It was some time during the summer of 2005. Half the year was over and President Bush had just won the election the previous November. The country was just beginning to really feel the fatigue of the Iraqi war, even as Leftist senators, congressmen and organizations continued to hammer the President on the missing WMD’s. At some point during this miasma of shouting accusations, the President introduced a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage.
At the time, I thought this was a peculiar non sequitur given the severity of the forces arrayed against us. Iran was in the incipient stages of obtaining the bomb. China was becoming bolder in challenging us on the high seas and pressing Japan’s airspace. Russia was tightening their energy noose around Eastern Europe and parts of Western Europe.
So, out of all the things the President could discuss— from Iraq to China, from illegal immigration to social security— he wanted to propose a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage? I scratched my head.
“He’s not serious, is he?” I asked a friend.
“Marriage is one of the most important sacraments there are in the Christian faith. You damn tootin’ he’s serious,” he responded.
Hmmm…
I recalled during President Bush’s presidential debates with Senator John “F” Kerry that he believed in the sanctity of life, that gays should be treated with “dignity and respect”. If giving people, gays in particular, “dignity and respect” meant denying them what is granted to everyone else, what did he mean by “dignity and respect”?
* * * *
Flash forward a few years. The proposed constitutional amendment fell flat on its face, the Iraqi war goes on with swings and roundabouts, the President is still besieged and governmental scandals abound.
This past August we saw the once mighty “Family Values” champion fall from his pedestal. I’m speaking, of course, of Senator Larry Craig, who was at one point one of the most influential senators of the Republican Party. Before the reports of his indiscretion reached the ears of most Americans, the sonic boom you heard was all the Republican senators running away from him.
Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney called Senator Craig’s actions “disappointing and disgraceful”. This is the same man who had appointed Craig Senate co-chairman of his presidential campaign and glowingly praised Craig’s “Family Values” ethic. But almost as soon as reports of his arrest were made, Romney distanced himself and remained elusive about his association. Now, almost no conservative is willing to touch Craig with a ten-foot pole.
What was his crime exactly?
He tapped his foot. He rubbed his hand under the stalls. That’s it…
… for tapping his foot and rubbing his hands on the bottom of a restroom stall, an entire life is destroyed? Senator Craig is now virtually exiled from the Republican Party and from the fundamentalist Christians he once represented. Did I think he solicited gay sex in the stall? Probably. But this leaping hysterical reaction from the conservatives troubles me.
All this because there was just a hint that he was, God forbid, gay.
This is the approximate point when it started to really dawn on me. The conservatives and the fundamentalist Christians, even some of the liberals, really mean it when they say they want to outlaw homosexuality and reinstate the Sodomy Laws. Up to this point, I’ve always rationalized and puh-poo’d the assertions of gays who said that the fundamentalists Right are out to get them. I’ve always taken that to be a hysterical Leftist reaction that always seems to accuse conservatives of being evil.
But this is where this axiom applies: You ain’t being paranoid if they’re really out to get you.
Being a Christian myself, I began really sit up and take note of what conservatives and fundamentalist Christians say about gays. And my goodness. You would think by hearing Christian conservatives talk that all the ills of America these past few years is due to our tolerance of homosexuality.
Gay bashing has almost become per forma.
For a Christian conservative to show he’s true-blue, a real conservative Christian, the Real McCoy, he’s got to bash gays somewhere in his statement. From Sean Hannity to Anne Coulter, from Hal Lindsey to Jerry Falwell. It was not long ago, last year I think, when all the conservative pundits used to make the stipulation that they don’t care whether so-and-so is gay or not. It was their political stances they had issues with. Now, most of those pundits— with the notable exception of Bill O’Reilly— have forgone this stipulation. They delve in whole-hog, hands and feet first, into accusing homosexuals as being disgusting, degenerates, immoral, and perverted, etc, etc. The fact that they make almost no attempt to hide their hatred is troublesome. They must think the nation is heading in their direction or else their opinions wouldn’t be expressed so frankly… and perhaps they’re right.
Because one of my main avenues of study is in the End Times prophecies, I’ve come across many Christian movies and documentaries discussing the Apocalypse. In virtually every documentary, every movie, the people producing the movie went well out of their way to denigrate gays, often in complete non-sequiturs. Because of its uniformity in these films and in the media, one might be tempted to say that to be a Christian, you must hate gays.
I am thinking of this one Hal Lindsey article in particular, called “Jesus—king of hate?” It addressed how Christians are being persecuted in a similar way to the early Christian Church. While reading his opening paragraphs, I kept saying, “Yeah, that’s right.” And, “Yep, that’s true.” Then I felt as though I’ve been suddenly slapped by a wet noodle when he made a 90 degree shift into outright gay bashing. The non-sequitur was just too jarring.
In making the point of Christian persecution throughout the world, he gave these examples:
…since the Caesars claimed deity, it became an act of treason to claim that Jesus was the supreme Lord above him. Two thousand years later, the Bible and Christianity are facing the same charges for basically the same reasons.
