IGF CultureWatch

First published in the Chicago Free Press., January 18, 2006

One of the most widely noted political phenomena of the last decade is the polarization of political opinion-usually along liberal versus conservative lines-so that there seems to be decreasing room for moderation, compromise or "just getting along."

Everyone listens to people on their own side, tunes into media and accesses weblogs that they agree with, and the notion that the other side might have a good point fades from the political universe. Fading even more is the possibility that the other side might not only have a good point but might actually be right about some issue.

Vanishing almost entirely from the polarized mentality is the possibility that both sides are utterly wrong and there could be some third position that is closer to the truth. Yet it seems unlikely that there could be just two plausible positions on any given issue.

I find this political polarization personally troubling because I have come to conservative positions on some issues and liberal positions on others. And I have concluded that there are yet other issues where neither side is right. In each case, I believe I can offer fairly good reasons for what I think.

Let me give some examples, not to argue for them here but to demonstrate what I mean. I know there are plausible-sounding arguments against all of these, but in each case I believe I have good counter-arguments.

First, nine "liberal" conclusions:

1. I am for legalizing gay civil marriage (or civil unions).
2. I support allowing gays to serve openly in the military.
3. I support legalized assisted suicide: It's my own life.
4. I think recreational drug use should be decriminalized: What I put in my body is my business.
5. I oppose government subsidies to farmers and corporations: Let them earn their money the way the rest of us do.
6. Commercial sex (prostitution) should be decriminalized: It's my body.
7. I oppose the death penalty.
8. Abortion at any time should be legal: A fetus is not a person.
9. Pornography should be legal to make and sell.

Now here are eight "conservative" conclusions:

1. I oppose government seizure of people's private property through eminent domain.
2. I support tax cuts for anyone anytime-rich, poor or middle-class.
3. I oppose government subsidies to arts organization: They should earn their money by pleasing customers.
4. I support school choice and home schooling.
5. I support absolute free trade: Tariffs and quotas are subsidies for inefficient businesses.
6. I oppose zoning restrictions by officious "city planners."
7. I support more welfare cuts: The last ones had salutary effects.
8. People should have the right to own guns to protect themselves: The police cannot be everywhere.

To all appearances these two sets of views belong on opposite sides of the political spectrum. So I have trouble describing my political position for people. I suppose I could call myself "a small government liberal." Or maybe "an ACLU conservative." But these terms would not mean much to people with deep commitments on one side or the other. They would just look at me strangely, as if I described some object as a round square.

Usually, people end up thinking I am whatever they are not. Conservatives think of me as liberal and liberals think of me as conservative. Both sides insist on 85 to 90 percent conformity with their views to qualify as "one of us." Apparently that is one way that political ideologues inhibit "deviationism"-otherwise known as thinking for yourself. You are supposed to buy the whole package.

Interestingly enough-interesting to me, anyway-I have come to some liberal positions on the basis of "conservative" arguments. For instance, I oppose the death penalty not because it is inhumane but because I do not trust governments to impose an irreversible sentence: Courts can make mistakes.

Similarly, I have come to some conservative positions for "liberal" reasons. For instance, I think Supreme Court justices should interpret the Constitution strictly because I think a strict reading must include deference to the Ninth Amendment, which recognizes a number of previously ignored "liberty rights" for individuals.

For that matter, I support privatization of Social Security so gays and other singles can pass on their investment to their partners when they die rather than having the government keep their money. Is that liberal because it benefits gays or conservative because it eliminates a government program?

Is there some coherent view that unites most if not all of these diverse positions? I think so and I think I can explain roughly what it is. But the point I hope to make is that whether or not they represent a coherent outlook, they are meant to show that a person might find good reasons to diverge from the liberal or conservative party line on several issues, if not these then others.

Back in the 1960s when the world was young there was a button that read, "Question Authority." I used to have one. It may still be around somewhere. Maybe I should start wearing it again.

A fall 2005 survey by Harris Interactive and Witeck-Combs Communications comparing gay and heterosexual adults found that gay men and lesbians were by several percentage points more likely than heterosexuals to respond to advertising messages, and that this was particularly true of offers that were keyed to their needs and respectful of their identities.

According to Witeck-Combs CEO and cofounder Bob Witeck, those results are good news for the advertising managers who have promoted more than 800 brands to the gay market and invested a quarter billion advertising dollars to reach same-sex households.

It is easy to see how ads directly aimed at gays by containing gay elements or same-sex couples would elicit a positive response from gay readers or viewers. But we could wonder why gays and lesbians might pay a little more attention to advertising generally. It is possible to imagine several plausible reasons.

