite of wide-eyed (narrow-eyed, suspicious, blind) does that mean he is safe? The real problem of this particular danger is that it assumes the boys to be helpless. This is a scare tactic at its worst. The way it is worded, if the parents don’t do something their boy will be gay. If that were true, we would probably not be a minority since there are fewer fundamentals and evangelicals than there are old church Christian or lapsed Christians. Since this is certainly not the case, then the scare tactic is just a tactic; it has nothing to support it. My greatest concern for this situation is say the boy is normal and plays baseball or golf and is a bit scrawny for any of a host of reasons. Do fathers then force the boy into something more violent like football just to “make a man of him?” When each town or group of towns had brothels or “cat houses,” fathers would often take the son of 16 or so and turn him loose on the women who would “make him a man.” Given that there is apparently no issue with going to bars, would there be a problem of bringing a prostitute in for the son? If the gay movement is THE greatest threat to any wide-eyed boy, would any tactic or option be forbidden? If they are willing to give a toddler a concussion or worse, then why would pay for play sex be out of the question? This is one of the most puzzling statements is that boys who are gay “have no idea what demoralization is planned for them.” This cannot be believed. If they have this whole meeting in church after church and spout all of this anti-gay propaganda, there is no way that a male child in that environment will be ignorant of the demoralization. If the teen is gay, he is already being demoralized by the environment without having to go anywhere at all. One thing that gay people will do, by and large, will be to accept a child coming out of this situation and give them some emotional solace from this demoralization that occurs at the church level. This statement is so full of piping hot crap that the thought of it draws flies. God’s blueprint and polygamy Bill Maier, a Dobson cohort, says: “When we follow God’s blueprint for how we’re supposed to live, things usually work out the way they’re supposed to . . .But when we defy God, when we live in ways contrary to God’s design for us, we often reap a harvest of pain and suffering in our lives.” He goes on to say that if the law is changed such that same gender marriage is permitted, marriage can be defined to include polygamy, “father’s marrying their daughters,” and even “a group of six or seven adults and their various children.” “The danger of same-sex marriage is that it ‘will also teach our children that the words “male” and “female” and “mother” and “father” are simply meaningless constructs.” He uses some surprising wording for an evangelical. If we live by God’s blueprint “things usually work out and if we stray “we often” have bad stuff happen. I kind of like that relativity. If you follow the law and do what you can to be a responsible citizen, spouse, parent things will “usually” work out. If you are irresponsible with money, drugs, relationships and so on it is quite possible that you will reap some bad things. That happens no matter where you live and no matter what your religion is or is not. I have written on this supposed same gender marriage “slippery slope” buried in a lengthy essay about same gender marriage. For civil unions and marriages, the law has still been one consenting adult marrying or uniting with one other consenting adult. Further, they must not be related by blood any closer than being first or second cousins by other rules of marriage. A man cannot marry his own daughter. This breaks the law of incest which is recognized in all states. The laws creating same gender unions do not undo the laws covering incest. A man cannot marry a boy or a woman a girl. The unions must be between adults. The age of consent for marriage is different for every state, but the minimum age that same gender couples can unite is 18 regardless. A man cannot marry a donkey. No law has yet been passed that permits cross species unions. Polygamy is against the law in every state and flairs up about every dozen years in either Utah, Arizona or both. Even still, the man is only officially, legally, married by certificate to one woman—the others are celestial wives in their vernacular (one of the larger problems with this has nothing to do with polygamy so much as what amounts to Welfare and Medicaid fraud—polygamy by itself doesn’t cost anything, living in the middle of a desert with no jobs around and a house full of women and children does). By the same token, a cadre of friends cannot be married in a ceremony where seven rings are exchanged. Marriage in every state is one person to another person. Some laws write it as husband and wife rather than man and woman. This would mean that all I would have to do is claim to be the husband or wife and my partner the other—the marriage would be legal because those are roles not genders (104). This makes a link to the “male,” “female,” “mother,” “father” argument perfectly (104). No amount of same gender marriages will change the words male or female. A male is no longer defined by the presence of a penis and likewise (using what seems to be the thought