Onward, Christian Soldiers

This image has been making the rounds lately, and I must say I agree completely.  If you're using the Bible to hurt people, you're using it wrong: you should be using a sword, or a battle axe, as the Lord intended. You can't do any serious, God-breathed damage with a floppy leather-covered book. Geez!

This is basically the "No True Scotsman" move, which isn't an argument but an attempt to distract your attention.  Since there are numerous passages in the Torah and Prophets where Yahweh commands Israel to murder all the pagans and their livestock and burn their cities to the ground, it seems that "loving thy neighbor and even thy enemy" is perfectly compatible with mass slaughter.  One Christian told me that God had to do this, because otherwise the Israelites would have enslaved the people, and that would be worse than killing them. He forgot that in other Canaanite cities, Yahweh commanded that at least some of the inhabitants (virgin females, usually) should be enslaved.

In the New Testament, love is evidently compatible with Jesus verbally attacking his fellow Jews and condemning people to eternal torture if they didn't meet his impossibly high standards of attitude and conduct. Sometimes he just insulted people at random, like the pagan Syrophoenician woman he called a dog when she begged him to heal her sick daughter. Yahweh and Jesus can hardly be dismissed as marginal figures, bad apples who make Judaism and Christianity look bad.

It's ironic to see this meme citing Paul, who wrote, or rather dictated, the letter to the Romans, because Paul is a popular whipping boy for liberal and especially for gay Christians.  Even a lot of self-identified non-Christians denounce Paul as the original betrayer, worse than Judas, who replaced Christ's simple and beautiful message of Love with a bunch of Jewish stuff.  In any case, Paul talked pretty sometimes, just as Jesus did sometimes, but he could also be harsh when his congregations got out of line or he had to contend with other Christian missionaries whose teachings conflicted with his.  Love, for Paul, must therefore be compatible with sayings like

You suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to everyone in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last.

Love must also be compatible with the outpourings of rage I've seen from LGBT and allied people in response to the antigay Christians who denounced last week's Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage, since their reactions generally accuse their opponents of "hate."  This implies that the pro-gay side is motivated by "love."  They could've fooled me.

Is "hate" compatible with authentic religion?  I'm an atheist; it's not for me to say, and I really don't have an opinion on the matter.  Personally I think that hate is as valid as love, and I'm not the first person who's noticed that they aren't that far apart, whether in sacred or secular domains.  It seems obvious to me that not only ordinary believers but the great exemplars of religions have spoken and behaved hatefully as often as they have spoken and believed lovingly.  If you take the Bible as an account of the wishes of Yahweh, which seems reasonable to me, there's no question that he often wanted large numbers of people to be butchered to appease his wrath; if you don't take the Bible as an account of the wishes of Yahweh, I don't know what evidence there is that he disapproves of slaughtering whole populations who worship the wrong gods, or worship the putatively right one in the wrong way.  The popular way out of this problem is to insist that when Yahweh commanded mass killing, when he erupted into paroxysms of misogynist abuse, when Jesus threatened the mass of humanity with eternal punishment, they did so in a spirit of Love that is so far above the pathetic human standard that we can only contemplate it with awe and humble self-abasement at our failure to be as holy as they.  It's impossible to prove such claims wrong, since they have nothing to do with reason; but one can still reject them.  One can still say, with Huck Finn: All right then, I'll go to Hell.

As far as I've ever seen, though, no religious teacher, ancient or contemporary, explicitly preaches Hate.  They all insist that they are preaching Love.  Even the Westboro Baptist Church, as far as I know, claims that God hates fags; if they also hate us, it's because they must stand with God, and hate what he hates. And why not?  But most believers call their teachings Love.  The liberal gay and pro-gay allies who expressed their eagerness to see a Texas preacher immolate himself in protest of same-sex marriage being legalized, don't seem to have thought they were preaching hate; they thought he was the hater, so by the simple process of elimination they must be full of Love.  It doesn't seem that he actually said he would do it -- like a true War Wimp for Jesus, he said that other people should put their lives on the line for traditional marriage -- but who cares about facts?  There's no time to be accurate, honest, or rational!  We're fighting a war against Hate here!  Ironically, the only Christian minister who's actually set himself on fire in response to this issue was a pro-gay Methodist who burned himself to death in 2014, leaving a suicide note explaining that "the self-immolation was an attempt to die a martyr for the black and LGBT communities." 