• Since fewer gays have children, they are likely to a have greater disposable income to spend on consumer products and personal services, so they naturally pay more attention to advertising that tells them what kinds of things are out there that they might use their money for.
• A special case of this is gays' tendency to be "early adopters"-their eagerness to adopt a new fashion style or have the most innovative consumer product-computer, sound system, electronic gadget, messaging system, whatever. To do that successfully they need to be alert for advertisements for new products.
• Having fewer children also means that gays are better able to "pick up and go." Previous research found that gays go on more frequent trips or vacations and go out more to restaurants, concerts, movies and clubs. So they naturally look for advertising that tells them what is available.
• Married heterosexual couples still tend to divide the work of maintaining the household, so each partner is likely to pay attention mainly to advertising about the aspects they handle. Same-sex couples do not divide household responsibilities so clearly, so both partners may notice, say, ads for better microwaves as well as new cars, new DVD players as well as new lighting fixtures.
• Finally, I sometimes wonder if growing up as gay with a greater need for a self-protective awareness of other people's responses does not create-at least in some gays-a more or less constant state of alertness to the details and nuances of what is going on around them.

As all those examples underline, the whole purpose of advertising is to provide information that you the potential consumer did not know and would not otherwise have. It may not be information you want or need at the moment, but you might eventually and somebody else might find it useful right now.

Examples: A fascinating new product is now available. A familiar product has been upgraded and restyled. We can provide this time-saving service for you. A fine store is conveniently located near you. Some store is having a special "50 percent off" sale. This product will entertain you better. That nifty product will impress your friends. This club is having special entertainment. This movie is opening at that theater. Et cetera.

How are you going to find out these things if not through advertising-or from a friend who saw the advertising? We tend to forget how much of what we know about the world of products and services we learned directly or indirectly from advertising. Commercial products and services do not become known by magic.

A quick survey found gay friends who said that because they saw an ad they:

• Opened an account at a particular bank.
• Discovered a store that sold a brand of shoes they wanted.
• Bought a Bose Wave Radio.
• Changed brands of toothpaste to one they liked better.
• Found dress shirts on sale.
• Tried dental whitening strips.
• Bought an original iMac the minute it came out.
• Hired an attorney who advertised in a gay newspaper.
• Tried a new remedy for cold sores.
• Went to a concert a friend saw advertised.
• Hired an "model/escort" for a pleasant evening.
• Bought a book that looked interesting.

The list could go on.

Some people say they do not like advertising. They are usually thinking of loud or repetitious radio or television commercials. But there are well-designed advertisements in newspapers and magazines as well as clever and entertaining ads on radio or television. The New Yorker contains a great deal of exemplary, stylish advertising, especially around Christmastime.

And such people are forgetting how much information they themselves obtain from advertising. They remind me of Richard Wilbur's little poem "Solipsism":

We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, "You are not true. "

Advertising can even create aesthetic benefits. Some artists in the early 20th century noticed how advertising's color and variety enriched the city's visual environment. French artist Fernand Leger who loved bright colors wrote enthusiastically of "life-giving color ... including all forms of everyday advertising."

First published in the Chicago Free Press on January 4, 2006.

The Vatican's new Instruction barring gay men from training for the priesthood is a farrago of unjustified assumptions, begged questions, circular reasoning, illogical arguments, stolen concepts and confused metaphors with no basis in either Catholic doctrine or current psychology.

The nerve of the new Instruction in paragraph 4 reads:

The candidate to the ordained ministry, therefore, must reach affective maturity. Such maturity will allow him to relate correctly to both men and women...

"Affective maturity" is not defined but since "affective" refers to feelings or emotions the term refers to emotional maturity.

Then paragraphs 8 and 9 state that:

those who ... present deep-seated homosexual tendencies ... find themselves in a situation that gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women.

So although the Instruction evades saying so explicitly, gay men are barred from priesthood training because they are thought to have immature sexual feelings.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, in Catholic tradition or doctrine supports the idea that homosexual desire constitutes any sort of immaturity. Catholic doctrine and tradition had always held that homosexual behavior was sinful but it never argued that that sin was the result of a psychosexual immaturity.

So where does this idea come from? The answer is: Freud.

Starting with an apriori assumption of a natural "procreative instinct," Freud developed a fanciful, Rube Goldberg-like theory of psychosexual development in which a male infant passes through narcissistic oral, anal and phallic stages, reaches an Oedipal desire to have sex with his mother, then fearing castration by his jealous father transfers his love to another woman, thus progressing to a glorious heterosexuality.

Men are homosexual, Freud thought, when this progression is inhibited-Freud never explains how-and the child is fixated at some preliminary stage of development: blocked at a narcissistic stage, or fails to negotiate the Oedipal phase, or fears castration by a woman's vagina, etc.

However bizarre all this seems, the result was that homosexuals were viewed as psychosexually immature. In his 1933 New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud wrote that homosexuals "have failed to accomplish some part of normal sexual development." And in his 1935 Letter to an American Mother Freud wrote, "We consider (homosexuality) to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development."

Commentaries on the Instructions distributed by the Catholic news agency Zenit spell out the rationale in even more obviously Freudian terms.

If the Catholic Church now adopts Freud's early 20th-century view that homosexual desire constitutes psychosexual immaturity, then what argument could it have offered before 1900 for barring gay men from the priesthood? The answer is: none whatsoever. So either forbidding (celibate) gay men to enter seminaries is a novel doctrine or else the church has always officially forbidden (celibate) gay men but never had any rationale for it.