Except it’s even more irrational today than it was in Roman times. At least the Romans believed in an “afterlife.” So in their minds, they were being excluded from an eternal reality.
In the West, the biggest persecutors of Christians don’t even believe there IS a hell, but they are still furious at being excluded from it. Now that is irrational – wouldn’t you agree?
A website called Frontline Fellowship that keeps track of such persecutions worldwide noted the following cases. In Sweden, a Pastor in his 70s named Ake Green was sentenced to a month in prison for offending homosexuals in a sermon.
In Canada, Hugh Owens was prosecuted for placing a small ad in his local newspaper. In it, he responded to all that he had been forced to observe during homosexual pride week. His ad simply listed four Bible references.
From these references, he put an equal sign to a drawing depicting two men holding hands. Then he superimposed over this drawing the universal red circle with a slash through it. Before one could even be offended, one had to first to look up the references in the Bible.
But somebody took the time necessary to look it up, be offended and file a complaint. As a result, Owen was charged with a “hate crime” and fined $4,500. The newspaper was also fined.
In New Zealand, two Christian videos that questioned safe-sex slogans and exposed the link between AIDS and homosexual behavior were outlawed by the New Zealand Parliament.
Dianne Haskett, the mayor of London, Ontario, Canada, was fined $10,000 for refusing to proclaim a “Gay Pride Weekend.” After she lost her case in Canada’s courts, she resigned as mayor rather than be forced to proclaim the event – just three weeks before Election Day.
In another incident related to Christophobia,…
In Hal Lindsey’s attempt to assert the beliefs of Christianity and to, in a sense, disprove the base accusation in his title, that Jesus Christ is “the king of hate,” he intimated that it is really okay to hate homosexuals. If you take his article at face value, he implied that Christianity not only condones such beliefs, he implied that it is a tenet of the Christian faith. Logically speaking, if he wanted to disprove the terrible accusation of the secular progressives that Jesus Christ is “the king of hate” and assert the opposite, homosexuals would have to be non-humans for him to make his argument, complete persona non grata as human beings.
But his underlying assumption is that it is right and proper to deny gays the status of human beings. I find it particularly offensive that someone would advocate and propound hatred in the name of Jesus Christ, even as he tries to argue the opposite, as though Christianity commands Christians to hate gays and deny them their right to exist.
It is much more convenient to pile your sins on the scapegoat and drive it out of the village than to confess them and build a character, eh?
Believe me, I’m not casting moral aspersions. This is true for you, me and Adam.
****
Allow me to get down to particulars. Anyone with a lick of honesty can see that a little four year old boy sneaking into his mom’s closet and putting on her lipstick and clothes is genetically predisposed to homosexuality, or if he’s naturally effeminate even before he’s hit puberty, you kind of get the idea that he’ll like other little boys and not little girls. A four year old has not been indoctrinated into anything, hasn’t been corrupted into anything. It’s just the way he’s been made. This is a point so obvious that my needing to explain it shows the degeneration of our reason.
Because gays are intrinsically born liking members of the same sex, one cannot mount the argument that they have chosen this way of life anymore than one can argue that one gets to choose how many fingers and toes one has. Once you’ve assented to the fact that homosexuality just is, an honorable honest man must treat them as a human being, not as some aberration of nature, as many conservatives are prone to do.
Or allow me to word this in another way. It is almost inconceivable that a man would choose, of his own free will, to be gay in today’s world. Almost from birth, he is reviled, kicked about and spat on by society, especially if he is effeminate. Even with today’s level of tolerance, which is not saying much, homosexuals are forced into small insular communities of other homosexuals because of the persecution of broader society.
In other words, they live the lives of exiles. In ancient times, the worst conceivable punishment for any individual would not be death but utter exile. It was a fate worse than death because, as any trained psychologist would tell you, a man who is cut off from his own society will go steadily mad. An exiled Russian living in and among only the French or an exiled Briton living in and among only the Sudanese will be quite mad.
This is the current disposition of many gays I’ve known. They are outcasts, and yes, some of them are quite mad. Again, I find it inconceivable that anyone would willing choose such a life without it be intrinsic to their being and nature.
Since the defeat of the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, the Right has since proposed to seat a whole Constitutional Convention to ram it through.
Think this one through.
The Right’s hatred of gays is so vehement they are willing to open Pandora’s Box and allow the Leftists to re-write our entire system of government. Once that Convention sits anything that comes out of that Convention will be the law of the land. American sovereignty, our peculiar democratic republican form of government, all our freedoms could be flung gleefully away as long as the Fundamentalist Right can legislate homosexuality out of existence.
The heat coming from the Right on this issue goes well beyond just morality. If this were righteous indignation coming from religious conviction, where is their heat concerning pre-martial sex, divorce, adultery, greed etc?
I find the Right’s vitriolic hatred of gays very reminiscent of Islam’s hatred of Israel. Both deny the right of the other to exist. The mere fact of their being somehow threatens them, Israel for Islam and homosexuals for the Fundamentalist Right. It is utterly irrational, but there it is.