Arguing about whether hate is compatible with true religion (or true atheism, for that matter) seems to me a distraction from more important questions.  It's so much easier, though, than thinking.

But back to the meme that set me off.  I know it's no fun to have other people tell you that you're going to Hell, or that you're a bad person because of your sexual tastes and practices, and if you're unlucky enough to be isolated in a hostile community, it can be very unpleasant.  People who've been wounded emotionally by such communities can be excused if they have trouble discussing these issues rationally, but they're in no position to condemn others for irrationality -- especially if their responses consist mainly of "Oh yeah?  Well, you're going to Hell!"  Which they mostly do.  See you in Hell, folks!

Defending the Faith

An old friend linked to this article from Slate on Facebook today, about religious opposition to same-sex marriage as voiced by Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal.  The post quotes Jindal as follows:

No church or church-affiliated organization, or individuals whose business is run in a manner consistent with their faith practices, should be required by the state to take steps in conflict with their religion. Nor should they be legally punished for how they treat marital arrangements outside the teachings of their faith. …

The writer of the piece, William Saletan, compares Jindal's remarks to the stand taken against interracial dating, also defended on religious grounds, by Bob Jones University "fourteen years ago," though it is actually decades older than that: the university had lost its tax exemption for racial discrimination in 1983, despite the support of then-President Reagan.  The particular stand Saletan discusses took place during the 2000 election campaign, when Republican candidate George W. Bush was criticized for having paid the obligatory visit to to BJU.  I've written about that before, and as Saletan points out, BJU dropped its policy against interracial dating immediately after mounting this defense, admitting that they couldn't cite a verse of Scripture to support it.  (The link I had to this information is broken.  Damn CNN.  But Saletan has this link to a contemporary account, which in turn links to a transcript of Bob Jones III's appearance on Larry King admitting that he had no Biblical support for the policy.)  Saletan points out several parallels between Jindal's defense of religious antigay bigotry and BJU's defense of racial bigotry, and rhetorically challenges Jindal to explain whether he'd support a religiously-based ban on interracial dating.

One of the most entertaining parallels Saletan draws is to a statement from BJU which declares that in its precincts "Students of all races attend here and live in racial harmony and respect for one another as Christians. … Each person dates within his own race. For there to be discrimination, one race would have to be treated differently than the other."  As Saletan says, this parallels the common claim that homosexuals can marry as long as they marry someone of the other sex.

But I objected to this related part (the statement in bold type is the antigay argument Saletan wants to refute):

4. Homosexuality, unlike race, is a choice. Empirically, all the evidence runs against this belief. If the science doesn’t convince you, the personal experience overwhelmingly reported by gay people, combined with the spectacular failure of “ex-gay” ministries, ought to shake your confidence. Yes, it’s possible to concede that homosexual inclination is involuntary while insisting that to act on that inclination is a choice. But the same can be said about race: You’re born black, but the decision to date a white person is on you.

As I keep insisting, the evidence supports neither claim: you can't prove scientifically that anything is a choice, and the evidence that homosexuality is somehow inborn is invalid.  As for "the personal experience overwhelmingly reported by gay people," that's a datum but proves nothing: people defend all sorts of bad-faith decisions by claiming that they can't help themselves, and they may even believe it.  (Lately, for example, I've encountered some gay people who claim that coming out wasn't a choice for them.  What else could it be?  How does coming out get into one's genes?)  The same goes for the spectacular failure of ex-gay ministries: it shows that sexual orientation, whatever it may be, is difficult to change, to the point of impossibility.  But forced religious conversions are equally ineffective, and no one (I think) wants to claim that religious affiliation is genetic.

