IGF CultureWatch

It's not much more than a conversation in a car, but if you think about it, it says a whole lot.

Dennis Prager and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach are driving in Botswana over Thanksgiving, and while the video recorder is on, the subject of same-sex marriage comes up. They have a spirited discussion.

For those who are younger, some perspective: Fifty years ago, such a conversation would have been unthinkable. Not just hard to have, but inconceivable - and not only among heterosexual men, but even among most people who were homosexual themselves. The most visionary of our early supporters could see marriage as a possibility, but in a world where homosexuality was a crime, a sickness and a sin, there were far more important things that needed to be accomplished before marriage moved up the list.

It's hard to emphasize that enough. Fifty years ago, our sheer existence was not even acknowledgeable. Particularly because of the criminal laws, we ran enormous risks even discussing our lives with friendly heterosexuals, much less trying to change the laws that enforced our silence. And good luck, in those days, trying to find friendly heterosexuals.

Now listen to Rabbi Boteach. While we could all probably think of supplemental arguments to back him up (Prager, of course, is not supportive), he is an articulate and feisty advocate, within the strictures of his religious belief.

More important, there does not seem to be anyone in the car who is gay to bring the subject up. While it is our rights that are at stake, and while we are an infinitesimally small minority, our arguments are sound enough, and clear enough that they have penetrated into the nation's conscience. We are not the only ones who understand how fundamentally unfair current law is - or feel we have an interest in changing it.

It is conversations like this that take place out of the public eye, and out of our hearing that are the most important now. As I said earlier, we cannot ever comprise a majority; our equality entirely depends on heterosexuals now. It took us a half century to pave the way for them to have these conversations, but now they are happening everywhere. Not all of them will be well-articulated or even sympathetic. But in light of the silence of generations past, every one of them will be helpful.

(H/T to Good As You)

Two things in this New Jersey poll on same-sex marriage caught my eye.

First, look at the breakdown of Catholics (who comprise the largest religious group in the state): 48% support same-sex marriage, 40% oppose, and 12% are undecided. The last group certainly deserves comment. Catholics aren't supposed to be undecided on issues the Vatican has pronounced upon; that's for Protestants.

But it is that supportive plurality - and near-majority - of Catholics that we have to keep focusing on. The church takes pride in sticking to its historical ignorance of human sexuality, and is doubling down on prejudice by aggressively recruiting the most anti-gay Anglicans, overlooking things like married priests and near complete acceptance of birth control. Church leadership has now gone beyond hypocrisy and is becoming obsessed with homosexuality.

And that is not going unnoticed in American pews. U.S. Catholics have long ignored the Vatican on birth control and divorce without much fuss from the berobed ones, and may be seeing that the church's position on homosexuality is part of the same continuum of museum-quality bias about sex and marriage - a trinity of sexual sanctimony from the famously (if theoretically) celibate, all-male priesthood. Given the fact that heterosexuals get a pass on their issues, many may even see the new crusade for what it is - pure bias against a minority; and a bias the church is backing up with an awful lot of financial support that is not going to other, perhaps more important church priorities.

That 48% plurality shows how many Catholics remain in their church despite, not because of its bizarre leaders. That is the kind of faith I lack, and admire in those who stay in the church I left.

But there's one other thing in the poll that shouldn't go unnoticed: 46% of all respondents said the issue of same-sex marriage was "not at all important."

This is a point I have made before, and continue to think is at the heart of the political debate we are being forced to have. I think it's fair to ask that 46% this question: Would it be important to you if you could not get legally married?

While I'm sure some would say their own marital status in the eyes of the state is equally unimportant, it is the rest - the certain majority to whom legal marriage is important - who need to know that we feel the same. The lack of marriage is a fundamental distortion in our lives, as it would be in theirs. Because we are a minority, the polling on this issue won't ever indicate how profoundly important this is to us. Their opinion is the only one that matters because they are the majority. We need heterosexuals to consider that we are not engaged in this fight for trivial or frivolous reasons - that we really do value marriage as much as they do. We need it to be important to them because it is so important to us.

I've come to accept that none of our commenters want to talk about what I want to talk about. This has been a serious blow to my ego. It's fortunate our commenters have interesting conversations among themselves, which keep me distracted from my own pain.

One of the most interesting discussions has been the one about whether homosexuality is innate. This isn't anything I was prepared to go into, but if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

I obviously think sexual orientation, itself, is innate, as does BobN. Quo, Debrah and TS seem to think otherwise - though they may only be talking about homosexual orientation, and may think heterosexuality is innate. Needless to say, they can all speak for themselves.

This is a subject fraught with political implications, and I think Debrah is right to question the bona fides of a lot of the research. On the other hand, I know that while I had to learn some things about sex, no one had to coach me into being attracted to men. On this, I am with Augustine, who noted long before our present debate that men, in particular, have an objective indicator of who they are sexually attracted to, and it is notoriously impervious to persuasion. (This may be different for women).