Worse yet for the church, Freudian ideology, particularly with regard to sex, is now entirely discredited, added to the junk heap of pseudo-science along with astrology, phrenology, N-rays, phlogiston, etc. Few psychiatrists and psychoanalysts now take it seriously. And no other theory supports the idea that gays are psychosexually immature. So the church is left without an intellectually respectable basis for the view it has just adopted.

And there are further problems with the Instruction. It claims that gay men cannot "relate correctly to both men and women" and that only heterosexual men can develop "a true sense of spiritual fatherhood toward the Church community."

But where has church teaching ever spelled out why or how priests are supposed to relate to men and women differently? So if a priest with an erotic inclination toward women is able to relate equally to men and women-say, with loving, pastoral concern-despite his erotic desire for one rather than the other, it follows logically that a priest with an erotic inclination toward men should be able to do the same. So the church's argument fails.

And since the requisite "fatherhood" is spiritual, not sexual, there is no reason why gay men cannot fulfill that role. One has only to look around to find numerous gay men successfully performing the non-sexual child-rearing and mentoring tasks of actual fatherhood for their adoptive or foster children. So the church is left without a valid argument for its demand.

The Instruction notes the requirement that a priest "should seek to reflect in himself, as far as possible, the human perfection which shines forth in the incarnate Son of God." But this would exclude gay men only if Jesus' perfection included heterosexuality. But there is not a word of biblical evidence that Jesus had any specific sexual orientation. So the church's argument fails.

Finally, paragraph 11 states explicitly that:

in responding to the call of God, the man (candidate priest) offers himself freely to him in love.

It is hardly frivolous to observe that so long as the Catholic Church conceives of its god as male, a gay man will be more readily able than a heterosexual man to make this affective offering with wholehearted, unconflicted commitment.

First published in the Chicago Free Press on November 23, 2005.

It is reasonable to wonder whether gays and lesbians are achieving anything politically, and wonder what to do about it if we aren't.

With a Republican president and a Republican Congress dominated by southern conservatives, we will see no progress at the national level. The president supports a Constitutional gay marriage ban. Congress will not repeal military's ban on gay servicemembers, nor will it approve a gay non-discrimination law.

The 2006 elections are not likely to change anything. Democrats are unlikely to win the 5 or 6 seats they need to control of the Senate. Even if they did, conservative Democrats would join Republicans to defeat gay-supportive bills Democratic leaders might propose. The most we can hope for is defeating a religious zealot like Rick Santorum.

Nor are the Democrats likely to win control of the House. Redistricting after the 2000 census created even more safe House districts, leaving only a handful in play politically. Even if Democrats won control of Congress, the president would veto any pro-gay legislation.

At the state level, to be sure, there has been some good news. The California legislature approved gay marriage although the bill was vetoed. The Connecticut legislature approved a civil unions law. The Illinois legislature approved and Maine voters upheld gay civil rights laws. Acknowledged.

But outside a few liberal areas, we have lost far more often than won. More and more states have added gay marriage bans to their Constitutions, bans that will be hard to overturn, some extending to any sort of civil union and domestic partner arrangements.

And think of all the gay bills that fail. They are defeated by the legislature, or more often never make it out of committee, or are not even introduced because, well, really, why bother if they are not going to pass. It is not so much that legislators are personally homophobic, although many may be, but that they fear electoral defeat if opponents can accuse them of supporting "the gay agenda." That's democracy, I'm afraid.

This analysis need not lead to despair, however, only a tactical shift in the focus of our efforts, focusing on thinking locally and acting locally. Here are three alternative models for making gay progress.

Focusing on the city level makes sense since cities are often more liberal than state legislatures. Cities that have not done so can be urged to pass gay civil rights bills, to approve domestic partner plans for city employees and require major city contractors to offer domestic partner benefits. The goal is to get gay partnerships legally recognized to establish a precedent.

We can urge cities to mandate their own lobbyists to pressure state legislatures to approve gay supportive legislation. We can invite mayors and council members to more gay events, assuming that their attendance promotes gay legitimacy. We can press school boards to enforce strict anti-bullying policies and mandate teacher sensitivity training about gay students.

Second, we need to keep in mind that young people are about twice as gay supportive as adults over 60, so future voters are more likely to be gay-friendly. We can support and hasten that change by assisting any Gay/Straight Alliances in local schools and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network that fosters them.

Do they need supplies? Do they need books? Do they need money to rent films? Do they want guest speakers? Do they need money for a field trip? Do they want to donate books to the school library? (Will the librarian make them available?) Groups of supportive adults can help those students just as the ubiquitous "Boosters Clubs" support school athletic programs.

Third, gay Christians can join and help gay-supportive groups in their own denominations. Public opinion can be significantly affected in the long run by the policies of churches and pronouncements of prominent clergy, so efforts to move churches in a gay-supportive direction are vital.

