IGF CultureWatch

It wasn't the first time an audience defied expectations. This time it was in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. I was there with Glenn Stanton, my "debate buddy" from Focus on the Family, to discuss same-sex marriage. The only thing we knew about Rhinelander before arriving was that its number one cause of death is bar-room brawls-or so we had been told by several Wisconsinites, who warned us of the small town's "redneck" reputation.

"Bar-room brawls?" Glenn joked. "I suppose that has heterosexuality written all over it."

"Oh, we gays have them too," I responded. "We just call them 'hissy-fits.'"

Unlike most of our university debates, the Rhinelander event was advertised primarily to local residents, rather than students, and when we arrived we noticed lots of gray hair in the audience. An older crowd in a redneck town-Glenn's territory. I braced myself.

Then the Q&A began, and one audience member after another attacked Glenn. I kept waiting for a critical question directed at me. Nothing.

After about an hour of Glenn's getting grilled while I fielded softballs, I turned to him and announced, "Well, Glenn, this has been exactly the right-wing audience we expected in rural Wisconsin!" The audience howled with laughter.

"Are you sure they didn't bus you guys in from Madison?" Glenn quipped back. I could tell that he was weary and that he appreciated the lighthearted moment.

The following week we debated again in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the same thing happened. I found myself wanting to stand up and shout, "This is the deep South, people. You're supposed to be on HIS SIDE!"

It's not that I'm complaining. I do these debates to convince people. Not to convince Glenn (although I'd like to think my time with him has had a positive effect). And not to convince ideologues, who have made up their minds and won't budge no matter what. I do them to convince the fence sitters-folks who show up curious about the issue, eager to listen, willing to engage arguments. So when people agree with me, I should be happy, and I am.

But…

But there are plenty of people who don't agree with me. One merely has to look at voting patterns to realize this. Last November, Wisconsin voters passed an anti-gay marriage amendment 59-41%-and much of that majority came from more liberal towns than Rhinelander. Even college students are far from unanimous in supporting marriage equality. Which means that opponents are either not showing up, or not speaking up, at our debate events. Either way, I miss the opportunity to engage them.

Such engagement would have two potential benefits. First, it might help convince the opponents themselves-even if slowly and gradually. Second, it might help convince the fence-sitters who are watching, since they would receive "the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error" (in the words of the great liberal theorist John Stuart Mill). The more we confront the opposition head-on, the more obvious their fallacies become. That's why I'm willing to travel the country with someone from Focus on the Family addressing the same bad arguments over and over again.

It was the hope for such engagement that led me to interrupt the Q&A in Baton Rouge to plead for some audience opposition. "Any critical questions for me? Please?" I asked no fewer than three times. It felt like announcing "last call" at the bar: "Last call…last call for traditionalists…" Finally, a woman took me up on my challenge-sort of:

"I'm a religious conservative," she began gently. "And I appreciate your kindness to Glenn and to us. But I haven't spoken up because I feel a lot of hostility from the audience. I think more of us would show up and speak up if we didn't feel like we would automatically be shouted down." She didn't offer any question-just that observation.

I was both impressed and surprised-impressed by her courage in speaking against the (immediate) tide, and surprised that she found the audience hostile. I could recall no anger or viciousness from the various questioners. But since they were on my side, perhaps I simply failed to notice.

Her remarks spotlighted an important distinction: it's one thing to silence your opponents; it's quite another to convince them. And sometimes-perhaps often-silencing is done at the expense of convincing.

The social pressure that makes certain views "taboo" has its uses. But political reality indicates that it's not yet time to halt the conversation over same-sex marriage-certainly not in Rhinelander or Baton Rouge. Strange as it sounds, we may sometimes need to work at making people more comfortable-not less-in voicing their opposition to us.

Meet Mike.

Mike is 30, has a girlfriend, and on the evening we talked on the phone, he was preparing to do laundry at his local Laundromat.

And, oh yeah - Mike is a seminary student and minister with the evangelical Church of the Nazarene.

Mike called me because he's writing a paper on homosexuality, and I've written about being gay and Christian. And he's writing that paper, he said, because he really didn't understand the issue. He doesn't know anyone who is openly gay.

"I didn't grow up in a Christian family," he said, "After becoming Christian I jumped right into all the evangelical Christian nonsense, 'hate the sin, love the sinner,' all of it.

"But in the past two years, I started to think about how this sets up a divide between two groups - you're a sinner and I'm not. Your homosexuality makes me more perfect. That's not how it works. That's where I get frustrated."

He is writing the paper, he said, with two assumptions:

1. Theologically, for his church, homosexuality is a sin (I know, I know, but bear with me. Mike understands it's a selective reading of the Bible - but he's leaving theology for another day.)

2. As he says, "God loves everyone, regardless of - well, everything."

Given those two things, he said to me, he is looking for a third way. A way for his church (and he himself is the minister of a small congregation) to keep its theology while also welcoming gays and lesbians into the pews. A way "to value people as people."

How would that happen? What would that look like?

At first, I couldn't imagine it. Without new theology, how could gays and lesbians be comfortable in evangelical churches? How can we worship at a place that calls our deepest, most important relationships "sinful"?