pattern of Dobson and his ilk) a woman is not defined by her lack of one. Male is the form an animal takes when the last paring in the chromosomal mix is XY. The female is defined as XX. These words will not change. For one thing, they do not belong to churches or gays or alcoholics or the deaf. Male and female are not social constructs but biological ones. The words man and woman are social constructs and somewhat in the way implied. How often have you heard someone say of a whining man that he is being a woman? The analog for women would be to handle a situation like a man. This doesn’t weaken the words but it does show that they are more constructed than the scientific terms. Mother and father have been in flux for probably longer than we want to admit. It isn’t that the terms mother and father have lost their standard and generally understood meaning. What has happened is that single parenthood creates either a father or a mother based on gender (“I live with my father”, for instance); however, the mother or father will often have to take on roles that would usually belong to the other. This doesn’t confuse anything, so much as redefine the roles of mother and father so that they fit the current social situation—and this is a function of language and no matter how many churches get up in arms, trying to stop that kind of social construct is a Sisyphean nap. Persecution “The speakers accuse gays of controlling television, radio and Hollywood. The gay movement, they say, is more politically active and powerful than any other movements. Gays are attacked as diseased and part of the criminal class,” and gays hate and want to destroy the faithful (105). Seventy years ago, Jews controlled everything in Germany and were responsible for the Weimar Republic and its pansy policies. Forty years ago, Jews controlled all media in the US and other nations according to the old/new anti-Semites in the US who only kept their mouth shut following the revelation of the Holocaust for a short time as etiquette would demand. They were also part of the criminal class in Germany starting in 1935 when the Nuremburg Laws were enacted. This is an old comparison and one that still ruffles a feather or two. Jews were accused and destroyed in the first instant because of a governmental action—something with all the guises of law. And in the case of the attacks on gays the people doing it belong to the ecclesiastical class—they may have influence, but they don’t pass laws. The reason the Jew/gay argument is relevant is what made each a scapegoat. You cannot have a movement that can be effective at gaining adherents unless there is an enemy. The enemy must be seen as having more or better or as being worse and evil. The enemy must be a relatively small group so even if they could gain arms, they would just sign their own genocidal warrant. Gays are the enemy of the religious right. They could attack adulterers, but if you arm all of them, they could crush all congregations at the same time. Murders and rapists are exempt because the law has locked them away, so they can’t be a threat. America is open for business every day of the week. Those cover a couple of the Commandments. What about African-Americans (generally religious, mostly Protestant), Mexicans or other of Latin heritage (Roman Catholic by and large), Asians (Buddhists, Shinto, Hindu, and a host of smaller but still ancient beliefs)? The churches cannot be seen as attacking groups like that because, here legally or otherwise, the churches would collapse under the weight of the moderates in the country who do rise up from time to time to remind those on the extreme that they represent very few all in all. The same can be said of the poor and the disabled. So this leaves groups like gays, vegans, the very wealthy, lottery winners, and people with irritable bowel syndrome (hey, they are so full of sh*t they really do pose a huge threat to society as a whole). Once again, if the gay movement were so powerful, same gender marriage would be legal in all states and recognized by the federal government so we could file taxes jointly if we so chose. Nazis and Klansmen Robert H. Knight wrote The Homosexual Agenda in Schools distributed by the Family Research Council which is a wing of Dr. Dobson’s fiefdom. He says that “[h]omosexual books, magazines and news papers are filled with bitter and often obscene denunciations of religion . . . and Christianity in particular. One activist calls for the outlawing of churches that disapprove of homosexual conduct. Another carefully outlines an advertising campaign that equates Christian clergy with Nazis and Klansmen . . . The attitude pervades the homosexual movement.