IGF CultureWatch

The 2008 presidential primaries and caucuses loom, so what's a gay Republican to do? For many, the answer has been to support Ron Paul. He's not going to win any primaries, but a vote for him could be thought a protest against the theocratic tendencies of the party. It could also be a vote for libertarian principle, which appeals to some. Yet while some of Paul's views are superficially appealing, he's a very bad choice.

Let's start with what's attractive about Paul. First, he's not the other GOP candidates. With the exception of Sen. John McCain, they're about as politically and ideologically unlovely a lot as one can imagine. They're nativist and anti-evolution. Several are running for National Pastor instead of president.

On gay issues, they're as bad as we've ever had. The two candidates with gay-friendly records -- Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney -- have abandoned their erstwhile principles to cozy up to religious conservatives.

All of them support Don't Ask, Don't Tell. All, except McCain, support some kind of anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment. Giuliani, who initially opposed any amendment, has since wobbled.

In walks Ron Paul, formerly a practicing doctor, promising to limit government and sticking by his principles. He would abolish the IRS, the income tax system, and the departments of Education, Energy, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services. He would eliminate Medicare and end student loans for education. He would even get government out of the medical licensing business. As he put it in an interview with Google, this means your neighbor could dispense medications.

Part of this is intriguing. If we were starting the world over again, it might make sense to do a lot of things very differently from the way we do them now.

But we are not at liberty to begin the world anew. Taken together, Dr. Paul's radical prescriptions would entail a massive disruption of life in the United States as we know it. Millions of elderly Americans depend on Medicare for basic medical needs. Student loans have given a college education to millions of middle- and lower-income students whose financial needs were not met by private markets. Every person a pharmacist? I'm sorry, but that's just loony. It's also typically reckless of Paul.

He wants the U.S. to quit the United Nations and withdraw from just about every important treaty it has entered. This sort of thing gets applause from conspiracy theorists who think U.S. "sovereignty" is endangered, but it's stupid foreign policy.

He says he supports free trade, but opposes the agreements that have made trade freer.

The best that could be said about a Paul presidency is that almost nothing he believes would become law. We might as well elect Daffy Duck.

But isn't Paul the best of the Republicans on gay issues?

Paul's opposition to a federal marriage amendment is welcome. But he voted for the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as heterosexual for federal purposes. DOMA substantially reduced the legal significance of marriage even for same-sex couples in states where their unions might be permitted. In contrast to the federal marriage amendment, which has no chance of passing, DOMA has done actual harm to gay families.

In an interview with ABC's John Stossel, Paul said that he supports gay marriage. Then he explained what he meant: "Sure, they can do whatever they want and they can call it whatever they want, just so they don't expect to impose their relationship on somebody else. They can't make me, personally, accept what they do, but they can do whatever they want."

There's more than a whiff of homophobia in this. It's akin to, "They have a right to their disgusting behavior."

More importantly, it's not clear what he means by saying gay couples can call their relationships "whatever they want." If he means that gay couples can contract for certain legal rights and call what results a "marriage," that's nothing new. And full legal marriage "imposes" on people in all kinds of ways since married couples have state-granted rights and benefits others don't have.

Paul's answer to this is to abolish marriage as it exists, to "privatize" it. State-sponsored marriage is bound up in our law at all levels of government. Ending state involvement in it is has as little public support as any imaginable policy proposal. So it's naive at best and a cynical dodge at worst to offer gay families "privatized" marriage as the answer to the practical problems they face right now.

Paul says citizens should be able to serve in the military as long as their sexuality is not "disruptive." That suggests he'd apply the same standard to heterosexuals and homosexuals in uniform. But the whole point of opposition to gays in the military is the claim that homosexuality itself degrades unit moral and cohesion. Paul has had nothing to say about this.

Personally, I'd vote for McCain. While I disagree with him on a few things, including campaign finance regulation, he's the candidate in the GOP field with the most potential to be a good president. He has the integrity, the life experience, and the national-security credentials for it. Alone among the Democratic and Republican candidates, he has the credibility with military leaders to end or at least to weaken DADT, if he decided to do that. The others are all talk on the issue.