* * * *
Some conservatives I know mount the secular argument against gay marriage because “it weakens the institution of marriage.” According to my conservative acquaintances, marriage should exclusively be between a man and a woman because opening the doorway to gay marriage unleashes whole sets of wanton behavior and because it would be contrary to traditional family values. Some of these conservatives even concede to the fact that homosexuality is genetic. Unstated but assumed in this idea is that the existence of gay marriage threatens and undermines heterosexual marriage.
I don’t find this sort of reasoning very persuasive or compelling. It is like saying the existence of an apple undermines the existence of an orange when the two can exist contentedly in entirely different spheres.
Like so much of our discourse recently, the debate on this matter attempts to force one into an “either/or” box. Either heterosexual marriage is legal or homosexual marriage. This binary box that people try to paint you into is ludicrous off the top. I don’t think homosexual marriage would have any bearing whatsoever on the state of heterosexual marriage. One does not negate the other, nor does it threaten it. They’re just apples and oranges.
While the national debate of gay marriage was well underway, I remember hearing some pundits making the point that Western Civilization was built on the family. The family is the basic building block that ties together and shapes a nation and a culture. To admit gays into normal society makes a mockery of this basic building block.
On this point, I couldn’t disagree more.
A nation and a culture are its relationships. I believe that the Greek philosopher Plato was correct and our modern ideas of family values are dead wrong. Plato wrote all those long ages ago, that “Friendship is the school house of all virtue.” It was the intense friendships between George Washington and Lafeyette, between John Adams and Franklin, and countless other friendships that launched our great American Republic—not their love of family, but the love between friends. Family does not make someone virtuous; frankly, that speaks to only the fertility of two able parties.
As late as the 1980’s in America, lifelong friendships were ubiquitous. Everyone had a friend or two in whom they could give their unguarded trust and loyalty. It was common for people to meet their friends in grade school and to have that friendship span the entire breadth of their lives. Men would gather on the lawn or porches and discuss religion, history and politics, and women would have their “coffee clutches” where the women would meet and gossip.
This was the way the world was in our not-so-distant past. Now, I don’t see many intimate friendships at all, but temporary alliances arranged at work or school. The proof is in the pudding. I don’t know of single instance of anyone I’ve known my entire life where the “friendships” don’t die when the “friends” no longer see each other on a regular basis. I’ll wager that whoever is reading this knows precisely what I am talking about, and if he is a counterexample to my generalization, he is a very lucky man indeed.
I think you can actually chart the decline of civil society with the death of friendships.
As it stands now, most people don’t even recognize true friendships when they see it. Most will mistake it for a homosexual relationship, and they’ll thus deride it and belittle it even when the two men could be a straight as arrows. I’ve seen it time and again.
Another secular argument against gay marriage says that legalizing this form of marriage will open the door to bestiality and every kind of freak show. Under rational circumstance I wouldn’t give this argument the dignity of a rebuttal because it’s too disgusting. It is disgusting because of the causal ease in which people equate homosexuals with one of the worse forms of insanity.
The only point of contention is whether marriage can be defined as between a man and a woman, or just between two consenting adults. The point of the contention is not the introduction of inter-species relationships, nor is the point about opening up polygamy.
* * *
Back during my years in college I ran in artistic circles. I knew a host of writers, painters, wannabe philosophers, and musicians. Quite a few of them were homosexuals, many of them weren’t. But as a generalization, in my experience, gays are perhaps one of the most creative, intelligent and (most certainly) expressive sector of our society. I fail to see the threat to society coming from a gay man doing oil paintings in his home, or a gay man sprouting abstract, esoteric philosophy to a group of other gays.
I’m sorry I don’t see it. As far as I can see, the only reason for the animus against gays from the Right and elsewhere is good old-fashioned bigotry…
… and bigotry, I think, is a very ugly thing.
It’s taken me a while to really see it but it’s better late than never. I think the fundamentalist Right really means what they say about gays. Immediately after 9/11, Jerry Falwell blames gays for the attack. When “moral leaders” speak of declining moral values in today’s world, they will invariable discuss the hideousness of our tolerance for gays.
You know you’re in trouble when a major national party has as one of its platforms the denial human rights to a subset of human beings. It has echoes of Nazi Germany, and that just doesn’t sit well with me. Many conservative proposals along these lines are a step down a path I don’t think we should take.
As Spencer Tracy said in Judgment at Nuremberg, the line you do not cross is to knowingly send an innocent man to prison.
“If he and the other defendants were all depraved perverts - if the leaders of the Third Reich were sadistic monsters and maniacs - these events would have no more moral significance than an earthquake or other natural catastrophes. But this trial has shown that under the stress of a national crisis, men - even able and extraordinary men - can delude themselves into the commission of crimes and atrocities so vast and heinous as to stagger the imagination.
… How easily that can happen!
There are those in our country today, too, who speak of the “protection” of the country. Of “survival”. The answer to that is: survival as what?
A country isn’t a rock. And it isn’t an extension of one’s self. It’s what it stands for, when standing for something is the most difficult! Before the people of the world - let it now be noted in our decision here that this is what we stand for: justice, truth… and the value of a single human being!”