The Religious Right theocrats may win an occasional skirmish, but by all accounts they've been losing the "culture wars" for some time. The public has reached consensus on abortion (leave it legal, except for viable fetuses about to be born), pre-marital sex (go for it, as long as the partners are of legal age), extra-marital sex (not good, but nothing to impeach a president over), and homosexuality ("They're Here, They're Queer, We're Used to It," to quote a recent cover of the conservative National Review).
These positions can change, of course, and on the gay issue attitudes are still evolving from mere toleration to full recognition of legal equality. But these are battles being waged in a fight that is clearly being won by the hundreds of thousands of gay men and lesbians who are not cowering in their closets. In short, the religious right is on the ropes.
Evidence of this can be found in the response received by a coalition of religious-right groups, including the American Family Association, the Christian Family Network, and Concerned Women For America, which asked the declared presidential candidates to sign an anti-gay "pledge." The statement included the candidate's promise to "uphold the sacred institution of marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman," to "vigilantly defend this age-old institution against any effort -- judicial or legislative -- to redefine it to include same-sex relationships," to "resist all attempts to provide the benefits and privileges traditionally accorded married couples to unmarried 'domestic partners'," to "oppose all judicial and legislative efforts to place children in homosexual households," to "oppose the promotion of homosexuality as normative in America's public schools," and to oppose "special legal protections based on sexual behavior or preference." That's a lot of "opposes"!
The "pledge" departs from sound conservatism -- the belief in limited government and individual liberty -- in a number of ways, especially by demanding intrusion by the federal government into areas typically left to the states (marriage), to local governments (public education), and to private agencies (adoption). And it even appears to urge measures to restrict private companies from offering domestic partnership benefits to their own employees.
Predictably, the GOP candidates who've positioned themselves on the "cultural right" compliantly signed on the dotted line, including Steve Forbes, Pat Buchanan, and Gary Bauer. What's news, however, is that all three of the GOP's national frontrunners -- George W. Bush, Liddy Dole, and John McCain -- refused to take the pledge. That, in itself, is a sign of the times.
Perhaps because the hard right is losing, it's interesting to watch some of its theorists revealing their true beliefs. The Sept.-Oct. issue of Family Policy, a publication of the Family Research Council, contains several articles blasting the widespread use of contraception. Yes, contraception! I suppose these ideologues feel that if they're going to lose the culture war, they might as well be honest about what their real aims have always been -- to control and regulate all aspects of private, personal, sexual behavior.
One of the articles is "The Deconstruction of Perversion: Paraphilias Come Out of the Closet," by Patrick F. Fagan, a fellow in family issues at the Heritage Foundation. He blames the easy availability of contraception for the rise and increasing openness of "paraphilias" (i.e., "perversions"), including homosexuality, pedophilia, sado-masochism, and voyeurism.
Writes Fagan, "The 'coming out' of paraphilias would never have occurred without the aid of contraception." Legal and accessible birth control, he laments, has led to "infertile sexual pleasure [becoming] an end in itself," which in turn has undermined traditional taboos. He concludes that only an understanding of "the role of contraception in the advance of sexual perversions" will provide "the substantive moral alternative to the distortion of sexuality needed in late twentieth-century America."
The funny thing about this argument is that, leaving aside the reactionary political program, it contains more than a kernel of truth. After "the pill" became widespread during the early '60s, human sexuality was freed as never before from being necessarily tied to procreation. Heterosexuals who value sex as much for emotional intimacy (or even, post-Playboy, physical recreation) as for reproduction can more easily make the leap into seeing "non-procreative" homosexuality as an acceptable variant of sexual expression.
More fundamentally, the idea that the widespread acceptance and use of contraception could be rolled back is about as likely as the horse-and-buggy replacing the car. If this is the position that the anti-gay right finds itself advocating, than we can rest assured that their jeremiads represent the dying embers of yesterday's fires.