Wealthy conservative Christians such as California's Howard Ahmanson have contributed vast sums of money to promote anti-gay organizing efforts in the Episcopal church and other denominations. We must respond with equal amounts of money, organizing and solidly-based theology. Existing gay Christian groups can form the nucleus of that effort, but need far greater support for their efforts.

Those are three important areas to work on. There are others. Employees at large companies can join the gay employee groups and work for domestic partner and other benefits. People can ask if local public librarians will accept gifts of gay books and donate some if so. They can write Letters to the Editor of the local newspaper. And, of course, most effective of all is coming out to everyone you know. Arguments can have an impact, but personal experience has more impact than anything else.

In short, no one has to remain silent and defenseless when gay people and their lives are attacked or ignored as insignificant. People have the means to defend themselves-if they but make the effort.

First published in the Chicago Free Press on November 2, 2005.

In mid-September, the National Center for Health Statistics, a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, released a 55-page study claiming that 4.1 percent of both men and women ages 18 to 44 labeled themselves homosexual or bisexual.

In addition, the survey found that 6 percent of men 15 to 44 have had oral or anal sex with another man and 11.2 percent of women 15 to 44 have had some sort of unspecified "sexual experience" with another women. For men age 25 to 44 the figure was 6.5 percent and for women 25 to 44 the figure was 10.7 percent.

Finally, the survey found that, depending on age group, between 2.6 and 3.3 percent of men have had oral or anal sex with another man in the last year and anywhere between 2.4 and 7.7 percent of women have had a "sexual experience" with another women in the last year.

As with most such surveys, the study made claims for its rigor and accuracy and was accepted uncritically by the mainstream press. It was, after all, based on information from 4,928 men and 7,643 women and derived "sensitive" information about sex by having respondents enter their answers into a laptop computer rather than telling the interviewer directly.

But careful analysis revealed ambiguities, inadequacies, inconsistencies and omissions.

The most obvious problem was that more than 20 percent of the people contacted refused to participate. Why did they refuse? A distrust of privacy assurances? Shyness about sex? A desire to cover up something? Although women generally tend to be more reticent about sex, a higher proportion of men (22 percent) than women (20 percent) refused to participate.

Another problem was that while only 4.1 percent of both men and women labeled themselves "homosexual" or "bisexual," almost the same number (3.8 to 3.9 percent) labeled themselves "something else" than either of those or "heterosexual."

No doubt some people, especially at lower educational levels, did not understand the terms homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual. Kinsey often pointed out that standardized questionnaires offer no way to clarify meaning or adapt language to the level of the respondent.

Then too, some people may insist on an affirmative term such as "gay" or "lesbian" rather than the clinical sounding "homosexual." Or they may prefer some argot term such as queer, kinky, swinger or polyamorous. Similarly, some African-Americans insist they are not gay, which they associate with whites or effeminacy, but say they are "down low" or "same-gender loving." This latter seems especially likely since a stunning 7.3 percent of Hispanic men and 7.5 percent of black men-more than three times the percentage of whites-said they were "something else."

Other black and Latino men think of sex with other men as just "having fun with friends" but insist that "sex" is only what you do with women, so they might actually think of themselves as heterosexual or "something else."

In addition, a much higher percentage of black (3.2 percent) and Latino men (3.5 percent) than white men (0.7 percent) refused to answer the sexual orientation question at all. So another disadvantage of questionnaires is that there is no way to pressure people to answer. But it is worth remembering that Kinsey pointed out long ago that if he met resistance anywhere it was when he reached questions about homosexuality.

Then there was the problem that the survey asked men only about the disease-transmitting behavior of oral and anal sex, but asked women about any "any sexual experience" at all with another woman-which could include kissing, "making out," body rubbing, or masturbation with a partner.

The study does not explain why it was so much more interested in any sort of female same-sex eroticism. But by refusing to include analogous male same-sex body rubbing, interfemoral (intercrural) sex and masturbation with a partner, the latter a common enough activity among some gay men, the survey artificially depressed the quantity of gay sex, the number of gay men and, accordingly, its reliability as an index of sexual behavior.

There were other problems too. If the survey wanted to find out how many gays there were or how much homosexuality there was, why ask if people had engaged in same-sex sex at least once-which could mean just once or a very few times? Asking, as the survey does, about same-sex sex in the last year is a little more relevant, but you would think the survey would ask something about how frequently with how many partners. But no.

And what about the 23 percent of the self-defined "homosexual" men who said they were attracted only to women? Kinsey would never have let anyone get away with such an obvious contradiction. Did they mean they like women better as friends, or are attractive to women, or want to be attracted to women, or are attracted to the idea of being women? Who knows? With a standardized computer questionnaire, no one could notice the discrepancy at the time and find out.

This is what the CDC offers as state of the art sex research.

First published October 26, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

After an agonizing series of appeals and remands up and down the judicial system, on October 21 the Kansas Supreme Court finally overturned a Kansas law stipulating a 13-fold longer prison sentence for sex by teens with underage youths if the partners are same sex rather than opposite sex.

