Spare the Child and Spoil the Rod

I'd be very interested to know what the right-wing Christian Rod Dreher would have to say about this incident.  The supposed persecution of Christian conservatives is one of his recurring themes.  Would he defend a teacher who, apparently because of her religious beliefs, attacked a child and the child's parents in the classroom?

For the benefit of those who, like me, dislike sitting through videos, what happened is this: a young boy was excited and proud because after going through five foster homes, he was finally being adopted.  The adoptive parents are two gay men.  When he talked about this in class, the substitute teacher in charge berated him: why would he be happy and proud about being adopted by homosexuals?  The boy didn't want to make trouble, despite his anger, so he didn't talk back, but some of his classmates did.  (That, for me, is the best thing about the story, that other kids stood up for him.)  They went to the principal, who removed the teacher, and she was subsequently fired by the agency that employed her.

The teacher is entitled to her beliefs, but not to pick on a student because of them.  I'd feel the same way if a liberal Christian teacher berated a child of the Duggar family, for example.  Or if an atheist told Christian children that their parents should be caged for brainwashing them with fairy stories.  I'm impressed that all this happened in Utah, which for me first comes to mind as the state which banned all extracurricular high school groups rather than allow Gay Straight Alliances.  Orson Scott Card is surely gnashing his teeth in helpless fury nowadays.

If I'm ever tempted to doubt that we have made progress in this country, a story like this one reminds me that we have.  Progress is never final, of course, and there are many people who will work to turn it back.  But as this story shows, there are also many people who will work to block them.

But Some of My Best Friends Are Cock Holsters!

Just as I was about to let Stephen Colbert's unfortunate "joke" about Trump and Putin sink slowly into the past, various people kept kicking it back to the front of my consciousness.  So, for example, Roy Edroso dismissed US Representative Jason Chaffetz last week as "a little bitch who remained lashed to his great white Hillary whale long after everyone else abandoned ship because pretending to be a tough guy is all he knows how to do."  Edroso got his metaphors a bit mixed up there, but these are troubled times and we've got to do something.  Then, yesterday, Edroso mocked country singer Toby Keith, who performed for an all-male audience in Saudi Arabia during Trump's visit there:

I like to imagine Keith getting a call: "Hey Tobe! It's me, Faisal. How'd you like to pick up a quarter mil easy money? All you have to is change some lyrics -- you know, 'Pellegrino for My Horses, Mango Nectar for My Men.'" Or maybe it's not that kind of relationship, and Keith came wrapped in a rug?

The link goes to a clip from the 1963 Hollywood blockbuster Cleopatra, in which Elizabeth Taylor has herself delivered to Rex Harrison wrapped in a rug, thereby signaling her sexual availability or something.  So Edroso wants us to think of Keith as Faisal's little bitch.

Then this morning liberal tweeter Yes You're Racist invited Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to "eat my entire ass."  YYR is a better person than I am; being rimmed by McConnell would just make me feel dirty.  (Or as the lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel had a character say in one of her early strips, "I thought sodomy meant having sex with a Republican.")

These examples, which of course could be multiplied, are useful partly because they disprove the straight-liberal-guy protestation that calling somebody a faggot is not a reference to gay sexual practices, that they are totally cool with gays boning gays, they totally support gay marriage, they just don't like "Servants of power.  You know - faggots."  But as Colbert and Edroso and YYR show, they equate being a servant of power with being penetrated sexually, which they regard with visceral repulsion.  So how do they think of the women in their lives?  I probably shouldn't ask.

Another reason I almost didn't write about all this was that Brandon U. Sutton wrote an excellent piece about the controversy at Progressive Army.  Sutton said most of what I'd intended to say.  For example:

First, and while this may seem churlish, what Colbert said was not even particularly clever or funny. Arguably, it was barely even a joke, since jokes have a certain structure from which they derive some of their humor. Colbert saying that the only thing Donald Trump’s mouth is good for is as a “cock holster” was just an insult that people found funny.

"Funny" is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but I think he's right.  "Cock holster" is the kind of epithet sixth-grade boys consider hilarious: not because they have any personal experience of fellatio from either end, but because they're extremely anxious about bodies.  Which reminded me of a couple of sketches from Colbert's show during last year's campaign, in which a young boy played Trump's "nickname strategist."  It appears that Colbert took the boy on as one of his writers.

That many conservatives objected to Colbert's insult was unsurprising -- not because it was "homophobic," which they would normally consider a good thing, but because it targeted someone on their side.  If, during the 2008-2016 period, some comic had called Barack Obama a cock holster for Benjamin Netanyahu, would liberal Democrats have considered it just a joke?  For that matter, I recall Colbert himself adopting a stance of unironic submission to then-President Obama, who ordered him to get a military buzz cut to show his solidarity with Our Troops in Iraq. "Servant of power" would have been a perfect characterization for Colbert in those days, and depending on whom he's bending the knee to, it still is.

I don't want Colbert fired.  I just want to name what he's doing.  His liberal defenders have had to resort to right-wing insults against his critics, such as "virtue signalling."  But virtue-signalling is Colbert's stock in trade.  One Colbertista on Twitter responded to me in those terms: "Thanks for another example of our virtue signaling culture where everyone is perpetually offended."  To which I replied, "I'm not 'offended' by his homophobic insults; I'm a faggot, they just roll off. They just undercut his signalled virtue."

But there's another thought: one reason we're not supposed to say such naughty things is that they'll drive gay kids to suicide.  So why does Colbert get a pass on it?  Because he's on Our Side, one of the Good Guys, and anyway, liberals are happy to use homophobic / misogynist rhetoric against their enemies.  (Don't imagine that kids wouldn't hear about what Colbert said, even if it weren't freely available the next day on YouTube.  That's another right-wing fantasy, that children will know nothing of homosexuality if we can just keep Teh Gay out of the media.)  I'm not seriously worried about Colbert affecting youth-suicide rates, of course: I'm just savoring the smell of hypocrisy in the morning.

Didn't I Say That on the Other Side of the Record?

The advice columnist Dan Savage "called out" antigay bigot Ben Carson last week for saying on CNN that being gay was a "choice."  Carson had pointed to people who "go into prison straight and come out gay."  Savage challenged Carson to prove his claim by choosing to become gay himself, by sucking Savage's dick.

I've said before that one reason I'm finding it hard to write this blog is that I feel like I'm repeating myself.  But then, so is Dan Savage: he said the same thing to another antigay bigot a few years ago, and I can't add much to what I wrote about him at the time.  Since then, however, he's shown his moral superiority to bigots by calling some high school students "pansy-assed" because they walked out on one of his personal appearances, using a homophobic epithet to try to shame them; and by saying that he sometimes thinks about "fucking the shit out" of the antigay bigot Rick Santorum, again using the homophobic trope that fucking another man degrades him.  As I wrote of Savage's remarks about Santorum, Savage is indulging in homophobic abuse that no one should be allowed to get away with, using sex as a metaphor for debasement and humiliation. He's tapping into the same reservoir of male violence that drives queerbashers and rapists.  And, of course, he's also revealing his own hangups about being gay himself.  So why listen to Ben Carson when you can get your daily dose of antigay bigotry from Dan Savage?

Carson backed down and apologized, but also "criticized CNN for airing the comments he'd made in an interview and said he won't be addressing gay rights issues for the duration of his presidential campaign."  Hahahahah, I'm sure he won't.  If he's going to be a presidential candidate, he'd better get used to the comments he makes during interviews (!) being aired and otherwise published.  I doubt his candidacy will get very far, though, since like other Republican hopefuls he's prone to making stupid gaffes that will entertain his hardcore supporters but put off everybody else.