I think the discussion got off track with discussion of a media story (which I never saw) about some boys who were molested by their adoptive father; the boys (apparently) "became" gay. I'd like to know more about that, but I think it's wise to separate psychological traumas that may play themselves out in sexual behavior from sexual orientation, itself, which may (or may not) develop independent of environment.

So the question for everyone, gay or straight (or otherwise) is this: how did you learn your sexual orientation? Or did you simply recognize it? If you're heterosexual, do you think you could become homosexual?

Now, of course, I'm dying to see what other subject you all will want to talk about.

Some ice may be breaking in Uganda. Box Turtle Bulletin links to an essay written by John Nagenda, a senior advisor to President Museveni, opposing the anti-homosexuality bill.

The colorfully written piece brings into focus the part of the bill that I think transcends any particular penalty: death, imprisonment or even misdemeanor fine. Its original sin is its naïve and vicious attempt to enforce purity - to create a Uganda free of "any form of sexual relations between persons of the same sex," and even "the promotion or recognition of such sexual relations," whether inside or outside the country. Its target is only a small minority, but it intends to be comprehensive. Every citizen is coerced into turning in suspected violators, or themselves facing prosecution.

To describe the bill, Nagenda invokes a word Americans will understand -- McCarthyism - and helpfully explains to his fellow Ugandans how witch-hunts occur. But he then offers an even more apt analogy: the Inquisition.

Christians of good conscience have powerful reasons to be hypersensitive about this. There should be no doubt, after the extensive investigative work Box Turtle Bulletin has done, that several American Christians had a formative role in the bill's inception. They have exported their misguided notions about homosexuality, and Ugandan politicians bought the goods, and placed them at the very heart of their new crusade.

The bill states, as a matter of law, that same-sex attraction "is not an innate and immutable characteristic." At the very least, that is a matter of controversy, and it is barely that to anyone who has seriously considered the issue. Only a fringe group of religious fanatics and deranged psychologists manqué insist, today, that homosexuals are just heterosexuals gone wrong, and should man up and marry a good opposite-sex partner.

Nevertheless, this merry band found in some Ugandan politicians the credulous audience lacking in America (at least among politicians who wish to be taken seriously), and the result is what would be expected when ignorant religious beliefs are married to political ambition. By asserting pseudoscience as an enforceable principle of law, the bill strips homosexuals of their very existence, turns them into nothing more than errant - and criminal - heterosexuals, and enlists all good citizens into the war against them.

This turns homosexuality into heresy. That is what American Christianists have been trying to do here - return us to the days when homosexuality was criminal, homosexuals were ashamed and silent, and heterosexuals could count on the police to enforce that shame and silence. Any citizen with a petty grievance or a niggling suspicion was empowered to press the levers of power. When rumors are evidence, people can destroy one another at will.

It doesn't take a lot to see how much damage that can cause, and has caused - particularly for anyone who's paid even the slightest attention to history. From the Crusades to the Inquisition to the Holocaust, the quest for purity inevitably brings out the worst in us, not the best.

Uganda can avoid learning that lesson the hard way. But they'll need to listen to better advice than America's traveling snake-oil salesmen are giving them. Nagenda's essay is a good sign that common sense may prevail.

Would a bigot help?

That's an important question in thinking about Rick Warren. He has been as harmful to gay equality as any religious figure on the right, particularly for his role in urging his parishioners - and everyone else who "believes what the Bible says" - to vote against marriage equality in California -- all the while denying he had done any such thing.

He has also played a starring role in stirring up the pot in Uganda against homosexuals. Which is why his strong and explicit statement against the anti-homosexuality bill there is so important. As Rachel Maddow says, "better late than never."

So is he a bigot? The epithet is potent enough to do to our opponents what they do to us - charge them with a fundamental lack of humanity or decency. Warren's statement is a firm assertion of both, and does him credit.

But Warren is all over the map on gay equality. On her show last night, Maddow clearly nailed Warren's incoherence, both on Prop. 8 and on his role in Uganda. But that is where I think a bit of empathy may be in order (and I know this will be controversial).

Like so many other heterosexuals of his age and older, Warren is caught in a bind. He believed the lies and misperceptions about homosexuality that history, particularly as embodied in his religion, have taught him. He relied on those distortions, and built his belief system around them.

For many years, we did too. It was hard to realize and then live out the truth about our own lives against those perversions of truth. But as the Catholic church learns daily, you cannot deny nature long without paying a price. Sex and intimacy are fundamental to human beings, and cannot be either renounced or faked. We learned that the hard way, and are trying to correct the record so it doesn't happen again.

Warren is obviously struggling with that. His conversation after Prop. 8 with Melissa Etheridge may have been a turning point. But his loyalty to the lies history taught him about us still permits him to blind himself to the lies he tells himself. And no lies are more persuasive then those.