(105)” If there is a homosexual agenda or even a movement involved in anything more than charities or the desire to be accepted, I missed a meeting. I have no doubt that “one” activist called for closing churches that decry homosexual behavior. Obviously the active word is one. I have no doubt that “another” carefully traced evangelical ministers’ opinions to being similar to the Nazis (having to turn one group into the enemy) and the Ku Klux Klan for whom intolerance is their mantra. I stress the use of evangelical over Christian. Evangelicals lambaste ministers of the traditional faiths unless they need to use them to increase their own numbers. It is possible, maybe this “one” called for all churches regardless of adjective to be closed. Please notice that no movement has ever been started due to these screeds. The same cannot be said by those in the evangelical movement. Isn’t it only part of human nature to fight back when attacked? Evangelicals attack gays, do they expect the enemy to sit back and take it? Some groups marked as enemies sat back and took the label, but following the Holocaust and the Civil Rights movement, no group labeled as an enemy is going to take it quietly anymore. The more they vilify the more gays will fight back. It is unreasonable for evangelicals and fundamentalists to think that gays won’t take to the airwaves, films, and print media to explain their side. By their own admission the radical religious right is older than the gay movement, so they are not in existence as a result of the gay movement that started in 1969 but didn’t get rolling until the middle of the 1970s then became an active movement based on an infection starting in 1981. American infidelity This will be lengthy quote. Jerry Falwell (interesting that his name is not listed in Word 2007, but Kevorkian is) said: “I believe that the protection, the covering of God that has been on this great land of ours for so many years, had lifted on September 11, and allowed this thing to happen. God apparently had good reasons for exposing the U.S.A. to such destruction, given the many sins that Americans have committed ever since the Roe versus Wade court case and the Supreme Court’s decision to keep God out of the schools. In fact, American Infidelity goes back to the 1920s and 1930s, to a situational ethics and notions of cultural relativity, along with a flirtation with communism at the highest levels of government. The point is not jus that Americans have been bad and forfeited their entitlements. It is that unless they reform themselves in a hurry, something far worse will happen to them (sic)” (106). I want to deal with the internal inconsistencies before I go through the spirit of what is implied. If the country has been “bad” or perfidious since the 1920s why is the interim seventy plus years being ignored? For the entirety of the 1930s the US was in an economic depression; in the middle of the 1930s there was the Great Dust Bowl. It is no wonder that the Socialist and Communist parties made some temporary gains. It is no wonder why unions made significant gains during this time—I am liberal but no fan of unions as currently configured; however at the time, unions helped make sure that working conditions were safer and the pay at least approached a living wage. Pearl Harbor was attacked at the end of 1941. Tens of thousands of American soldiers died in no win wars in Korea and Vietnam. The US went through a lengthy recession through the seventies. There was relative peace (minus the first Gulf War) from 1980 to 2001. The greed of the 1980s and the national obsession with IPOs and the DJIA can’t have missed the eyes of a deity for whom greed is a sin based on the Commandments and one of the seven deadly sins. From 1920 through September 10th, something around 120-130 thousand Americans died due to war alone and another 10-15 thousand died due to malnutrition during the Depression. Three thousand people died in one day, in a horrific way, broadcast all over the world. The difference between this one event and the ones that occurred earlier is that we only lost that number of people in one day just once and that none of the previous horrors were broadcast around the world. What sins, other than legal abortions, have Americans been committing now that we didn’t commit before January 1973 when the Roe decision was handed down? You must remember that abortions occurred during the period from 1840 to 1973 when they were illegal—it is also worth noting that the reason abortions were made illegal wasn’t based on moral issues but because women who went to hospitals to get one got infections and died at a rate considered too high. Since we are talking about sin, and since I mention greed, we have six more to examine. Wrath. The Indian wars, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, Korea, Vietnam, and the current Gulf War are all sins of wrath and the first of these began before the colonies formed a nation. Gluttony. We want more. It is America’s right of eminent domain that we can stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific no matter how many people stood in the way. We want more gas for less money, even more gas for even less money. We want huge cars and consider it an entitlement to have such a vehicle. Steak or hamburger on every plate means that we have more cows than we have people and cows and people are causing serious releases of greenhouse gases. Enough is as good as a feast, but the American way is a feast isn’t even enough. Sloth. We are a nation of sofa-surfers, obesity is such a problem among children that treats and soda producers have finally decided to pull their vending machines from schools (if schools were funded well enough, need for vending machine money and sales of crap like wrapping paper and buckets of premixed cookie dough would not turn the children into corporate shills before they can