The case involved Matthew Limon, an 18-year-old sentenced to 17 years in prison for consensually fellating a male youth who was 14, just shy of his 15th birthday. Had the two been of opposite sexes, the maximum sentence would have been 15 months in prison.

Bizarrely, a Kansas appeals court upheld the sentence, whence it was then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Having just decided its groundbreaking Lawrence decision striking down state sodomy laws, the Supreme Court remanded the case to the appeals court with instructions to reconsider in the light of Lawrence.

But in a stunning display of either judicial effrontery or obtuseness, despite the clear signal from the Supreme Court that Lawrence applied to this case, the appeals court once again upheld the draconian sentence, insisting that:

1. Lawrence did not apply because this was not a privacy issue and

2. The law protected minors from sexually transmitted diseases more common among homosexuals.

Appeals court judge Henry Green asserted further that the law:

3. Upheld traditional (i.e., anti-gay) sexual mores and

4. Promoted traditional (i.e., heterosexual) sexual development.

It was that decision that a unanimous Kansas Supreme Court just overturned, rejecting in turn each of the various trumped-up rationales for the law offered by Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline and the two judges in the majority.

"Trumped-up"? According to the New York Times, Kline argued in his legal brief that striking down the harsher penalties for gays would "begin a toppling of dominoes which is likely to end in the Kansas marriage law on the scrap heap ... allowing such combinations as three-party marriages, incestuous marriages, child brides, and other less-than-desirable couplings."

This is simply boiler-plate language from the religious right playbook, the argument being that if society cannot deny all equality for homosexuals and penalize them with the utmost severity, it cannot prohibit anything at all and society will collapse. Call it the "Cry Havoc!" defense.

Granted that state officials may and do say anything no matter how preposterous to try to justify existing laws, hoping that some mud will stick, and that gullible or bigoted judges will accept it. But still you have to wonder if the Kansas Attorney General could imagine no reason to prohibit a man from marrying his 8- and 9-year-old daughters that did not also require harsh prison sentences for teenage gay sex. If not, perhaps Kansas needs a smarter attorney general.

At any rate, the Kansas Supreme Court rejected all the arguments offered in support of the law in an opinion that could be summarized as: "What part of 'equal protection' don't you understand?"

The opinion by Justice Maria Lockert pointed out to begin with that "moral disapproval of a group cannot be a legitimate state interest." This follows directly from Lawrence and behind it Romer. It also constitutes a blow directly against the basic religious right claim that moral-often religious-disapproval is an excellent reason to regulate behavior.

Lockert also made short work of the disease transmission rationale for the law. She pointed out that the law was both over-inclusive because oral sex, the youths' activity, is unlikely to transmit HIV, and under-inclusive because it stipulated lighter penalties for heterosexual anal sex which is more likely to transmit HIV and other STDs. As the law failed to reach its purported aim, it lacked a justification for discriminating and so violated the equal protection provision of the Constitution.

The mistaken supposition by appeals court judges that early homosexual activity might induce a heterosexual youth to become homosexual, their view of all homosexual sex on the model of male anal sex, and their ignoring of the incidence of heterosexual anal sex, all bear witness to the ongoing ignorance of many judges about sexual behavior lamented by Kinsey decades ago.

That ongoing ignorance emphasizes the importance in legal cases involving gays-or other sexually related issues-of filing amicus briefs citing current scientific findings on sexual behavior. No one should assume that middle-aged and elderly judges know anything about sex other than their own behavior.

As 7th Circuit Court of Appeals judge Richard Posner in his 1992 Sex and Reason observed in evident frustration, "The dominant judicial, and I would say legal, attitude toward the study of sex is that 'I know what I like' and therefore research is superfluous."

Finally, it might be reasonable to wonder, as Judge Posner does, if Kansas did not get it backwards-if the age of consent and the penalties for violating the law should not be lower for homosexual than for heterosexual sex because in addition to the possibility of contracting sexually transmitted diseases, young women run the considerable risk of becoming pregnant. Such a discriminatory law would at least have the merit of being defensible on some rational basis.

First published in a slightly different form in the Chicago Free Press on September 28, 2005.

The Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education is reportedly readying a directive that homosexuals should be barred from entering or continuing in seminary preparation for the priesthood.

In addition, the Congregation is beginning a multi-year "apostolic visitation" to all 200-plus U.S. Catholic seminaries to examine their adherence to church doctrine and "look for signs of homosexuality." (Insert your own jokes here about "signs of homosexuality.")

Since gay men, open or closeted, are reportedly a sizable minority in seminary training, if these efforts are undertaken seriously, they will no doubt cause a decrease in the number of men entering the priesthood, exacerbating the current shortage of priests and further weakening the church's institutional base. Since the Catholic hierarchy is one of the leading forces opposing gay equality, this result should be welcomed.

But the policy also highlights several anomalies and contradictions in current Catholic thinking.

The new instructions reportedly claim that gay men have a "serious personality disorder." But that claim is simply false. That view was abandoned by institutional psychology in the 1970s after psychologists determined that gays and lesbian had healthy personalities and normal psychological functioning.