A number of people, gay and antigay, have tried to confuse the issue of analogies between "race" and "sexual orientation" in the service of their agendas.  True, same-sex marriage isn't equivalent to race, but it is arguably analogous to interracial marriage.  As I've also pointed out before, interracial marriage was not legitimized by appeal to a "racial orientation" that forced people to marry spouses of the opposite race; why some people made such a choice was not even discussed seriously, certainly not in the Supreme Court decision which struck down state anti-miscegenation laws in 1967.  (It concludes, "The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations.")  I've known people who were only attracted to people of other races, as well as others who stuck to intra-racial relationships.  Some of the latter, especially, might appeal to Nature as a basis for keeping it all in the Race, but there's no basis for this notion and no one, that I know of, has even tried to find one.

Is being gay like being black?  Parallels and analogies can be and have been drawn, and they can be argued for and against.  But since American civil rights laws protect both innate conditions and chosen ones, whether homosexuality is inborn, mysteriously acquired, or freely chosen is irrelevant to the question of religious exemptions under those laws.  Religious freedom, like any other freedom, has limits, and those will have to be debated, litigated, and decided; but it's dishonest of opponents of same-sex marriage to pretend that such questions are anything new.

The Time Is Fulfilled, and Gay Marriage Is at Hand -- Real Soon Now

My old friend the ambivalent Obama supporter shared a link about the "inevitability" of same-sex marriage on Facebook today.  I've heard this trope a lot in the past couple of years, as polls show increasing support for same-sex civil marriage and even many of its antigay opponents concede grumpily that they've lost this battle.

Even more annoying in this case, the link in question was to an article about a poll that asked people if they thought same-sex marriage was inevitable.   Now, you can ask people about almost anything, and what people think about even stupid questions can tell you something about public attitudes.  But it's not terribly significant.

I annoyed my liberal law professor friend after she annoyed me by posting that same-sex marriage's time had come, there was no excuse for people who refuse to along with History and Progress.  "If everybody jumped off a bridge, would you?" I jeered.  She didn't make a very coherent reply, of course.  Such claims have the same kind of history as, say, claims about the imminence of the Second Coming: they're almost always jumping the gun.  But even when they aren't, they're intellectually and morally dishonest.

Right now, it does look as though same-sex marriage will be legal in all fifty states very soon.  And it also looks like antigay sentiment is declining in the US, mostly among younger people.  It fits with what the sociologist Mark MacCormack found in England, and it's an encouraging trend since it's evidence that antigay bigotry isn't innate to human beings.  But I'm still nervous, because no one knows why it's happening.  It's speculated that it's partly due to the greater visibility of GLBT people in society, that when you have gay friends and siblings and uncles and aunts and parents, you're less likely to see us as a remote but still scary threat.  I think that's plausible, but I wonder if it's sufficient to explain the change.  I worry that change like that can reverse itself, as easily as it happened in the first place.  I want to know why this change is happening, not just to speculate about it.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was touted in the media as "an overwhelming natural force whose momentum could not be stopped."  But I also recall how the American Republican Right celebrated its victory in the 1994 midterm elections by gloating that liberalism was on its last legs and that a few liberals should be kept on as museum pieces for the education of the young.  And how liberal-centrist Democrats gloated that the Right was on its last legs after Obama's victories of 2008 and 2012.  (Not so much after the slapdown of 2010, though.)  It ain't over 'till it's over, and it's never over.

Most important, the fact that change is snowballing in one direction or another may be more or less true, but it is not an argument in favor of the change.  Even if those who oppose a social trend are a tiny minority, they shouldn't go along with the trend merely because it's trendy.  "All the cool kids are doing it, you retarded loser" -- and Barack, as we know, is the Caliph of Cool to his devotees -- is an abdication of reason.  If you think something is wrong, or if you think something is right, you should stand fast even if everybody else in the world disagrees with you.  I've said before, of course, that it's not enough just to have principles: you have to have good ones.  But whether your principles are good or bad is not up to the crowd.  There are, I believe, plenty of good reasons, rational and historical, for being wary of triumphalist arguments from historical inevitability.