A vote for Paul, on the other hand, is a flight from responsibility. He is too ideologically hard and pure to be president. A conscientious voter should think harder about the serious choices.

It is clear to nearly everyone that fundamentalists--Christians who believe in biblical inerrancy--are the chief obstacle to equal freedom for gays and lesbians.

It would not be so irritating if they limited their religious practice to their own lives--not participating in homosexual acts, not inviting known gays into their homes, praying privately for the salvation of homosexuals, etc. But they generally try to go much further and impose their anti-gay religious doctrines on society at large.

Just as they try to have biblical commandments posted in courtrooms, seek taxpayer support for their charities, oppose stem cell research, and oppose use of the HPV vaccine because it could encourage sexual activity, so too they oppose allowing gays to serve openly in the military and all attempts to have the government treat gay couples equally.

They oppose non-discrimination laws that apply only to government policy, oppose "hate crimes" laws that include gays, claiming that they would hamper freedom of speech, and oppose anti-bullying laws for schools, believing it is their children's god-given right to bully little gay children.

Gen. Peter Pace, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave the game away when he explained that gays should not serve openly because homosexuality is immoral and the military should not countenance immorality within its ranks. So all these policy arguments for keeping gays out of the military are mere window dressing. The real reason is the religious doctrine that gays are immoral.

What if anything can we do about this? It seems to me that we have three options.

1) We can continue to make our secular arguments, appealing to civil rights, equal freedom, "fair-mindedness," analogies to other minority groups, etc., hoping that they will persuade more people through sheer repetition.

2) We can try to do better at generating and promoting religiously-based arguments for homosexual non-immorality and gay-supportive policies, hoping that those might persuade people who are not evangelical inerrantists. At one time the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force sponsored a Religious Round Table to do this, but it never seemed very articulate or effective. Too bad.

3) We can mount a sustained effort to counter religious literalism and inerrancy themselves. This would include pointing to holy book inconsistencies, contradictions, easily demonstrable errors, readily apparent barbarisms, etc., with the aim of weakening the hold of literalist thinking. Religious belief of any sort is too often given a free pass in this country. But nothing in our tradition of religious tolerance precludes forceful criticism.

Increasingly, I find myself leaning toward adding the third option to the other two. I am encouraged to think this can be productive by two facts. One is the recent publication and substantial sales of books attacking religion by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. No doubt many thoughtful Americans are appalled at religious influence in our current government.

The other encouraging fact is the increasing number of people who claim to have no religion or express no religious preference in public opinion polls, and the decline in regular attendance at religious services over the last three decades among younger Americans (age 21-45), most noticeably among the growing number who remain unmarried.

How to carry out such an initiative is worth discussing. One possibility is protesting preachers, politicians, and other prominent figures who make anti-gay statements. People who have no discomfort with picketing could include that as an option. Philadelphia Gay News publisher Mark Segal suggests protesting at upcoming U.S. appearances by the Pope. Would that be helpful?

I have a former-fundamentalist friend who seems to enjoy visiting fundamentalist blogs and websites and posing textual and other religious difficulties for them. It is hard to do this persuasively unless you know the bible really well, but if you do, that would be a possible option. Rarely will you have an effect on the original writer, but you might on other people visiting the website or blog.

Another possibility is writing (e-mailing) to correct newspaper writers who unthinkingly assume the truth of biblical stories, whereas we know that many are merely myths and legends with no historical basis. Randall Helms' book Gospel Fictions is a particularly good source of information.

I'm sure people can think of other ways. Those are just a start. The important point is to counter the pro-religious monopoly of public discourse. Fundamentalist and biblical inerrantist views are not forces for good. They are devices for achieving power and manipulating whole populations. They are divisive, promote fanaticism, and afflict more than they comfort. They must not be allowed to continue to control our lives.

