First published in the Chicago Free Press on Feb 8, 2006.
It has long been obvious that religious and social conservatives have been conducting a crusade against "homosexuality." But since you cannot suppress homosexuality without suppressing gays and lesbians, that means a crusade against gays and lesbians as people.
For example: The President's past support for sodomy laws; Republican opposition to gays in the military; the administration's support for an unprecedented constitutional ban on same-sex marriage; longtime Republican opposition to counting the number of hate crimes against gays and lesbians; opposition to gay parental custody, adoption, and foster care; and uncritical indulgence of homophobic statements by GOP leaders from Dick Armey to Jesse Helms to Rick Santorum.
Notice how many of these involve big government-i.e., coercion-whether it a government proscription of sexual activity, the institutionalization of anti-gay prejudice in a government agency, or the extension of federal control over a matter traditionally left to the states.
Republicans, who once claimed to be the party of small government and personal liberty, have moved far from that position. Economic conservatives usually advocated minimal government intrusion. Social conservatives advocate the exact opposite.
But there is another, larger, aspect to these issues. While social conservatives probably realize that despite their efforts they cannot entirely stamp out homosexuality (that is to say, homosexuals), they can at least make every effort to render them-us-socially and culturally invisible. Hence they oppose same-sex marriage because it would give gay relationships visibility by being registered with the government. If sodomy laws cannot entirely prevent homosexual activity, at least they help to keep it underground and discourage gays and lesbians from being open about their sexuality. The "Don't ask, Don't tell" ban on open gays in the military is simply an extreme version of this same thing: Saying one is gay or lesbian is designated as "homosexual conduct."
In the same way, although past opposition to counting anti-gay hate crimes was no doubt prompted in part by a view that they should not be taken very seriously because, after all, gays just bring attacks on themselves. But even more it stemmed from a wish to avoid giving gays visibility by collecting and publishing statistics about crimes against them. After all, a gay man being assaulted by a homophobe counts as just another kind of "homosexual conduct."
The U.S. census bureau's disinclination to ask even as a voluntary question if people are gay or lesbian is another example of preserving gay invisibility. And of course, the CDC cannot report risk behavior for AIDS by gay and bisexual men, only by "men who have sex with men." If a man is having recurrent "sex with men" that's what gay or bisexual means, but the CDC cannot acknowledge that gays exist as persons, only that people are engaging in certain types of sexual behavior.
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Once you start looking around, examples of the effort to suppress gay visibility leap out at you. |
Once you start looking around, examples of the effort to suppress gay visibility leap out at you. "Ex-gay" groups fit in perfectly. Most of them no longer claim that they can significantly change a person's sexual desires. Their main goal is to dissuade people from thinking of themselves as "gay," "lesbian" or "homosexual." As therapy, this is preposterous, but it successfully reduces the number of people identifying themselves to others as homosexual.
Social conservative opposition to television programs with gay or lesbian characters, to performance of plays such as "Angels in America," to Gay/Straight Alliances in "public" (government) schools, to the inclusion of homosexuality in any aspect in sex education courses has exactly the same root: We don't want to see gays represented or made visible in any way.
And especially, they will say, they don't want their children to see gays represented anywhere, although they never quite say why. Sometimes they seem to imply that learning that homosexuals exist will somehow, as if by magic, produce homosexual desire in young people. But it is hard to believe that anyone really thinks that.
I suspect the real social conservative fear is one of two things. Either they fear that if their children, or anyone-even they themselves-learn about gays and lesbians, that will gradually incline them to feel greater tolerance for gays. And that could lead them to question the other "bible values" they have been brought up to believe.
The other possibility is that they fear that a knowledge of gays and lesbians that could lead to greater tolerance would make the lives of gays and lesbians less unpleasant. And that is what they do not want. Not sufficiently trusting their god to punish people they regard as sinners, they are eager to take on that task themselves.
Gay author Wayne Besen once wrote about a friendly conversation with a woman he met on an airplane in the course of which he mentioned that he was gay. The woman stiffened and announced that she did not want to hear that. "Do you want me to lie?" Besen asked. "Yes," said the woman.