spell corporate, let alone know what it means). Pride. “USA, USA, USA, USA, USA, USA, USA, USA, America right or wrong, we are the greatest nation in the world, in the history of the world we will never fail and will forever be here and remembered for the greatness we exuded from every pore . . .” (he spoke rapidly and drank a glass of water—from Next to of course God America I, e.e. cummings). Lust. Sex sells. In fact it sells so well that it is a 9 billion dollar a year industry. That is a tremendous amount of monthly subscriptions to magazines, porn sites with streaming video and still photos and even interactive chat with models, and porn films on whatever media you can shove it on (or maybe in). I’ve thought for a while over this one. You can say that keeping up with the Jonses is a form of envy, but I’m not so sure that it is so pervasive to rise to the problem of the other 6. Either a sociologist or a religious scholar could look closer at envy and find more or less than what I have. “Unless they reform themselves in a hurry, something far worse than [the terrorist attacks] will happen to them” says Jerry Falwell. He is dead now but when he said this he was an American. I thought ministers of the Lord were supposed to be humble. What is so humble about saying that all Americans but him would face worse if they didn’t reform? He lived for not quite 6 years after this statement and I wonder what he would consider worse. Or does it matter now? What follows all of this is a lengthy biography and interview with Mel White the gay ghostwriter for such archconservatives as Francis Schaeffer, Jerry Falwell, James Kennedy, and Pat Robertson. I need to quote something from him then strain it a little bit. “What frightens me most are gay people who don’t understand what is happening and who are unwilling to take a stand . . .Once they take away our rights they’re going to start wanting to register us because we’re the ones who have the most sexually transmitted diseases. They’re going to say, ‘We want to register you so we can give you special medical attention.’ Quarantine comes next.” I agree that more of us need to stand up more often. However, living a standard life being out of the closet and in jobs from all over the spectra of collars and those of us (like me) lucky enough to make a decent living not having to wear a collar at all (I wear t-shirts, I’m not a stripper; the days when that was possible are memories) is far more important because we do it every day. We cannot protest and stand up and be heard every day, obviously. I have mentioned in the past the economic impact that gay people have on local economies. People in Pensacola wanted to put an end to a Memorial Day weekend gathering by huge crowds of gay people—when a study indicated that in three days, 25 million dollars went to the city’s coffers; there were no longer any protests. Towards the end of June every year is Gay Disney. The radical religious right may hate it, but that weekend spikes the already hyper-economy in Orlando, so no one at Disney would be willing to stop it—nor Orlando for that matter. These are the most important ways we can stand and be counted. Politically we are too vitiated by geography, family, status with regards to the closet, and just old fashioned American apathy to be effective in any other way. Gay money isn’t just the same color as everyone else’s, there is typically more of it. Is it possible to take away our rights because of public health issues? All people with sexually transmitted diseases are supposed to register at the local public health office and provide a list of people that may also be infected. HIV is not the same. Now all those records are secret by federal law. If gay people’s rights are taken away then those who have had a sexually transmitted disease would come along with us. Since that would mean something like one in 4 people (including women who have had cervical cancer due to HPV) would be quarantined. I can understand Mr. White’s fear, but I believe this is fed from his being closeted among those who hated him for so long. If you sit through all the vituperation for as long as he did, you are likely going to believe the absolute worse. Do gay people have anything new to worry about? I don’t think so. The current structure of the Republican party is likely not going to last much longer. The party will survive, but the structure will have to change. Last week (June 17), the New York Times reported that young people are leaning to the left, which had not been the case in previous poles. June 28 USA Today reported that Hispanics were now rallying around Democrats. On the federal level, gays may have less to worry about. On the state level, things will be pretty much as they are. This isn’t great, but it is a devil we know and may know how to exorcize. So far American Fascists is a really good book about something many of us fear and may even despise, but it puts the issues in a logical manner that allows digestion rather than just a form of information gluttony that doesn’t allow analysis and investigation. As I said, I will review the whole book in the next couple of days, but I didn’t want the month to pass without me posting something for the pride write off.  |
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