On the other hand, Carson said something true: that "up until this point there have been no definitive studies that people are born into a specific sexuality."  Maybe his medical training has paid off after all!  But if he really cared about factual accuracy, he wouldn't make any statements at all about the etiology of sexual orientation, and he certainly wouldn't have said what he said about the effects of prison on sexual orientation.  Nor would he claim, as he continues to do, that homosexuality is a choice.  But he seems to be driven to make a fool of himself, so even in the apology he posted on Facebook he said that "we are always born male and female", which as a scientist he should know is oversimple, and that he thinks "marriage is a religious institution"; if he really believed that, he'd reject civil marriage, the interference of the State in a religious institution.

It's interesting how far Carson (like other religious bigots) has surrendered to the Politically Correct Gay Agenda.  Does he want homosexuals to be executed, as Scripture commands?  Does he want to reinstate sodomy laws, or Don't Ask Don't Tell?  Does he want same-sex couples to be outside of all legal recognition and protection?  No, he does not:

I support human rights and Constitutional protections for gay people, and I have done so for many years. I support civil unions for gay couples, and I have done so for many years. I support the right of individual states to sanction gay marriage, and I support the right of individual states to deny gay marriage in their respective jurisdictions.

That's not a Bible-believing Christian talking, not one who stands firm against the moral erosion of American society.  That's a flaming liberal.  Even when he says that marriage should be restricted to one man and one woman, he's agreeing with the liberals that polygamy -- a Biblical and traditional value, mind you -- is wrong.  Someone really should ask him, though: since he thinks marriage should be defined and sanctioned by states rather than the Federal government, does he think that Loving v. Virginia, which overturned state laws against "interracial" marriage, should be overturned?  And if he really believes that permitting legal same-sex marriage is an illegitimate redefinition of marriage, why is he willing to let states do it?

"I am not a politician," Carson concluded.  As a presidential hopeful, he is a politician.  But he won't be one for long, the way he's going.

Ah there, you see?  I've said all this before, though sometimes about different people.

Pride and Prejudice

Someone I know passed along this meme, and since I didn't have commenter privilege on that post I shared it, with my commentary, and then checked out the proximate source.  The comments there were a mixed bag, though it was clear that for many people who liked the meme, antigay bigotry was a significant factor in their opinion.

There are many things I could say, but I think it's best to address this idea directly.  First off, I am not surprised that many Homo-Americans have sunk to the level of our worst enemies in reacting to this meme and the whole notion of "straight pride."  (One commenter wrote: "Are you Christian? Kill yourself".  That's showing your moral superiority!)  Haven't we been saying for decades that we're just like straight people except for whom we love?  Well, unfortunately, it's true.

I considered pointing out that an analogous "white pride" meme would also go down like a Zeppelin, but then I remembered that people who say they need to celebrate straight pride are likely to be the same people who ask peevishly why there isn't a white history month, so never mind.

However.  I'm all in favor of straight pride manifestations. We've had a few "straight pride" events here at IU over the years, though not recently.  They were all organized by right-wing groups who were known to embrace antigay bigotry, but since they were not known for thoughtfulness or more than minimal intelligence, this didn't bother me; they were too dull to understand what they were proposing.  Again, not all that different from many of my fellow homosexuals, unfortunately.

I love my straight friends and relatives; I don't look down on them, because I know they can't help themselves; they deserve pity and sympathy, not censure. Love the sinner and hate the sin! So whenever I encounter someone talking about "straight pride" events, I tell them that, and I offer to help them organize the "gay allies" contingent. Just as gay pride celebrations routinely include straight allies, often with straight allies as parade marshals, a straight pride celebration should welcome the support of gay allies. I haven't received a very welcoming response when I've made this offer, for some reason.  I think it's long past time to organize the first branch of Parents and Friends of Straight People. It sounds like they really need the support!

When the Son of Man Comes, Will He Find Faith on Earth?

Something else I meant to say about Rod Dreher and Megan McArdle's complaints about same-sex marriage: They may be right about the effects of social change on conservatives like them, because they appear to have abandoned all opposition to homosexuality except for same-sex marriage.

It's been hard for a long time to find a religious conservative who'd cite Leviticus 20:13 and call publicly for the execution of perverts.  Even Orson Scott Card tried to claim that when he endorsed keeping sodomy laws on the books, he was talking solely about intra-Mormon business.  Sex between males hasn't been a capital offense in the United States for centuries now, and though the sodomy laws are still in force in some states despite Lawrence v. Texas, not many people want to defend putting homos in prison anymore.  Not publicly, anyway.  For a decade or more, bigots would call on the Bible to back them up in their opposition to "normalizing" homosexuality, but they seemed to have given up on actual State persecution of sodomists, and wanted only to be able to denounce us from their pulpits and force their kids into ex-gay boot camps.  Rick Warren, the evangelical hustler befriended by Barack Obama, is careful not to froth at the mouth when he talks about gays: he believes in "equality", he says, and is coy about issues like civil unions and hospital visitation.  Some old-guard reactionaries are still warning America that the Gayish Media are coming for your kids, but for media consumption they claim they'd just like to seriously "debate gay teen propaganda."  And they all complain that the Gay-controlled media "are not celebrating diversity.  They are intimidating dissidents."  But they don't object to intimidating dissidents -- they just want to be the intimidators.

Marriage appears to be their last stand.  They've pretty much given up on legal prohibitions of homosexuality itself, and on mobilizing majority disapproval against it.  They like to imagine themselves reading Leviticus 20:13 and Romans 1:26-7 behind locked doors by candle-light with a faithful remnant of real believers, just like the primitive Church in the catacombs!  And being true Americans and devout Christians, they are terrified of majority disapproval themselves.  Just being called bigots, or homophobes, or old-fashioned, brings them to their knees.  There's no need to throw them to the lions, or send them to Politically Correct Re-education Camp, or disenfranchise them.  Even name-calling may not be necessary.  Just a frown of disapproval seems to be enough to make them deny their Lord.

As a gay man who was born in a time when gay men and lesbians met behind drawn curtains and locked doors, even in big cities, when gay meeting places were raided and customers beaten up and humiliated, their identities exposed in the press, and who has seen a remarkable change of social attitudes in my adult lifetime, I certainly can't resist some Schadenfreude at the moral cowardice of such people.  When I came out, I knew I'd be subject to public hostility and disapproval, and sometimes I was.  But as long as I knew it was okay to be gay, and as long as I had some allies, I didn't need majority support.  It turned out not to be as hard as I feared at first, though of course I chose my terrain carefully, a fairly liberal university environment.   (Which didn't mean there wasn't antigay bigotry and violence there too.)

And much of that bigotry has melted away over the past several decades.  It's not gone yet, nor do I believe it will ever be.  As with interracial dating, which after decades of banning, a reactionary institution like Bob Jones University finally, sheepishly, admitted it didn't have a biblical basis to forbid, because the social revulsion against interracial dating had largely dried up, it appears that many people are finding that they don't really find homosexuality so horrible to contemplate anymore.  That doesn't mean they want to be gay themselves, only that it doesn't bother them in others, and a growing number of people don't oppose same-sex marriage for those who want it.  That's really not so surprising: although heterosexuals are less likely to marry than they were when I was a kid, the institution still has immense prestige.  In our culture, it's considered a Good Thing, something everyone should want to do someday, and since it is almost universally agreed that if you meet someone you really really really love and want to spend the rest of your life with, marriage is the obvious and necessary next step.  Given that bedrock belief, most people find it obvious that gay men and lesbians should feel the same way, and they can't think of a good reason not to let them marry.  It seems unfair not to let them.

