FOR ALL OUR TALK about breaking down societal taboos and giving voice to unpopular points of view, we homosexuals have a verboten topic all our own. We have an awfully difficult time talking about moral values.
It's easy enough to understand why. All our lives, lesbians and gay men have been hammered into submission by "family values" rhetoric and the social and legal condemnation that has come along with it. Understandably, we are wary of the coercive power of public morality and the relative ease with which media-hungry politicians and religious leaders use talk about "values" as a wedge to divide folks into convenient camps: American vs. un-American, the saved vs. the damned, us vs. them.
Our collective take on the historical role of public "values" in this country is not an attractive one. Judeo-Christian moral values have been used, many would say warped, to subdue ethnic minorities (particularly blacks) and women into second-class citizenship, while reserving full participation in American society for the archetypal "straight white male," especially those of the WASP variety.
One by one, each of these oppressed groups has thrown off the yoke of value-laden discrimination, and has won civil rights, cultural acceptance, and greater involvement in the life of the nation.
Now that it looks to be our turn (finally) to live our lives without moral condemnation from the outside, we gays seem loath to open up Pandora's box and allow a free-flowing dialogue of our own about the "lifestyle choices" we make as gay men and lesbians.
And woe to those who dare try to broach that forbidden subject matter. We eat these heretics for lunch - pasting them with vicious personal attacks, impugning their motives, overstating their positions and, most discouraging of all, tarring them as "self-righteous" and accusing them of acting like the Queer Moral Majority.
The ones on the cultural right take the most heat. Gabriel Rotello, Michelangelo Signorile, Andrew Sullivan, Camille Paglia, even Larry Kramer - all caricatured as hypocritical, bitchy moralizing airbags in something of a hysterical (panicked!?) over-reaction to their very passionate arguments about the kind of world we homosexuals should be working toward.
Drug use, unsafe sex, public sex, religion, sexism - each of us makes choices in these areas that affect our lives and the culture and society we share. Why shouldn't these issues be open to vigorous, respectful and civil debate?
To be sure, none of these cultural critics is beyond personal criticism. And some sling mud at their intellectual rivals with at least as much vigor as do their critics.
But is that the point? Should personal attacks pass muster as social criticism? Is it all about engaging in a contest for whose private life best reflects her moral philosophy?
We need to find a language with which we can talk about values without difference of opinion being mistaken for condemnation. Otherwise, we have managed to take live-and-let-live moral relativism to an all new level: Not only is your morality your own business, but when someone else shares her ideas about values and life choices, she's somehow violating your "moral space."
Why be offended when someone else questions your ethical choices? Because it might make you second-guess your own value system? Because you're sick and tired of having to defend your life to someone else, thank you very much? To bow out of that conversation is to check out of life, or at least a thoughtful, examined life.
We'll never win the hearts and minds of Judeo-Christian middle Americans if they adopt the same head-in-the-sand intransigence to our view of how the world should be.
Let's set an example, as a community, of how folks can thoughtfully and respectfully examine their individual value systems without condemnation, recrimination or involving governmental coercion.