Catholic use of outdated psychological language to stigmatize gay men is not surprising since the psychological claim was itself a secularized version of Christian moral doctrine, reformulated in the late 19th and early 20th century into pseudo-scientific psychological language. So it is to be expected that the Catholic hierarchy would continue to find the claim plausible when no one else does.

Of course, the Catholic church has long held the view that a homosexual orientation is "objectively disordered" and it has now decided that it does not want "disordered" men, celibate or otherwise, as priests. Catholic doctrine holds that "rightly ordered" people sexually desire only the other sex.

It says this because it believes that its God created the penis only for procreation-at least when used sexually. This, of course, is nothing more than our old friend "Intelligent Design" formulated centuries ago by theologians ignorant of evolutionary biology. But even they should have realized that according to Genesis 2, Eve was decidedly an afterthought by their God, so the God could not possibly have "intelligently designed" Adam's penis for procreation.

Apologists for the new policies try to put a benevolent spin on them, arguing that admitting gay men into an all-male seminary places undue temptation in their way. Yet it should go without saying, but apparently does not, that there is no evidence that gay men are less able than heterosexuals to control their sexual behavior, nor does the church pretend to offer any.

To the contrary, according to Richard Sipe's exhaustive 1990 study A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy, the preponderant sexual behavior by priests is-heterosexual.

Indeed, the Catholic demand for priestly celibacy was primarily motivated by a desire to assure that priests did not have children who could lawfully inherit church property. Thus the Lateran Council of 1139 declared the marriages of clerics not only illegal but invalid. But the very need for such a dictate indicates that some priests were marrying. From this standpoint, gay men would seem to be ideal priests since they would not generate potential heirs.

Since none of the stated reasons for the new policy seem cogent, it must be primarily a public relations move, enabling the church to say that it has done everything in its power to eliminate the problem. Rather than blaming seminaries for poor training in how to manage celibacy and their failure to weed out troubled and weak-willed candidates, the church is pretending that eliminating gays from the priesthood, at least those they can find, is the solution.

Still, you have to wonder why any gay man would want to become a priest when his church so clearly says he is defective and disordered and it does not want him. No doubt it is an easy enough job. It pleases many Catholic families. It guarantees a degree of respect. It provides a ready-made career path for the directionless. It promises a structure for those who need one.

But if the motive is benevolent, the desire to do good or even serve a god, there are other, frankly more effective ways to help people: Becoming a teacher, a nurse, a musician who creates beauty, an entrepreneur who creates jobs, the inventor of a useful product, a designer who enriches our visual life. All of these benefit people more than saying mass every day.

Ultimately, gay men who become priests seem like "enablers" of Catholic homophobia. By helping fill the ranks of the priesthood, they bolster the institutional church and, accordingly, its influence and ability to promote its anti-gay views.

They lack even the excuse that they are helping to change the church. Catholic doctrine since the Apostle Paul has been adamantly anti-gay. And that is not going to change, absent the divine intervention of a holy spirit that has not intervened on the issue in two grim millennia.

First published September 14, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund recently developed a list of some 30 questions it hoped would be asked of Supreme Court Chief Justice nominee John G. Roberts, Jr., and, presumably, the as yet unnamed associate justice nominee.

Among them were: Is there a Constitutional right to privacy? Can the government make it a crime for gay people to have sex? and Do gay people have a right to equal protection under the law?

Roberts will probably not discuss his views on most substantive issues since he would lose votes no matter how he answers. But those are good questions that point to the still-developing area of people's rights against government interference. Lambda unfortunately neglects to educate the gay public about the basis for these rights, so a radical rethinking may be invited.

The right to privacy is an umbrella term for a bundle of different rights and immunities such as the right to be secure from intrusion in a person's body, in his (or her) home, and in his most intimate relationships. The core concept is the right to personal autonomy, the right to be left alone. As the old adage had it: A man's home is his castle. The winds may blow through it, the rain may pour through the roof, but the King of England may not enter.

"Privacy" is not mentioned in the Constitution, but elements have been found in several specific guarantees in the first ten amendments, most convincingly in the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of security "in their persons, houses, papers, and effects," in the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of private property rights and its prohibition of taking "life, liberty, or property," without due process.

Are there other "unenumerated" rights against government interference that individuals retain? There are. How do we know that? The Constitution says so. Where does it say that? In the Ninth Amendment. What does it say? It states in its entirety, "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Having set up an "energetic" federal government with the Constitution, the Framers felt a need to reassure people that their new government could not become tyrannical and that they retained all the traditional rights of Englishmen plus additional rights to prevent potential abuses. Although they listed several, they realized that no list could be complete. Hence the Ninth Amendment.

Some advocates of government control over people's social and economic lives have tried to evade the Ninth Amendment, saying it just repeats the Tenth Amendment. But that is flagrantly dishonest. The Ninth Amendment refers to "rights"-i.e., immunities against government-retained by "the people"-i.e., individual persons. By contrast the Tenth refers to "powers"-i.e., governing authorities-reserved for "the states."