McArdle doesn't appear to be religious, except for her Randite background (she used to blog under the name "Jane Galt," I understand).  I don't know what kind of social support network she has, though as a good rational Objectivist libertarian she should be prepared to stand utterly alone against the looters and moochers and other collectivist scum -- though what that has to do with opposing gay marriage, I have no idea.  Dreher, like most antigay Christians, has a community to back him up, so I don't really see why being in a righteous minority scares him so much.  Even if official persecution comes, however unlikely that is, he will, Scripture says, have his reward in heaven.  As an atheist I never had any such reassurance, and it's an interesting question, which I can't answer, why I never felt the need for it.  Perhaps in Dreher's moral universe that would be monstrous Pride.  But Christians have an ancient tradition of expecting and facing worldly opposition to their faith -- a paranoid delight in persecution, as Graham Shaw called it in The Cost of Authority.  The paranoia goes some way to explain why they're so sure that gay goons will invade their churches and force their ministers to say, "I now pronounce you wife and wife."  They love scaring themselves with the thought.  I suspect that a major reason they feel the need to do so is that many of themselves can't, when they search their hearts, think of any good reason to oppose same-sex marriage either.  But they have to.  The enemy is in themselves.

Despite all this, I'm not complacent.  If homophobia is declining in the US and England, as the sociologist Mark McCormack argues in his 2012 book, it is just as possible that it will return someday, like the tide.  There's still plenty of bigotry and violence around, along with racism, misogyny, and gut anti-Semitism.  People of good will must continue working against such things.  But if the job is turning out to be somewhat easier than we expected, that also means we can pause now and then to think about what we're doing and why.  The most dispiriting thing to me is the dishonesty and irrationality of so many people who are supposedly on my side.  Even if all antigay bigotry disappeared magically tomorrow, I'd still have to work against that.

Come, Let Us Reason Together

I'm starting to notice a certain pattern in Conor Friedersdorf's writings on gay issues.  To his credit, he does broaden somewhat the "national conversation" on "gay rights" (two phrases that set my teeth on edge), by giving a forum to people with opinions that ordinarily might not be published by the Atlantic, like that closeted young gay Christian who opposed same-sex marriage.  Friedersdorf does this in the name of reminding his readers that there are arguments against same-sex marriage that aren't rooted in bigotry, but so far he hasn't succeeded in finding any.  So the pattern I'm noticing is a reluctance to call bigotry by its name unless it's really virulent and overtly expressed.

Last Friday Friedersdorf wrote about an antigay "college football analyst" from whom "Fox Sports Southwest has withdrawn a job offer" because of his expressed opinions:

The arguments against gay marriage have never persuaded me. Christianity's insistence on treating homosexuality as a sin strikes me as a tragic, historic mistake. When I read that college-football analyst Craig James, formerly an SMU player, believes homosexuality is "a choice," that homosexuals will "have to answer to the Lord for their actions," and that even civil unions ought to be opposed, all positions he took during a 2012 U.S. Senate run, I couldn't disagree more. My belief is that homosexuality is both natural and inborn; that God, in whom I believe, looks upon gays and lesbians no more or less favorably than heterosexuals; and that opposing even civil unions is a morally objectionable position.

Just for context, Friedersdorf also thinks that Andrew Sullivan is "eloquent."  Well, we'll have to agree to disagree on that, though I hope it's not an article of Friedersdorf's faith.

I'm inclined to agree with Friedersdorf that James's antigay opinions needn't be relevant to a job as a sportscaster.  But I stress needn't, because as more GLBT athletes come out, it's going to be hard for a sports analyst to avoid weighing in on the subject.  (One commenter on Friedersdorf's article asked: "Would you, or anyone be comfortable with Fox Sports hiring an outspoken virulent racist as a broadcaster, even said broadcaster had never said anything racist during a broadcast? I don't see how this is different."  Maybe it's not, but sports broadcasting is full of racist commentators, as the Jeremy Lin brouhaha reminded us.)

But I have some quibbles with the rest of what Friedersdorf said in that paragraph.  He is free to believe that homosexuality is inborn, just as he's free to believe that Yahweh created the world in six days if he wants.  (Disclaimer: I have no reason to think he does believe the latter.)  But both beliefs are highly dubious.  Whether homosexuality is inborn is also irrelevant to the moral status of homosexuality -- and also, as I've argued before, to its legal status: choices are not trivial, and many important ones, like religious affiliation, are protected by civil rights laws.  Suppose scientists definitively proved that homosexuality was a "choice" (whatever that means): would Friedersdorf withdraw his opinion that it is "natural" and looked on indulgently by his god?  And how does he know that his god "looks on gays and lesbians no more or less favorably than heterosexuals?  Wait, let me amend that, since many pro-gay Christians I've challenged on this pretend that they don't claim to know what their god thinks; so let me ask, what makes him believe that his god looks on gays and lesbians no more or less favorably than heterosexuals?  Given the Christian god's dim view of any sexuality, according to the New Testament, maybe Friedersdorf isn't making such a grand claim.  Maybe he, like Jesus, thinks that gay people no less than straight people should become eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven; or, like Paul, that the married man -- straight or gay -- cares for what will please his wife, while the single man cares for what will please the Lord.  In any case, Friedersdorf chose to marry, not to burn.

Friedersdorf is critical of Christians who are "willing to dismiss large parts of the Old Testament, but not the parts about homosexuality. They treat boycotting a gay wedding as if their faith compels it, but don't think twice about attending the nuptials of serial divorcees."  I first misread this as an assertion that the Old Testament forbids divorce, but while it's ambiguous I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on that point.  (The Hebrew Bible, aka the Old Testament, permits and regulates heterosexual divorce; in the gospels, Jesus explicitly rejects that teaching.)  But he also seems to imply that only the "Old Testament" deals with homosexuality; the New Testament also does, and though Jesus never explicitly mentions eroticism between persons of the same sex, he is not a sexual liberal according to the gospels.

Friedersdorf goes on:

Twenty years ago, when gay equality was an outlying position and prejudice against gays was the norm, I would've regarded it as imprudent and unjust to fire a college football analyst because he favored gay marriage or declared homosexuality not sinful. Today, I am every bit as convinced that it's imprudent and unjust to fire someone for calling gay marriage unwise and homosexuality sinful. These aren't remarks that he made on air, while doing his job.

 And concludes:

As much as I disagree with James' particular thoughts, I prefer to live in a country where the consequences of expressing them is a persuasive rebuttal, not an effort to stigmatize and coerce. For those saying that Fox Sports should have known about these statements before hiring him, do we really want a country where employment is predicated on an investigation of one's political and religious beliefs to make sure that, on matters totally unrelated to the job, you've never said anything deemed unacceptable? In that sort of society, the weak and marginalized, whose views are generally least protected, would be hardest hit, and we would all be hurt.

I want to agree with this, and I have uttered similar thoughts myself in the past.  But statements made during a campaign for national political office, just a year ago, are hardly obscure or trivial.  It's not as if private remarks James made decades ago at a college fraternity party were being dredged up.  Of course, it's possible that James was merely pandering to his prospective constituents, as some notable white Southern politicians did on racial issues back in the day.  But that doesn't mean he shouldn't be held responsible for his pandering.  And "the weak and marginalized" are already vulnerable in their lives and have trouble finding corporate-media venues to express their opinions and plead their case.  If only as a devil's advocate, I can see a point to letting the Right feel some of that pain.

