IGF CultureWatch

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.

I won't have any transgender people at my Christmas party this year.

Actually, I won't have any non-transgender people either: I'm not hosting a party this Christmas. But in years past I've hosted many, and I've never had any transgender people attending, unless you count one former women's studies student who identified as transgender "for political reasons."

I have nothing against transgender people; I just don't know many. Nor do I have anything against diversity-indeed, my parties have been quite diverse: young and old, gay and straight, nerdy academics and slick business types (not to mention slick academics and nerdy business types).

On the other hand, they've been populated by mostly white, mostly educated, mostly professional folks-the kind of people my partner and I typically encounter in our daily lives. Our parties have had relatively few lesbians and surprisingly few blacks, given that we live in a majority-black neighborhood in an overwhelmingly black city (Detroit). They would not impress most college diversity offices.

And I don't really care.

Please understand: I'm a proponent of diversity. I've written in support of affirmative action, and I vocally opposed the initiative that ultimately banned it in Michigan public institutions. But imposing it on our social gatherings is just foolishness-which is not to say that people don't try.

A few years ago some friends of mine observed that Detroit's lack of a "gayborhood" meant that gay city dwellers often felt socially disconnected. So we started brainstorming about ways to draw them together-an online community, a series of house parties, that sort of thing-and we formed a group. Then one of the local GLBT organizations got involved. Every time we tried to sponsor an event, they'd interrupt: "Wait; you don't have enough lesbians on board." So we brought more lesbians on board. "Wait; you don't have enough African-Americans on board." So we brought more African-Americans on board. "Wait; you don't have enough working-class people on board." And so on.

Now we have no one on board. The group never got off the ground, having collapsed under the weight of the artificial diversity imposed on it. What began as a band of like-minded gay Detroiters was forced-on purpose-into a hodgepodge of individuals with relatively little in common. Not surprisingly, those individuals very quickly decided they had other more pressing interests.

When "birds of a feather flock together," why fight it? It's one thing if those groups are hoarding resources that others are entitled to; it's quite another if they just want to hang out.

Ironically, the insistence on diversity sometimes results in a rather opposite problem, stemming from what I call the Diversity Fallacy. It would seem that, for any minority group X, having more members of X creates more diversity. But that's true only up to a point, after which the group is no longer underrepresented and the principle becomes fallacious. So, for example, adding another African-American to the Detroit City Council (eight of whose nine members are black) would not make it more diverse: it would make it less so, all else being equal. This is true despite the fact that, even in Detroit, African-Americans are thought to "count" toward diversity in a way that whites do not.

Obviously, this problem is not unique to the GLBT community. It arises anywhere cultural identity and diversity attempt to coexist. But the GLBT community has been revisiting it of late, mainly because of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).

ENDA passed the House in a version that includes sexual orientation but not gender identity. As a result, the GLB community has been accused (largely from within its own ranks) of throwing transgenders under the bus. Critics have recalled the women's movement of the early '70s, many of whose leaders denounced lesbians as a hindrance to the movement's goals.

The analogy is clumsy at best. Every lesbian is a woman; not every transgender person is gay. Sexual orientation and gender identity (unlike womanhood and lesbianism) vary independently, even granting that they have important affinities.

What the ENDA debate reminds us is that the GLBT "community" comprises diverse sub-communities, which overlap in various and sometimes awkward ways. No G's and L's are B's; some G's, L's, and B's are T's; all T's are either straight or GLB. Every one of us has both a sexual orientation and a gender identity, though one or the other of those traits may dominate our individual political agendas.

But the debate also reminds us that communities are at least partly a matter of choice: choices about which alliances to form, when to form them, when to honor them and when to break them. Choices that are easy to make when sending Christmas-party invitations become far more difficult when people's livelihoods are at stake.

John Corvino's "What's Morally Wrong with Homosexuality?" is now available on DVD.

On Nov. 30, a group of 28 retired generals and admirals released a letter urging Congress to repeal the law mandating the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy regarding gays.

Pointing to studies suggesting that there are more than one million gay and lesbian veterans and 65,000 gays currently in the armed forces, the generals and admirals point out, "They have served our nation honorably."

This letter in itself, of course, will not move Congress to act but it chips away a little more at the legitimacy of the law and it can provide additional support for politicians who are willing to speak out about the issue.

The letter followed by just two days a Nov. 28 CNN forum for GOP presidential contenders in which all the candidates (except Giuliani) expressed support for the current policy, arguing that it is "working" or that it would be disruptive to integrate open gays into the military. Sen. John McCain said specifically that senior generals had told him that the policy is "working."

Is the policy working? Well, a lot of deplorable policies have "worked," depending on your goal, but that doesn't mean that they are the best policies or that other policies would not work better. Racial segregation in the military "worked." For that matter, racial segregation in the whole Southern society "worked" too. At least for white people. Stalin's concentration camps "worked." Islamic "honor killings" of women who have been raped "work" too, I suppose, if you are not the victim. But do many people want to defend those policies as the best policy?

Remember those Arabic linguists a couple of years ago who, despite the military's crying need for Arab-language translators, were discharged because they were gay? Is that an example of the policy "working"? What about all the other skills gays may have been taught that are lost when they are discharged from the military? More examples of the policy "working"?

What is particularly interesting is that people on both sides point to the same fact-that the U.S. is at war-to support their position. In an op-ed article for the New York Times last January, Gen. John Shalikashvili wrote, "Our military has been stretched thin by our deployment in the Middle East and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job."

By contrast, the Republicans all say that it would be a distraction to allow open gays into the military during wartime. As former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee put it, morale and unit cohesion are paramount in the military and the DADT policy protects both. But Huckabee is not well-informed. First, gays are already in the military, an increasing number open about their orientation.

Second, a Rand Corporation study several years ago concluded that what counts is not "unit cohesion" but "mission cohesion"-a common commitment to completing the task at hand. And you might think that a military at war has a more important and easily identifiable mission than a military at peace. So integrating gays during a war would be the best time to do it.

Third, the British military began allowing openly gay personnel to serve several years ago and found-to its expressed surprise-that there were virtually no problems. And fourth, small surveys of military personnel have shown an increasing acceptance of open gays in the military.

The military itself seems to be ignoring the policy. The New York Times points out that discharges of gays dropped by 50 percent between 2001 and 2006-from 1,227 to 612. Military recruiters themselves, hard-pressed to meet their quotas, sometimes ignore the gay ban. I believe I have previously told the story of a friend who told the recruiter he was gay. The recruiter said, "I didn't hear a thing," and promptly signed him up. This is not just a policy that has lost its legitimacy, it is a policy in tatters.

Nevertheless, Republican candidates clutch at any possible rationale for keeping gays out of the military even if it has no basis in fact or prudence. I have no doubt that if the nation were at peace they would all say that because we didn't need more military personnel there was no real need for allowing open gays. (Giuliani, to his credit, has said that if it were peacetime, he would work to rescind DADT.)

No doubt for most of the Republicans, their position is rooted in a religiously motivated hostility to gays. But no doubt too they are aware that most GOP primary voters have similar views, so they are boxed into an inflexible position.