On the next-to-last night of Hanukkah I went to Alan and Will's house, and before the menorah lighting there was time to read a book with 4-year-old Sam. I had brought him Lemony Snicket's The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming, with a cover blurb, "Latkes are potato pancakes served at Hanukkah. Lemony Snicket is an alleged children's book author. For the first time in literary history, these two elements are combined in one book." The latke was screaming first because it had been thrown into a pan of boiling oil, and then because everyone it ran into-a string of colored lights, a candy cane, and a pine tree-tried to make it a part of Christmas, when it had nothing to do with Christmas.

I know how the latke felt, because I keep coming across fundamentalists who insist that everyone else's religion match theirs. The latest source of annoyance is Republican presidential candidates, most of whom are not fundamentalists but pander to them for their support in upcoming state caucuses and primaries. One contender in this dismal competition is Mitt Romney, who said on Dec. 6, "Freedom requires religion."

With all due thanks, I feel free to say that the former governor's statement is absolute rubbish. Organized religion has a long, bloody history of being an enemy of freedom. Granted, it depends on what the meaning of "freedom" is. Romney's version of the First Amendment, like that of Democrat Joe Lieberman before him, says that we are guaranteed freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote on Dec. 7, "In Romney's account, faith ends up as wishy-washy as the most New Age-y secularism. In arguing that the faithful are brothers in a common struggle, Romney insisted that all religions share an equal devotion to all good things. Really? Then why not choose the one with the prettiest buildings?"

Then there is Rudy Giuliani, who said on NBC's Meet the Press on Dec. 9, "My moral views on this come from ... the Catholic Church, and I believe that homosexuality, heterosexuality, as a way that somebody leads their life ... isn't sinful. It's the acts-it's the various acts that people perform that are sinful, not the orientation that they have. I've had my own sins that I've had to confess." This echoes the phony fundie distinction between sin and sinner, and shows how far Rudy has drifted since living with a gay couple for a time while mayor of New York. It was smart of him to mention his own sinfulness, since he did not obtain an annulment of his second marriage as he had for his first; but his church offers gay people no option but lifelong celibacy.

Finally there is Mike Huckabee, who wrote as a U.S. Senate candidate in 1992, "I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk." As a reader commented on Politico.com on Dec. 8, "I feel gluttony is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk. Good thing Huckabee went on a diet before his presidential run." Huckabee also called for the isolation of people with HIV in 1992, long after it was learned that HIV was not easily communicable like airborne diseases. But to be fair, in contrast to Romney and Giuliani, Huckabee's ignorance appears genuine.

The GOP candidate follies are the Bush-Rove strategy come home to roost. The desperation and disconnect of the religious right's war on popular culture is illustrated by recent attacks against The Golden Compass, a movie based on the first volume of Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials. Catholic League president Bill Donahue states, "This is pernicious. This is selling atheism to kids, and it's doing it in a backdoor fashion." Considering Donahue's assertions that the sexual abuse of children by priests was not done by pedophiles but by homosexuals, he knows all about backdoor attacks.

That fantasy literature can provoke such fury from the religious bullies shows their fear of the imagination-which is fear of freedom. Pullman responded on Nov. 2, "I prefer to trust the reader.... As for the atheism, it doesn't matter to me whether people believe in God or not, so I'm not promoting anything of that sort. What I do care about is whether people are cruel or whether they're kind, whether they act for democracy or for tyranny, whether they believe in open-minded enquiry or in shutting the freedom of thought and expression."

We should not let exasperation at right-wing excesses prompt us to throw out the religious baby with the fundamentalist bathwater. For one thing, champions of liberty ought to show more tolerance than the fundies. For another, many secularists are religious. I was reminded of this on Dec. 6 at the home of Pastor John Wimberly of DC's Western Presbyterian Church, who hosted an ACLU discussion of liberty and security. When we accept the theocrats' characterization of secularism as hatred of religion, we concede more than they deserve.

At Alan and Will's, after Sam finished his dinner, he went around the table for hugs. "Good night, Uncle Ricky," he said, kissing me on the cheek. Then Will took him upstairs and read him another story unapproved by the Catholic League. And Daddy's little miracle was just fine.