I also wonder what difference it makes to Friedersdorf, if we're going to talk about what's just and prudent, if a sportscaster or other commentator makes bigoted remarks on the job.  Does he believe that such people check their freedom of speech at the studio door?  Evidently he doesn't:

A network would be justified in firing a sports broadcaster for expressing controversial moral or political views during an entertainment telecast that had nothing to do with the subject. But to not hire someone for prior remarks made amid civic debate, and that are indistinguishable from the position taken by almost half of all Americans at the time?

Why does Friedersdorf think this?  As I've already noted, gay issues do not have "nothing to do with the subject" of sports, especially with more and more athletes coming out, and the controversy over the upcoming Winter Olympics in Russia.  His willingness to dispose of sportscasters for expressing "controversial moral or political views" seems to me to be at odds with his argument that "the consequences of expressing them" should be "a persuasive rebuttal," not termination.  So, which is it?  After all, quite a few Americans (and even more people elsewhere in the world) disapprove of homosexuality; the issues Friedersdorf sees as settled are not settled.  He also seems to think that Craig James is entitled to a job offer, to a job he doesn't yet in fact have.  No one,  however qualified, is entitled by right to that. 

I too would like to see more "persuasive rebuttal."  But I'm not sure I believe that Friedersdorf really is committed to that, since he's willing to toss out commentators who express views he considers too controversial, in what he considers the wrong context ("during an entertainment telecast that had nothing to do with the subject").  Why not have someone rebut them?  Because the corporate media aren't interested in that kind of debate, of course.  Nor are most Americans, I believe, including those who call for national conversations and more use of critical-thinking skills.

I'll go halfway with Friedersdorf in disavowing an "effort to stigmatize and coerce."  I'm against coercion in matters of controversy; I'm not against stigmatizing.  I feel the same way about people with views I more-or-less share -- atheists, gay people, and the like -- but also with views I don't -- people who don't want to be called feminists or liberals or Muslims, for example.  People have the right to be bigots and to express bigoted views, but they don't have the right to demand that they not be called bigots.  They can avoid the stigma by changing their bigoted views.  They're also welcome to try to engage in some persuasive rebuttal, but their record in that area isn't encouraging.

Playing the Card Card

The Onion's AV Club reported yesterday that author and vocal antigay bigot Orson Scott Card has issued a protest against calls to boycott the upcoming film of his novel Ender's Game.

Ender’s Game is set more than a century in the future and has nothing to do with political issues that did not exist when the book was written in 1984.

With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot.  The Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution will, sooner or later, give legal force in every state to any marriage contract recognized by any other state.

Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.

You know something?  It sounds to me like Card is genuinely worried that the boycott will be effective.  That's remarkable, since he has previously been sure that gay-marriage was just a plot by a few "genetic mix-ups" and "dictator-judges" to redefine marriage, presumably to force everybody to gay-marry, or at least to nullify all man-woman marriages and recognize only gay ones.  To save real marriage he declared: "I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn."  And now, just because of a couple of dictatorial Supreme Court decisions, he's ready to give up, pack up his tools and baggage and stuff, and declare the issue "moot," just don't pick on him, okay?

There are several funny bits here, like his claim that gay issues didn't exist in 1984.  Maybe he's been reading Michael Kinsley, who wants us to believe that he and Andrew Sullivan invented gay marriage in 1989.  Maybe Card thinks that same-sex marriage is the only issue -- and it's true, it wasn't on many people's radar in 1984 -- though his earlier antigay tirades were about keeping and selectively enforcing sodomy laws to maintain heterosexual supremacy.  In 1990 he wrote for a Mormon magazine:

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.

When this material was publicized, Card said that it was internal to the Latter Day Saints and no business of the Gentiles; I heard rumors he'd threatened legal action against anyone who quoted these words.  But his defense was obviously dishonest: he was talking about what American society as a whole should do, not just Mormons.  Since then Card has made it abundantly clear that he's utterly without intellectual or moral integrity, and his protest against the boycott is no exception.

At the time Card wrote Ender's Game, gay issues were very much in the air, as state after state abandoned its sodomy laws (though not without controversy, and sometimes those laws were later reinstated), as the Christian Right tried to drive gay people back into the closet with legal initiatives, as all US religious groups debated the status of their gay and lesbian members, and the AIDS epidemic was constantly in the news. It's possible that Card himself was so isolated from the world that he was unaware of all this, but I don't believe it.

Nor do I believe that he really thinks same-sex marriage is now "moot."  The Supreme Court's decision on DOMA only affected the federal government's treatment of same-sex couples who are legally married in one jurisdiction or another, and didn't affect the many states that already have banned same-sex marriage by statute or constitutional amendment.  The decision on Proposition 8 reinstated same-sex marriage in California by default, by tossing out the appeal on a technicality.  For the foreseeable future, the status of same-sex couples will have to be decided state-by-state, and I don't believe that the National Organization for Marriage (Card is a board member) or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (very much involved in the campaign for Proposition 8) are going to sit those battles out.  Card may have surrendered, because his bigotry has begun to cost him money, but his fellow bigots have not.

The AV Club properly mocked Card's moral relativism, his claim that antigay bigotry is as valid as any other lifestyle choice and deserves respect, so he shouldn't suffer prejudice and discrimination for it.  (Remember Pope Rat's complaint about the "dictatorship of relativism" that denies him the power to impose his religion on others?)  Weirdly, some commenters on the post actually agreed with Card, like this one:

See, this is the troubling aspect for what I believe are my liberal views...

Further, I believe that this kind of "intolerance for intolerance" just makes bigots dig in deeper and I think there are examples of people changing their minds and regretting their past views. Shouldn't that be encouraged?

This doesn't come from religious views (I'm an atheist) but I think there's something noble about saying, "I'm not going to let your hatred turn me into someone who hates." I would also like to think that I can accept people's views, even if they're abhorrent to me, because people should be entitled to their beliefs. And let's not be naïve and pretend that a fiscal boycott isn't an attempt to arm-twist someone into changing their minds.

Like so many people, this person misunderstands what "liberalism" is supposed to be about.  As Paul Feyerabend put it so well, it doesn't entail acceptance of anyone's views:

Nor does one become illiberal when denying truth to a Puritan. Liberalism, as Gellner ought to know, is a doctrine about institutions and not about individual beliefs. It does not regulate individual beliefs, it says that nothing may be excluded from the debate. A liberal is not a mealymouthed wishy-washy nobody who understands nothing and forgives everything, he is a man or a woman with occasionally quite strong and dogmatic beliefs among them the belief that ideas must not be removed by institutional means. Thus, being a liberal, I do not have to admit that Puritans have a chance of finding truth. All I am required to do is to let them have their say and not to stop them by institutional means. But of course I may write pamphlets against them and ridicule them for their strange opinions.

The "intolerance of intolerance" trope, like "prejudiced against prejudice," seems to mistake "tolerance" for a global, indiscriminate kind of acceptance of everything.  It isn't, though this misunderstanding has something to do with why the principle of toleration has often been criticized.  (Much like "discrimination," which in US political discourse is shorthand for "unjust discrimination," but many people forget that.  Bigots therefore try to defend discrimination by pointing out that We All Discriminate; it's an invalid argument, because civil rights laws and movements for social justice only target specific forms of discrimination, not discrimination itself.)  There's nothing inconsistent about refusing to tolerate bigotry, though it's important to think about and discuss how intolerant we should be, or what consequences bigots should suffer.