No one should go easy on Warren. It is the relentlessness of Maddow and Andrew Sullivan and particularly Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin that has put the pressure on him to correct the problem he was complicit in in Uganda. The fact he has done so can make an enormous difference.

But he lives here, and is accountable here. The inconsistency of his position on homosexuality is more apparent with each passing day. A bigot, I think, would refuse to face that. I'm not sure whether Warren is a bigot in that sense. But his action now should give us reason to hope. He can be a powerful ally.

This is exactly what I was worried about. By taking the death penalty out of the Uganda anti-homosexuality bill, the government has improved the bill's reputation, and its chances.

The Minister of Ethics and Integrity, James Nsaba Buturo said the government supports the bill because homosexuality and lesbianism are "repugnant to the Ugandan culture," but wanted a more "refined" set of punishments. Death was too much, so the refinements include life in prison and reeducation.

Whether the punishment is sufficiently refined or not, Buturo articulates the rotten core of this bill: a heterosexual majority running roughshod over the dignity of a very small, and very vulnerable minority for no reason other than political dominance. And heterosexuals can get swept into the vortex; the bill imposes a regime of controlled speech and opinion, where objections to homosexuality may be freely uttered, but support is prohibited.

I don't know about Ugandan culture, but that abuse of power is repugnant to any civilized government. And I am afraid our heated rhetoric has not helped. To my mind, at least, this was never about the death penalty; it was always about the discrimination. But after we set the stage with our focus on government murder, the bill now looks, to many people, ever so much more reasonable. We may have cause to regret our inadvertent aid in making that happen.

The commenters on Non-bigotry made some very good arguments. Lymis is right on point that the rabbi is a textbook example of someone who is prejudiced (whether or not that is bigotry). In contrast, Pauliji has no doubt the rabbi is a bigot. Joe Perez has a lengthy post at his blog that I think John Corvino is more qualified to respond to than me. I think this topic is worth more time, and I'd like to devote a few posts over the next week to examining arguments made by some specific people who oppose marriage equality.

Senator Paul Sarlo was the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and was a No vote from the start. However, he ran the very controversial hearing well, and the explanation of his vote is respectful:

Yes, I am opposed to the bill at this point in time, but their (Garden State Equality) advocacy has come a long way, and I am quite certain some time in the near future, I believe the tide has turned a little bit, and they will win with their issue. I am still opposed personally because of my religious beliefs as a Roman Catholic, and as senator of the 36th District, which is mostly made up of Irish and Italian Catholics, and Orthodox Jews.

Two things seem important to me about this statement. First, while I can't speak for New Jersey's legislature, I have worked in and with California's for over a decade. It is rare here for any legislator voting in a public hearing to cite his or her religion as the (or even a) reason for their vote. While particular religious arguments may be made (biblical passages about charity, for example, to support public welfare programs), outside of gay rights (and the very rare bill these days in California about abortion) an individual's religious beliefs are simply not used as a political argument. That is a consistent anomaly in the debate over gay rights.

Sen. Sarlo's concern about the religious beliefs of his constituents is a slightly different matter, but actually intensifies the inherent problem. While the Orthodox Jews in his district would probably strongly support his vote, only about half of his fellow Catholics would, if they are like Catholics in the rest of the nation. And I assume he has Jewish voters in his district who are not orthodox and support same-sex marriage. Moreover, this explicit appeal to specific groups quite obviously leaves out all of his constituents who are nonreligious, or belong to other religions. This may not be a political problem in his district, but as a general public policy matter, it is certainly unfair, if not unwise.

But he says something else that is even more telling. He is sure that "they" (Garden State Equality and by extension, lesbians and gay men) will win "their" issue. Equality is certainly our issue by virtue of the fact that we don't have it and must fight for it. But the concept is a constitutional one, and as such, it does not "belong" to any minority, but to all citizens. "Equal Justice Under Law" is carved into the entrance to the United States Supreme Court, not for any particular "us," but as a guiding principle for the laws that apply to the nation we all share.

Sen. Sarlo separates himself from this foundation when he assigns the fight for equal laws to us. The stunning success of the gay rights movement has been to help heterosexuals see exactly this point. They have as much stake in honoring the constitution as we have battling not to be excluded from it.

To be fair, Sen. Sarlo does understand this. His state's supreme court ruled that same-sex couples did not have equal rights in New Jersey, and told the legislature they must resolve that discrepancy. Sarlo believes that comprehensive civil unions satisfy the command of equality. But the religion he cites as authority for opposing our equal marriage does not support laws that grant us civil unions. He does not explain how he resolves that inconsistency.

I don't think Sen. Sarlo is a bigot. Unlike some of our most vocal opponents, he is comfortable articulating that we are entitled to equality, and differs only on the means of achieving that. That seems to me an important factor in deciding whether to level a charge of bigotry. What do you think?