In recent years as courts began trying to expand certain privacy or personal autonomy rights, particularly in the social and sexual sphere, they cautiously began to mention the Ninth Amendment, which one author called "The forgotten Ninth Amendment" and Justice Goldberg in his 1965 Griswold (birth control) concurrence said "may be regarded by some as a rediscovery."

Although the Ninth Amendment must have some substantive content, judges have been terrified to base decisions on it alone. Currently, it seems to be viewed at most as a kind of nagging reminder to judges to hunt for specific privacy and autonomy rights elsewhere in the Constitution. The appeal is usually to the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, often in tandem with the Fourteenth Amendment's specification that "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

But slowly, by engaging in expansive readings of those other amendments, the Supreme Court seems to be approaching, by the back door as it were, the original intent of the Ninth Amendment-that there are a lot of rights not explicitly stated.

At some point the courts should simply acknowledge that they have been going about things backwards. Instead of trying to find a constitutional basis for every specific privacy or autonomy or liberty right, they should begin with the assumption that people have a right to do whatever (peaceful, consenting) they desire and require the government to assert some specific constitutional authorization to prohibit it.

Thus, it seems obvious that private homosexual activity should not be the subject of legal attention. The Constitution gives no government power to prohibit homosexual activity because it is no one else's business what goes on in my home or someone else's home.

And it seems clear that my ongoing intimate relationship with some other willing adult partner is none of the government's business either, but so long as it extends certain privileges to contracting heterosexual couples, the Constitution provides no basis for denying "equal protection of the laws" to me and my contracting partner.

Such a reversal of the burden of proof for the legitimacy of government policies would restore a healthy modesty among government authorities and free citizens to conduct their lives for well or ill according to their own personal tastes and aspirations.

*****************

Addendum: Readers wishing to explore the Ninth Amendment further are referred to Randy E. Barnett, The Rights Retained by the People: The History and Meaning of the Ninth Amendment (George Mason University Press, 1991) as well as other works by Barnett.

First published August 3, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

Most of us realize that there are many people who have had sex with both sexes but that that does not necessarily means they feel equal desire for both sexes. As Masters and Johnson wryly observed, "The label of bisexual often means whatever the user wishes it to mean."

Now a new study published in Psychological Science by Northwestern University psychologist J. Michael Bailey and two Ph.D. candidates claims to advance science by reporting that none of the men in their study of male bisexuals experienced "strong" desire for both sexes and that most experienced much stronger sexual arousal by men than women.

Whether or not Bailey's conclusions are true, the study fails to demonstrate them effectively. Bailey has repeatedly in the past employed problematic research procedures and this study is no exception.

Bailey and his team recruited 33 "bisexuals" as well as control groups of homosexuals and heterosexuals by advertising in the gay and "alternative" press. They then showed all three groups of men "several" two-minute-long erotic films, including two of two men having sex and two of two women having sex. The subjects' genital arousal was determined by a device placed around the penis that measured any increased circumference. Bailey says, "For men arousal is orientation."

It turned out that one-third of each group of subjects had no significant genital arousal at all from the films, which means that either they had no sexual orientation or else the technique for testing orientation was flawed. But Bailey ignored that possibility, simply eliminated the non-responders and used the 22 bisexual who did have an arousal response.

It also turned out too that three of the 25 gay men who had measurable genital arousal were more aroused by the female films than the male films. Bailey should conclude ("arousal is orientation") that they were heterosexual but does not and does not say why. This interesting fact is buried in a footnote in a manuscript version of the study but I missed it in the uncorrected page proofs Bailey kindly provided.

In any case, the final result was that although all the bisexual men reported equal subjective (mental) arousal to both types of films, all of them "had much greater genital arousal from one sex than to the other" and three quarters of the 22 men had stronger genital arousal from the all-male films than the all-female films.

It is noticeable that there is no mention of heterosexual films - a man having sex with a woman. The study assumes that a film of two women having sex will always generate a heterosexual arousal response but offers no evidence or argument for the claim. No doubt some men are titillated by lesbian sex but whether it is as uniformly effective a heterosexual arousal agent as a heterosexual film seems questionable.

Some bisexual men, for instance, are far more interested in their own performance, their impact on the other person, than the gender of the partner. Masters and Johnson call them "ambisexuals" and C. A. Tripp mentions that some researchers describe them - somewhat inaccurately - as ready to "stick it in anywhere." If such men are to be aroused by brief films it would more likely be one of a man having sex with another person, male or female, than by a film lacking any male participant. This could help explain the greater number of men aroused by the all-male films.

Since the bisexual men did report substantially equal subjective (mental) arousal to both types of films, someone might wonder if two-minute films were long enough to generate genital arousal particularly for the female films since they presumably did not involve specific arousal cues such as copulatory activity. As psychologist Murray Davis points out, the move from everyday life to erotic reality can take time, the right mental set, and the right cues.