The AV Club commenter admits that Card went beyond mere expression of his views into activism against gay people.  It seems to me, therefore, that Card isn't being targeted for his opinions -- though it's perfectly legitimate to pick on him for his opinions -- but for his actions and his use of his money to try to advance bigotry.  There's nothing unjust or inconsistent in principle about people calling for a boycott of his work, including this movie.  Boycotts are a valid tactic, though typically people who use them tend to deny their legitimacy when someone boycotts them.

A boycott of the movie of Ender's Game is, I admit, a complex matter, though I don't think it's illegitimate.  Personally I've decided not to buy new copies of Card's books; the only ones I own are the first four Ender books, which I bought second-hand.  But a movie, even more than a book published by a major publisher, is more than the work of one author.  It isn't only Card who will be affected by the boycott, and it's irrational tunnel vision to talk about the movie as if it was simply "his" work.  Still, there's nothing wrong with sending a message to Card's cinematic collaborators that working with him is not going to be financially successful.  And that's assuming that the boycott is successful, which will have to be seen.

I'm easier in my own mind about boycotting work for its content, not for the publicly avowed views and activities of its authors.  The strange thing about the book of Ender's Game, as many other people have pointed out, is that it doesn't seem to be antigay or homophobic -- on the contrary, it's startlingly homoerotic, in that Ender feels powerfully drawn to the beauty of other boys his own age.  I don't know what was going on in Card's mind when he wrote it, but I am pretty sure that most twelve-year-old boys don't yearn for other twelve-year-old boys in that way.  (Or do they?  It would have made a big difference to me if I'd known that when I was twelve.)  I'm also aware that authors may have an agenda when they set out to write something that their subconscious minds won't let them carry out, even ambivalently.  But I read all of the original Ender tetralogy without encountering anything that offended my militant queer sensibility -- which is more than I can say for many ostensibly liberal straight-boy productions, which tend to contain a lot of homophobia, from fag jokes to performative fuck you's and anxiety about having to bend over for unacceptable political views.

So I don't know if I myself will boycott Ender's Game when it's released in November.  It depends partly on the reviews; I don't expect the film to be much good, like most highly-anticipated adaptations, so it would be disingenuous to claim that I didn't see it because of Card's politics when I just didn't feel like spending money on one more mediocre movie.  (It's like Paula Deen: I didn't watch her before the fuss erupted.)  The same will be true if it flops at the box office: if so, will it be because the boycott was successful, or just because audiences don't care?  But I still support the boycott in principle, and hope that it inspires better discussion of the issues it raises than I've seen so far.  And it's fun to watch an arch-bigot squirm in public as Card is doing now.

Nothing Says "GLBT Ally" Like Homophobic Language

First one of my right-wing acquaintances shared a meme with a quotation ascribed to George Orwell: "The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it."  Interestingly, Orwell apparently didn't say this.  I found one source online which claimed it came from A Collection of Essays, which sounded iffy but turned out to exist -- it just didn't include this sentence.  (It's available as an e-book online, which made it easy to search.  Amazon's "Look Inside" didn't turn it up either.)  Wikiquote reports that it hasn't been found in Orwell's works, but did appear (not attributed to Orwell) in a "conservative" opinion piece that defended the right-wing shock jock Michael Savage as one of those who speak the truth.  Even if Orwell had said it, my friend wouldn't have agreed with him about who speaks the truth and who doesn't.

Then the item above appeared in my news feed from Yo, Is This Racist?  Maybe even funnier.  Again, the irony is delicious: calling for a homophobic and/or misogynist epithet to show one's solidarity with downcast, downtrodden gays. The person who submitted it as a question to Andrew Ti's tumblr missed it entirely, as did Ti.  Thanks, guys, but no thanks.

You Don't Have to Be a Monster to Be a Bigot

My Right Wing Acquaintance Number One linked to a bizarre column by The New Republic's Michael Kinsley, "LGBT PC: Being against marriage equality doesn't make you a monster."  RWA1 commented, "I'm for gay marriage, but Kinsley is right about PC heresy-hunting in academia and elsewhere."

Kinsley was displeased because Dr. Benjamin Carson ran into some controversy when he made some ordinarily bigoted remarks about same-sex marriage on TV.

In March, Ben Carson appeared on Fox News’ “Hannity” show to talk about gay marriage. Carson is the latest Great Black Hope for the Republican Party, which is quickly running out of African American conservatives to make famous. But Carson’s appearance was not a success. He should have left bestiality out of it. And any reference to NAMBLA—the “North American Man / Boy Love Association”—is pretty good evidence that we have left the realm of rational discussion and entered radio talk-show territory. This alleged organization exists—if indeed it exists at all—for the sole purpose of being attacked by Republicans and conservatives on talk radio and television.

Carson repeated this performance on MSNBC a few days later, more mildly but a lot more incoherently:

“If you ask me for an apple, and I give you an orange, you would say, ‘That’s not an orange.’ And then I say, ‘That’s a banana.’ And that’s not an apple, either. Or there’s a peach, that’s not an apple, either. But it doesn’t mean that I’m equating the banana and the orange and the peach.” 

Despite one of those standard insincere apologies that public figures make when they've said something notably vicious, Carson suffered.

Carson was supposed to be the graduation speaker at Johns Hopkins Medical School. There was a fuss, and Carson decided to withdraw as speaker. The obviously relieved dean nevertheless criticized Carson for being “hurtful.” His analysis of the situation was that “the fundamental principle of freedom of expression has been placed in conflict with our core values of diversity, inclusion and respect.” My analysis is that, at a crucial moment, the dean failed to defend a real core value of the university: tolerance.

Kinsley's rationale rivals Carson's diatribe for incoherence:

Carson may qualify as a homophobe by today’s standards. But then they don’t make homophobes like they used to. Carson denies hating gay people, while your classic homophobe revels in it. He has apologized publicly “if I offended anyone.” He supports civil unions that would include all or almost all of the legal rights of marriage. In other words, he has views on gay rights somewhat more progressive than those of the average Democratic senator ten years ago. But as a devout Seventh Day Adventist, he just won’t give up the word “marriage.”

I don't agree that "your classic homophobe revels in" hating gay people.  Your classic homophobe generally insists that he or she has nothing against homosexuals, indeed he or she loves us and wants to help us win the struggle against unwanted homosexual desires.  I presume Kinsley has in mind someone like the Westboro Baptist Church, but they don't hate gay people either: they just report that God hates us, so that the world can escape his judgment.  I've said before that the worst thing about the WBC is that it represents an extreme compared to which other bigots can pretend to be moderate, and Kinsley's ramblings here probably are an example of that.  I've also pointed out another strategy of today's bigots: despite their reliance on the Jewish/Christian Bible for morality and the definition of marriage, they're oddly reluctant to endorse execution of sodomites, and protest their devotion to equal rights for everybody.  They may compare homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality, but they're very tolerant, and it grieves them when they're called bigots.  This is nothing new, of course: white American racists hid behind the Bible during the Civil Rights Era, and insisted that they loved the Negro, and it was because of this love that they wanted to shield him from a false equality for which he was un-equipped by his God-given nature.  Not only does sincere religious belief not justify bigotry, it has been the basis for most bigotry historically: the Catholics who burned Protestants, the Protestants who burned Catholics, all did so in humble obedience to their God.