To cite this scene isn't to suggest that people on any side of the same-sex marriage controversy are Nazis; my point is that the appeal to historical forces is empty, and can be used by anybody, good or bad.  Since it's irrational, though, to make that appeal is to put yourself in very bad company.

I wasn't sure whether to bother posting about this exchange, but then I read an article at the Guardian that quoted Richard Stallman, the computing pioneer.  He was talking about the trendy phenomenon of "cloud computing," but as you can see, his remark generalizes:

Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.

That also applies to the Triumph of the MOOC (via).

There are other reasons than antigay bigotry or homophobia for skepticism about marriage, including same-sex marriage.  In general, both sides of the mainstream debate aren't interested in them.  What passes for public debate is really marketing most of the time.

Never Trust a Stranger Who Addresses You as "Friend"

A couple of friends linked to this opinion piece on Facebook today.  I'm disappointed in both of them.

The writer imagines that he's addressing Dan Cathy supporters, but I can't imagine many of them bothering to read the piece.  He's preaching to the choir, so he might as well not pretend otherwise.

To all of the, "It's his (Dan Cathy) right to speak his mind. Leave him alone!" people,

Is that your only point, that he has a right to say that? Who have you found that actually disputes that fact? I certainly do not endorse that argument, and it isn't the point. He is free as any other citizen of our nation to say whatever he likes, but that freedom does not protect him or his employers from other individual reactions to his speech.

Lou Colagiovanni obviously hasn't been paying attention to the debate.  Many people have actually disputed the fact that Dan Cathy has a right to state his opinions.  Start with Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Alderman Joe Merino of Chicago and Mayor Tom Menino of Boston, who threatened to block future Chick-Fil-A franchises from opening in their cities because of Cathy's statements and policies.  Then consider all the people who supported their threats, tried to justify them, or pretended that they hadn't said what they said but agreed with them anyway.  Generally they also ignored the fact that these worthies had backtracked from their original aggressive rhetoric, probably on legal advice.  Often the rationale was that "hate speech" is not protected by the First Amendment, or that governments can block any business they like for any reason they like, as long as the businesses are bad guys.  Glenn Greenwald did a piece last week, challenging those who felt this way to explain why (or if) they would object if governments were to block liberal, pro-gay businesses; the comments on the piece were revealing in their incomprehension of the issue.  (Most other well-known liberal writers agreed with him, however.)  To my mild surprise, even my liberal law professor friend muddied the issue.  The friend of another gay Facebook friend denied that the government couldn't block bad speech, because "hate speech" and "pornography" are not protected speech; of course, she was wrong about that too.

But back to Mr. Colagiovanni.

Why do you so forcefully argue that Cathy has a right to his opinion, but recoil when my friends and I attempt to exercise our opinions in the same manner that you champion? Is it because we disagree with Mr. Cathy and therefore with you? If so, let me tell you with certainty that agreement is not a tenet of free speech. In fact it is quite the opposite.

(When I first read the article this morning, Colagiovanni had written "tenant" for "tenet"; I pointed this out in a comment with more substantive criticism, and he fixed the typo but not the argument.)  To answer his first question, the double standard he criticizes is normal for American political discourse.  "Freedom of Speech for Me, But Not for Thee," Nat Hentoff called it, though he was as guilty of the tactic as anyone he criticized.  The same question could be asked just as profitably of Dan Cathy's critics: why do you so forcefully argue that you have a right to your opinion, but recoil when he and his friends exercise their opinions in the same manner you purport to champion?  Why is it good to boycott Chick-Fil-A, but not for the Christian right to boycott J. C. Penney for hiring Ellen DeGeneres as an advertising symbol?  (To her credit, DeGeneres didn't freak out over the boycott threat as many of her fans did.  But to his credit, Bill O'Reilly declared his opposition to all boycotts, regardless of their rationale; he's consistent on that point, even if he's wrong.)