Finally one might wonder if the recruitment ads were specific enough. If Bailey had advertised for men with "equal sexual desire" for men and women he might have obtained a more interesting study group. As it was, he defined "bisexuals" as people with Kinsey ratings of 2, 3 and 4 thus including people with stronger heterosexual responses (2s) and stronger homosexual responses (4s).

One might also wonder if most of the bisexuals solicited through ads in gay publications might lean toward the gay side of bisexuality - which could be why they were reading gay publications and saw the ad. That in turn might help explain the larger number of bisexuals who were more aroused by males than females.

These and related difficulties lead to me wonder why Bailey continues to try to do sex research when he demonstrates so little understanding of the human psychology involved in sex and sexual arousal and seems so unself-critical about research designs that include sample bias, dubious testing procedures, built-in assumptions, unaccountable anomalies, etc. Whatever he is doing, it is not psychology and it is not science.

First published July 20, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

When gay activists argue the case for same-sex marriage they make sure to emphasize that they mean civil marriage. The right of various religious denominations to determine the criteria for their religious marriage ceremonies is rightly protected by the First Amendment.

But gays and lesbians who are religious may long for a ceremony that may feel more like the real "wedding," so they feel more fully, satisfyingly married. Although a few churches already offer religious ceremonies, most denominations still do not. They say that same-sex ceremonies are not consistent with their theology.

So we need a persuasive theology for gay marriage.

There is nothing arcane about theology. Theology is simply the way people try to use revered stories and writings, visions, insights, and their own ponderings to understand the nature and intentions of the god or gods they believe in.

Theology is by nature conservative. But just as existing theology conserves the insights and experiences of earlier religious leaders, so theology is, in the long run, influenced by the deeply felt and clearly expressed experience of people living today. And that includes experiencing the presence of loving relationships by gay and lesbian couples.

As the bishops of the Episcopal Church wrote in a presentation to the recent Anglican Consultative Council, "We believe that God has been opening our eyes to acts of God that we had not known how to see before. Members of the Episcopal Church have discerned holiness in same-sex relationships."

But even Christians in denominations less explicitly open to the concept of a continuing disclosure of a god's purpose (what John Henry Newman called "the economy") are not without resources to begin developing a theology for gay marriage. Here are just four of several possible lines of approach.

1. Some Christian denominations place so much emphasis on procreative capacity as the key criterion for marriage that they almost seem to turn Christianity into a breeding cult. But early texts offer scant support for that view.
   
2. The Apostle Paul urged Christians not to marry and if they were already married to act as if they were not married. Paul offered the "concession" that Christians could marry but mentioned only the excuse of assuaging strong sexual desire, not anything about having children (1 Cor. 7:6-8, 25-29).
   
3. Some opponents of gay marriage claim the defining characteristic of marriage to be a "one flesh union" of man and wife, citing Genesis 2:24. But they ignore the fact that the bodies do not actually merge (it is a metaphor!) and they miss the broader meaning of "one flesh union."
   
   Paul, for instance, writes of sex with a prostitute, "Do you not know that he who joins himself to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For as it is written, 'The two shall become one'" (1 Cor. 6:16). So "one flesh union" refers to any kind of sexual penetration, not marital or procreative activity specifically.
   
4. According to Paul, belief in Jesus as the Christ rendered all attributes of social status, nationality and gender irrelevant.
   Paul wrote:
   

5. "Before faith came, we were confined under the law ... But now that faith has come we are no longer under a custodian. ... There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ" (Gal. 3:24-28).

   
   
6. A more forthright and comprehensive dismissal of the relevance of gender for the religion of Christ could hardly be imagined.
   
7. In an interesting new book about same-sex marriage, What God Has Joined Together?, David Myers and Letha Scanzoni point out that the Hebrew prophet Hosea has God liken his covenant with Israel to a betrothal: "I will betroth you to me for ever. ... I will betroth you to me in faithfulness" (Hos. 2:19-20).
   
   "Perhaps," Myers and Scanzoni write,
   

   "rather than thinking in terms of gender, we might instead consider the characteristics of that covenant .... justice, fairness, love, kindness, faithfulness and a revelation of God's personhood. ... If these characteristics define an ideal marriage, might two homosexual persons likewise form such a union? ... If we can think in those terms, might we ... accept these (same sex) covenantal relationships as indeed a joining of two persons by God?"

Gay marriage opponents will, of course, offer counter-texts and counter-arguments. And gay-supportive Christians can respond in turn, drawing on additional texts and arguments. That is how theology develops.

To take one example, anti-gay advocates will note "Paul's" apparent enthusiasm for childbearing in a Letter to Timothy (1 Tim 2:15, 5:14). But gay marriage supporters can point out that linguistic and historical analysis have shown that that letter was not written by Paul but by an impostor trying to use Paul's authority to promote his own beliefs 40 or 50 years after Paul's death. (See Werner Kuemmel, Introduction to the New Testament.)

So for gay Christians the project of developing a theology for same-sex religious marriage can be both exciting and enlightening.