Kinsley goes on (and on):

The university’s response was wrong for a variety of reasons. First, Carson isn’t just another gasbag. He is director of pediatric neurosurgery at Hopkins. Pediatric neurosurgery! He fixes children’s brains. How terrible can a person be who does that for a living? Yes, I know the flaw in this thinking: There is no necessary connection. As a character says in Mel Brooks’s movie The Producers: “der Führer vas a terrific dancer.” But Carson didn’t murder millions of people. All he did was say on television that he opposes same-sex marriage—an idea that even its biggest current supporters had never even heard of a couple of decades ago. Does that automatically make you a homophobe and cast you into the outer darkness? It shouldn’t. But in some American subcultures—Hollywood, academia, Democratic politics—it apparently does. 

"All he did was say on television that he opposes same-sex marriage" -- well, no, he said a bit more than that.  He also compared homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality.  And maybe he said more than that; I don't suppose Kinsley has reported everything Carson said.  But that comparison has nothing much to do with the question of same-sex marriage, as Kinsley actually concedes: Carson has left rational discussion behind, and is cavorting in la-la land.  Nor does the bestiality-pedophilia comparison follow from Carson's Christian beliefs; he could argue against homosexuality on Biblical grounds.  It's strange, really: plenty of antigay bigots have made exactly the same comparison, it's almost a cliche, and they always get attacked for it.  You'd think they'd learn that people who compare homosexuality to bestiality in public will take heat for it, but they're always taken totally by surprise, and hasten to explain that they never meant to offend anybody.  Then they do it again, and again.  (What would Carson, or Kinsley for that matter, say about a white person who compared people of African descent to monkeys, or interracial marriage to bestiality?  What would they say about the white guy in this story?  Would they defend him, denying furiously that he is racist?)

Citing Carson's good works as proof that he's not a "homophobe" seems wilfully off-the-mark; perverse, even.  Just about any adult can probably think of visibly good, civic-minded, charitable individuals who have nevertheless done terrible things: Nazi concentration camp commandants who loved Brahms and Beethoven and deplored gratuitous violence; Roman Catholic priests beloved in their parishes who raped numerous children; or a white policeman with a black fiancée, an exemplar of anti-racism on the force, who nevertheless sodomized a Haitian immigrant with a broomstick.  Carson isn't remotely in the same league as people like these, as far as I know; but if he were,* there would still be well-meaning people who'd leap to his defense and insist that he wasn't a monster, and shouldn't be cast into the outer darkness over a little lapse or two or two dozen.

I can't help wondering, though: would Kinsley argue that "tolerance" requires a university, private or public, not to withdraw an invitation to someone who is a monster by Kinsley's criteria, whatever they are?  And suppose that Carson hadn't withdrawn as commencement speaker.  Would Kinsley insist on the freedom of speech of students to protest and picket his appearance?  I doubt it; I know RWA1 wouldn't.  He'd consider them a bunch of fascist PC yahoos.  I can't remember any time RWA1 has criticized right-wing students or organizations for hunting "heresy" on campus or elsewhere.  When Ward Churchill was being attacked for some distinctly un-PC remarks a decade ago, and ultimately fired from the University of Colorado at Boulder, despite tenure and numerous awards for service and scholarship, RWA1 was silent, because Churchill violated right-wing Political Correctness.  Nor have I ever observed RWA1 criticizing the numerous right-wing organizations that try to monitor classrooms for liberal and left-wing thoughtcrime.  This, unfortunately, fits the normal American pattern: free speech for me, but not for thee.

In fact, the very idea of a “test of right thinking on gay issues” or any other kind of issues, is absurd. Gays, who know a thing or two about repression, ought to be the last people to want to destroy someone’s career because they disagree. In their moment of triumph, why can’t they laugh off nutty comments like Carson’s, rather than sending in the drones to take him out?

This is absurd.  Being disinvited as speaker to the Johns Hopkins commencement isn't going to "destroy [Carson]'s career."  Nor is it comparable to "sending in the drones to take him out."  I've spoken up for the free speech rights of bigots in the past myself, but nothing in the doctrine of freedom of speech requires people to say nothing when someone says something vicious.  Freedom of speech includes my freedom to criticize, and even to attack verbally, people who say bigoted things.  I don't want to destroy Ben Carson's career, but I do want him to know that if he says things about gay people that he'd surely object to if they were said about black people (and they were, in his lifetime), he will face criticism.  Patently insincere "apologies" won't suffice.  I know that Carson has opinions on other topics that are less than fully rational and open to question; he is evidently a fine neurosurgeon, but that doesn't mean his political opinions therefore command agreement.

Another curiosity about Kinsley's column.  He makes much of the relative recentness of same-sex marriage as a hot-button political issue, suggesting that people like Ben Carson can't be blamed because they haven't had time to get used to such a radical new idea yet.

The first known mention of gay marriage is an article (“Here Comes the Groom” by Andrew Sullivan) commissioned by me and published in this magazine in 1989. And I would bet that there is no one born before 1989, gay or straight, who didn’t, when he or she first heard the idea, go, whaaa? Many on reflection got used to the idea, and a majority of Americans now support it.

I've reread these sentences several times to make sure I didn't miss some qualification that would allow them to make sense.  Same-sex marriage was mentioned long before 1989.**  Maybe it wasn't discussed in The New Republic, but radical gay activists were trying to get the issue before the public no later than the early 1970s, and it was discussed in gay and lesbian publications before that.  The heterosexual newsweekly Look magazine covered the struggle as early as 1971.  I'm sure it must have been mentioned in straight-but-hip newspapers like the Village Voice during the 70s and 80s too.  I presume Kinsley means that nobody who mattered mentioned gay marriage before 1989; but I'm not obliged to respond to such a claim by doing anything but pointing my finger and making rude derisive noises.

It's funny, because Andrew Sullivan is always claiming (falsely) that gay radicals have tried to erase the history of the gay movement before Stonewall; but here's Michael Kinsley trying to give himself and Sullivan credit for first mention of same-sex marriage in 1989.  Kinsley also seems to assume that opposition to same-sex marriage only comes from right-wing religious bigots, apparently unaware that such opposition also comes from "the left", from gay and feminist thinkers who can actually think about the issues involved.  But they, like anyone who mentioned same-sex marriage before 1989, aren't Very Serious People Who Matter, so they don't exist.  There are other ways to silence debate than overt censorship: if you have a platform like The New Republic, you can also rewrite history, and misrepresent the true range of opinions on an issue.

* The article linked here is from The Onion and therefore a parody, not to be taken at face value.  I think it's a great send-up of the kind of excuses Kinsley is making for Carson, Obama fans make for Obama, and Ted Koppel makes for Henry Kissinger.

** Kinsley's article has been revised online to curb his hubris somewhat: "One early seminal article on gay marriage (“Here Comes the Groom” by Andrew Sullivan) was commissioned by me and published in this magazine in 1989."  The original wording can be found in this blog post.  But the editors failed to notice or correct the same claim in the opening of the article: "It [i.e., gay marriage] was a genuinely new idea when it first appeared in this publication in 1989."

Queen of Queens

Sometimes I think that all aspiring anthropologists should have to do an ethnography of their own communities before they're turned loose on other societies.  It has been an ongoing complaint of mine that so many writers compare non-Western homosexualities to an imaginary mental model of gay life in the West, especially the US.