Aren't you the same people who advocate for free markets? What is more free in a market than individuals coming together to talk about something they are passionate about? Do you believe in a market where consumers are not allowed to actively and loudly voice their dissatisfaction with a product, or a brand -- regardless of the reason? If so, how can you call that a "free" market, friend?

The more one examines the points of views of those who make these arguments, the more readily apparent it is that what they offer under the guise of patriotism and a battle for the truth is nothing more than an attempt to silence dissenters.

I haven't noticed that Chick Fil A's pro-gay critics welcome discussion or disagreement any more than Chick Fil A's supporters do.  Certainly the critics aren't very good at discussion.  There's something pathetic about the supporters' day of support for the chain on August 1 last week.  It's reminiscent of the Right's conviction that calling themselves the Tea Party (after a notorious incident of civil disobedience and property damage) while having safe little rallies constitutes courageous dissent against tyranny.  If they imagined that by eating at Chick Fil A they were standing in the proud tradition of the lunch counter sit-ins (and I got the impression that some of them did) or the primitive Christians worshiping in catacombs, they were deluded: no one was going to hit them or arrest them for buying a fast-food chicken sandwich.  But they did turn out in numbers, which is something.  The nationwide counter-demonstration mounted soon after seems to have fizzled.  Here in Bloomington, the Kiss-in participants were stopped from taking pictures by Mall guards.  When it was pointed out that the anti-gay demonstrators had taken pictures, the response was that there were too many of them to stop.  That wasn't true of the pro-gay demonstrators; why not?  I didn't go because I don't feel passionately about this matter; I'm not a supporter of marriage, same-sex or other sex, and I think the opposition to Chick Fil A has muddied the issue by its disdain for the First Amendment.  But a lot of people do care, or say they do.  Where were they?

The Gaze Militant

Here's an interesting exchange. It's fun and easy to laugh at Romney's discomfiture here, but one thing jumped out at me: if this Vietnam veteran is going to make same-sex marriage the deciding issue when he votes, he won't be able to vote for Barack Obama either. Obama has always made his opposition to same-sex marriage clear and unmistakable, except for those who absolutely insist on deluding themselves.

“I’m a Christian,” Mr. Obama said on a radio program in his 2004 race for Senate. “And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman.”

Luckily, his religious beliefs apparently don't say anything about homosexuals serving in the military, though even on that matter, despite his promises, he did nothing for two years. It took him just about as long to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act against legal challenges. If I had a magic wand, I'd wave it to let Bob Garon, the veteran who challenged Romney, sit down to breakfast with President Obama and ask him the same questions.

At the same time, I wouldn't mind putting some questions to Mr. Garon. The U.S. Constitution doesn't say anything about marriage, so it's not correct to say that denying him marriage denies him his Constitutional rights. (According to the Queerty article from which I learned his name, he's married to another man under Vermont law. Even without DOMA, other states aren't required to recognize that marriage. That's likely to be contested for some time, even if DOMA is repealed.) I do get tired of people talking about marriage "rights," when what marriage confers is privileges and benefits, and why should married people get special privileges and benefits? One negative side effect of the push for same-sex marriage is that it has devalued other relationships, such as domestic partnerships, that extended recognition to nonmarital relationships. If the Family and Medical Leave Act were passed today, would it extend its benefits to people who aren't related by marriage or "blood"? I doubt it. The more I watch the debates over marriage, the more I agree with Nancy Polikoff that it is families that need support and recognition, whether they involve marriage or not.

Having said that, I must add that I enjoyed watching Bob Garon make Romney uncomfortable. As one commenter at Queerty pointed out, Romney could hardly have expected, when he sat down with those two old men that morning, that they would not only be gay but let him know it, and that one of them would challenge him on gay marriage. Things have certainly changed since I was a boy, but then, Bob Garon is only a few years older than I am. Those of us old gay militants who are still around have not become less militant. But I'd still like to see him confront Barack Obama.