This happens even when these writers' subject is a Western society like Mexico.  (Or Mississippi, for that matter.)  In Flaming Souls: Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Social Change in Barbados (University of Toronto Press, 2012), David A. Murray does it even though he acknowledges that Barbados -- an English-speaking independent Caribbean state -- is Western, or at least not non-Western.  The antigay bigotry he documents is thoroughly Western, in fact Christian.  (As Saleem Kidwai and Ruth Vanita observed about India, the people who denounce homosexuality like to "associate homosexuality with the West. ... On the other hand, they draw on Western sources to legitimize their homophobia.")  He therefore relies on the imperial metropole/colony binary, though he cites Ann Stoler to the effect that "imperial formations are unlike empires in that they are processes of becoming; they are fixed things" (115), and he claims:

From the days of the plantation to the present there have been multiple, fluid, and shifting social, economic, and moral practices operating in Barbados, affecting hegemonic discourses of respectable citizenship, so that these discourses do not sit in as stable a position as they do in settler states like the United States, where the moral codification of white heteropatriarchy has established a stranglehold on sociopolitical and economic order [115-6].

Well, no, I don't think so.  I don't agree that hegemonic discourses of respectable citizenship are stable in the United States,  They're always prone to slippage, because whiteness for example is a highly unstable category, which is constantly being renegotiated.  So is manhood, which is always in crisis.  That the US is a settler state has nothing to do with it.  Empires are "processes of becoming," not "fixed things."  I haven't read Stoler, so I don't know if Murray is representing her views accurately.

Murray also claims that antigay bigotry in Barbados is connected to other, perhaps larger social forces.

Specifically, I argue that it is no coincidence that homosexuality was increasingly debated in public contexts at this historical juncture because Barbados faced major social and economic challenges in its marginal position relative to other international political and economic alliances ... These realignments (or potential realignments) of political and economic power were bringing about significant changes in the socio-economic fabric of life of many Bajans, resulting in what some observers claimed was a submissive, subordinated, or 'feminized' (defined through a heteropatriarchal lens) economy.  Like many other societies, Barbados was also going undergoing rapid technological changes through the increasing presence of computer, television, and mobile communication technologies, which in turn linked Barbadians to multiple, globally circulating ideas, values, and identities relating to sexuality [9].

No doubt this is true, but the same is true of an imperial settler society like the United States.  There was a sharp rise in antigay bigotry here after World War II, associated with very similar "challenges."  And as Sarah Schulman reminded us in Stagestruck (Duke, 1998, p. 124), "Historically, dominant people have always been comfortable with the idea of oppressed people as secretly powerful. The easiest example, of course, is how for almost two thousand years, dominant groups of various stripes have convinced themselves that they were ruled over by a secret cabal of Jews."  Even as the US has imposed its will on much of the world, it still has imagined itself as a pitiful helpless giant, pushed around by its critics and enemies.  Maybe Murray does well to stress these factors in Barbadian life, but since he seems to think that they aren't relevant in the US, he gives a misleading impression.  The same difficulty arises in his discussion of "rights."

These matters are more about history and cultural theory, however.  I was startled when Murray expressed his confusion at the way some of his gay Barbadian informants spoke about themselves, for example:

Throughout our conversations Darcy would interchangeably refer to himself as gay and a queen, which confused me at the time based on my understandings of these terms derived from my experiences as a white, North American, gay-identified male.  In North America gay and transgendered communities are popularly thought of as distinct groups based on their different sexual and gendered orientations ... At this time I thought Darcy's usage of these terms indicated the possibility of at least two or more queer communities existing in Barbados, transgender and gay or lesbian, and that perhaps [he] was telling me that [he] felt comfortable in both groups [65].

My understanding as a white, North American, gay-identified male is different, though it may be out of date.  In the predominantly white college-town gay community in which I made my debut in the early 1970s, "queen" was a generic term for gay men.  One sign of this was the use of "queen" qualified by various modifiers -- chicken queen, opera queen, trade queen, theater queen, danger queen, etc. -- that indicated an individual's quirks and fetishes, not all of them erotic.  Drag (female impersonation) wasn't seen as a transgender phenomenon but a part of gay life, however much it bothered many public-relations-minded homosexuals, and as far as I can tell it still is: Miss Gay IU pageants were annual events in my community until the past few years, when financial woes brought them to an end for the time being.  "Transgender" is a relatively recent category, and it has led to a lot of confusion over who qualifies and who doesn't.

In larger cities, there are enough people to generate specialized segments of the community, so that a young gay man like Murray can perhaps go for years without meeting queeny individuals, and might come to imagine that "gay" refers exclusively to gender-compliant gay males, with everyone else being "transgender" and not "gay."  But I really doubt it.  I immediately think of Seventies clones, one of whom told the gay sociologist Martin Levine, "Darling, beneath all this butch drag, we are still girls."  (Dancer from the Dance, Andrew Holleran's classic novel of the gay Manhattan disco scene of the Sixties and Seventies, depicts this world and mentality very well.)  And then I think of the high-end real estate agent Robby Browne, who celebrated his achievement as Corcoran's 2007 salesperson of the year by putting on a drag show starring himself and a dozen Broadway chorus boys.

No, someone hasn't been paying attention to the community he's been living in.  And once again I wonder how this book found its way into print without one of the many fellow-academics thanked in the Acknowledgements pointing out these misunderstandings.

P.S. Which doesn't mean Flaming Souls isn't worth reading.  Like many academics, Murray gives good research, and his account of Barbadian gay life is engaging.  I especially enjoyed his story, in chapter 6, of the "Jamaican invasion": some Barbadian queens go to Jamaica on vacation and bring some Jamaican men back with them.  (Sexual tourism also works horizontally, you see: between the colonized nations, as well as vertically.)  Hilarity ensues when the Jamaicans turns out not to be as different from their shiftless, no-account Barbadian counterparts as the queens had hoped.  Besides, unlike many academics, Murray actually understands most of the theoretical jargon he must use, and his discussion of political and economic factors is well done.  The problem, as I said, is his faulty picture of gay life in the US.

An Abomination in My Own Backyard

I've begun reading Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays (NYU Press, 2012), by Bernadette Barton.  It looks promising, since it's evidently based on interviews with gay men and lesbians from the American Bible Belt, and I usually enjoy reading such material.

But Barton got off to what is, to my mind, a bad start.  She told how, soon after she and her partner Anna moved to a small city near Lexington, Kentucky, she had an upsetting conversation with a male neighbor while working in her garden.  The neighbor, whom she calls "Jim," asked her if she was married.

"No," I responded, "I'm involved with someone."  Although not legally married, Anna and I traveled to Vermont in 2002 to be officially joined in a civil union.  I struggled then with Jim, and still struggle at times, to find the best way to answer questions about my marital status.  Heterosexist assumptions and potential homophobia lurk behind this question, depending upon who is doing the asking and why.

So far so good, actually.  I often struggle with the same consideration when I'm asked that question, especially by presumed heterosexuals from other countries.  I am not in any kind of couple and haven't been for a quarter century, so "No, I'm single" should be a sufficient answer.  But questions about marital status, especially from foreigners, tend to be a way of getting to know a person, as well as of classifying them, so I don't really want to shut down the inquiry.  But how soon should I tell them that I'm gay?  It would come up sooner if I were in a couple, since I would then have to explain quickly that my partner was male.  Since I'm single, I can and sometimes have delayed bringing up my homosexuality indefinitely with people I don't expect to be friends with.  Being single and being gay are not equivalent, though even many gay people seem to think they are: many of us have been heterosexually married, many of us still are, many others are in unregistered couples, and increasing numbers of us have formalized our couplehood in church or with the state: civil unions, domestic partners, marriage.  While I have many reservations about marriage, I am enjoying watching the social changes that are occurring as "I'm married" no longer means "I'm heterosexual, or pretending to be."

I used to be surprised when gay friends and other gay acquaintances from other countries asked me if I'm married even though they knew I'm gay.  In their countries, many or most gay people, especially older ones, are heterosexually married.  Among other things, this reflects a different construction of marriage and of homosexuality.  To oversimplify slightly: a marriage is something you get whether you much want to or not, out of duty, the way you get a job.  It's a requirement for adulthood.  But for men especially, it may not be expected to be the defining status of one's sexual life.  Homosexuality is something men may do on the side as long as they avoid scandal; one's homosexual relations are not supposed, even by gays, to be the defining core of one's life.  The same construction prevailed in parts of US society until at least the late 20th century.

But back to Bernadette Barton and her neighbor.

Jim inquired, "Do you go to church?"

"No," I said, and then took my own leap of faith.  "We're gay, and the churches around here aren't very supportive of it."

He paused, looked confused, and examined me closely.  A long moment passed.  He announced, "It's an abomination in the eyes of the Lord."

Stunned, I just stood there looking at him.  The air grew thick.  I felt dazed, afraid, shamed, and weirdly, curious.  "Someone just called me an abomination in my own backyard," I thought.  "This isn't supposed to happen."  I felt like an anthropologist stumbling upon an unexpected and unpleasant finding about my own life.

Jim added, "I'll pray for you," then there was a long pause, "that you grow good vegetables."  We chatted briefly.  Meanwhile, I didn't recognize myself.  I am a very outspoken, some might even say opinionated, person and was surprised by my reticence.  I found that I was reluctant to confront him about his homophobic comment.  What if he decided to burn a cross on our lawn?  Looking at myself from far away, I listened to him pontificated about his relationship to the Lord in the righteous tones of the born again [2].

I like the part about praying for good vegetables, but I'm startled by Barton's reaction to Jim's pronouncement.  I understand her moment of fear about the potential for violence in her situation -- that is all too realistic, unfortunately.  I can even understand her sudden speechlessness in that situation; who hasn't come up dry at times when articulateness is called for?  But I don't get her evident surprise at Jim's statement.  She's living in the Bible Belt, for Cthulhu's sake.  What planet did she live in before, and where did she grow up, that she's never encountered expressions of antigay bigotry before?  Had she never encountered fundamentalist Christians before?

I grew up in rural northern Indiana in the 1950s and 1960s, and encountered surprisingly little explicit antigay bigotry there, partly because the gay movement (and more important, organized opposition to it) hadn't found its way into mass media very much.  While I did encounter some, in mass media, in library books, in day-to-day life, it was almost never directly aimed at me.  That came later, when I moved to southern Indiana, and the sophisticated college town of Bloomington, snugly nestled in Klan country.  When I did encounter it I was never surprised: I knew my society that well, at least.  And perhaps one benefit of having done my homework, and come out under the influence of the radical gay movement of the early 1970s, was that I always took for granted that it was illegitimate and I could answer it.

It often seems to me that we've gone backwards in crucial respects since those days.  I can't help wondering how much of Barton's reaction, as she reports it, is simply typical liberal "Oh, how can you say such awful things!?", which doesn't further discussion, but isn't meant to.  To paraphrase Karl Barth's quip that belief cannot argue with unbelief, it can only preach to it: Liberalism cannot argue with conservatism, it can only throw hissyfits about it.  It's radicals who talk back, knowing that even if we can't affect the beliefs of the people we debate, there will be impressionable people listening who need to hear what we have to say.  And I must say I'm even more baffled when I observe this kind of panic among academics, because I thought being able to discuss and debate ideas was, y'know, part of their job.  What really bothers me is that so many people who are theoretically on my side in the struggle against bigotry can't be counted on when there is bigotry to be confronted.

I Say We Take Off and Nuke the Entire Site from Orbit

It's the only way to be sure.

Band of Thebes, where I got this clip, asks, "Do the bullies run completely unchecked in feral packs?" Of course they do. Parents and teachers and administrators stand by and do nothing; sometimes they join in. I've written before about this.

Reading Pascoe's account of what she calls "the rape paradigm," or remembering the Speakers Bureau volunteer who tells how once a month, in his high school in the 1980s, the cool kids would wear t-shirts that read "SILLY FAGGOT -- DICKS ARE FOR CHICKS", I find myself asking a question I never thought would pass my lips:

Where were the adults?

Where were the adults when Pascoe's Ricky was being harassed and beaten up, or when Keith was jamming a drumstick into another student's crotch and yelling "Get raped"? (Standing back and watching it happen, she says.) Where were the adults when those t-shirts were being worn in the halls, classrooms, and cafeterias? (Doing nothing, or chuckling at the wit of it all.) Even the word "dicks," which I'd have thought a punishable breach of decorum, didn't bother the administration. Considering that political messages or other attention-grabbing slogans are verboten in so many school dress codes, I find it incredible; but antigay bigotry is uncontroversial and apolitical. Their high moral standards, their obsessive concern with a docile student body, can be forgotten for the right cause.

As Anderson Cooper says in the clip, religious bigots claim that anti-bullying programs "encourage homosexuality." This needs to be fought more effectively. Kids like Jamey Rodemeyer shouldn't have to do it themselves. As Dan Savage has said, gay advocacy groups are kept out of schools by the bigots. But why should it be necessary for outsiders to do this? Parents should be the leaders in these matters; don't they care about their own children? Of course it won't be easy, but finding your child hanging from a rope because he couldn't stand his life anymore is presumably harder.

The gay community can set an example, and needs to clean its own house. As I also wrote before, there's a lot of hostility to effeminate boys and masculine girls (under the euphemism "stereotypes") among gay people who fancy themselves respectable, the kind of people I call Homo-Americans.

And if it's destructive to bad-mouth people, if speaking negatively about someone in their presence can drive them to suicide, something needs to be done about gay people who complain about the bad homosexuals who Fit the Stereotype and made it seem that they couldn't be normal Homo-Americans like they wanted to be, scaring them back into their closets for years. It's those Stereotypes who get beaten up regularly and are more likely to kill themselves; it surely doesn't help them to hear themselves denounced as scary, malevolent queer demons who ruin everything for normal homos. It's telling that many respectable gay people think it's proper to demonize them. (And like the straight homophobes, the image people never think about the the impact of what they're doing on real people.)

Then there are hip, radical straight boys (they never will be missed!) who want to rehabilitate the word "faggot," because on their account it doesn't really mean "homosexuals," it means people "who take a knee," who "choose to lose, because the alternative bears too heavy a cost." (This is especially funny, really, because the blogger who wrote it later whined, when IOZ playfully urged defiance of TSA groping at airports, that he couldn't do it, because he had his kids with him and it would just get him in trouble for nothing. Faggot.*) Or who, in their ideological purity, don't want class issues to be sidetracked by trivia like racism, sexism, and homophobia.

We've got our work cut out for us.

*Bear in mind, I don't think he should have defied TSA at the airport. I'm just pointing out that he fits his own definition to an F, so maybe he should be a bit less judgmental about other people's little capitulations. The faggot.