I sighed. "Honestly, it would be a giant step if evangelical churches just didn't stand in the way of equality for gays and lesbians," I said, more or less (I was taking good notes when Mike talked, but the pen trailed off the page when I myself had the floor).

"Conservative churches can keep their beliefs- it's your church, you can do that. Just don't actively fight for the legislation of discrimination."

"So you can't see gays and lesbians worshipping with us and being part of a community?" Mike said.

"No," I responded. "Not unless they're incredibly self-hating."

But then Mike showed me where he thought his "third way" was.

What if the Nazarene Church could buy into the idea that yes, you can hate the homosexual sin and love the homosexual sinner; and you can hate the heterosexual sin and love the heterosexual sinner?

What if, instead of eliminating this deeply held belief, they expanded it to include everyone, so that everyone was equally a sinner and in the same ways? Where you value the worth of all people?

This is radical stuff Mike is saying. I liked him for it.

"Isn't there a way we can worship together?" he asked again.

"Huh," I said. "Maybe then there is a third way - and maybe some churches are currently practicing it."

Most mainline denominations, like Methodists, don't marry gays and lesbians and won't ordain them (or else they are nearly in schism over these questions, like the Episcopals).

But even though the denomination doesn't honor gays and lesbians, individual churches can and do.

I worshipped happily at a Presbyterian church in Chicago that couldn't marry gays and lesbians or ordain us as ministers. Yet the pastor asked after my girlfriend and we were invited to events as a couple, there was a gay and lesbian group, and I never had to worry about viciousness from the next pew if I held my girlfriend's hand during the service. The minister never condemned gays and lesbians from the pulpit, and in fact talked about us in a loving, flattering light.

That church honored my humanity. And although that is not the same as equality, it was warming enough that the church became a home. That position now seems regressive for mainline denominations, but it would be a leap forward for evangelicals.

Mike thought for a moment. What if, he said, "There was a switch of emphasis. Instead of someone being gay or straight, if there was an emphasis instead on Christ, why couldn't you bring your girlfriend to worship?"

He added, "I feel like, if you lived nearby, we would be friends. And I would hope you and your girlfriend were comfortable worshipping with us."

I wish I could relate here every second of our conversation. I wish I could convey how unexpectedly affirming it was to listen to an evangelical minister as he struggles over this issue.

We don't know about this struggle, we don't hear about it. We assume that all evangelicals hate us - but then there is Mike, who is looking for a way to welcome gays and lesbians within the context of his beloved religion.

And then Mike said the most heartening thing of all. "Know that I'm not the only one. There are more evangelicals where I am than most people realize."

To me, his words sounded like a miracle.

In the recent debate over ENDA, it has frequently been said that "the community" solidly opposes the first-ever federal gay civil rights bill unless it includes transgenders.

The evidence for this surprising unity is the fact that more than 300 organizations have signed an online petition, available at UnitedENDA.org. "United ENDA," the website boasts, "effectively communicated the strong opposition of hundreds of organizations and millions of members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community."

The correctness of an all-or-nothing approach to civil rights is not determined solely by the number of organizations or people who favor or oppose it. The strategy could be wrong even if everybody supported it; conversely, it could be right even if everybody opposed it. But in a society that values representative politics, claiming that you speak for millions of people lends moral authority and democratic legitimacy to your cause.

So is it true that United ENDA speaks for the community? The answer depends on which "community" we mean.

If we mean "the community of gay and trans activists" who lead organizations like the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force and Queers for Economic Justice, the answer is "yes."

This is a small and select group of people, however. They are very liberal, highly educated, and unusually politically aware. They long ago bought the idea that the "T" is necessarily part of the "GLB." This view is strongly influenced by academic queer and gender theory that, whatever its merits, is probably not widely understood or actively embraced.

This does not mean that the leaders of these organizations are wrong; their dedication to their beliefs is admirable. It is only to suggest that they may not be representative of many people.

But, it might be answered, they lead more than 300 organizations that collectively do represent millions of members of the community. To determine whether this might be true, I looked at the organizations listed on the United ENDA website. The list is much less impressive than it first seems.

Some of the groups are well-known players on the national stage, like NGLTF and Lambda Legal. The vast majority are very obscure local and state groups. For example, one is called "Coqsure," described online as a "social group" in Portland, Oregon, "for people who were born or raised female who don't presently identify as totally female."

Missing from the list is the largest and most influential gay political group, the Human Rights Campaign. There are no gay Republican organizations listed, yet more than 25 percent of gay people regularly vote Republican in national elections.

The list is padded. The National Stonewall Democrats are there, but so are a dozen of the group's state and local chapters, including both the Colorado chapter and that chapter's "Transgender Caucus." The national PFLAG organization is listed, but so are more than half a dozen of its subsidiaries. On and on it goes like that.

The list also includes numerous non-gay organizations, like the Alliance for Jewish Renewal and a single local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. They're free to oppose a bill that protects gay civil rights, of course, but they don't represent the gay community.

There are about ten million gay Americans, of whom perhaps 7.5 million are adults. How many of them are "represented" by the United ENDA signatory groups?

One way to determine that is by asking how many active members the groups have. Unfortunately, membership figures are mostly unavailable and are often inflated when they are available, consisting of little more than a mailing list. Membership in the listed organizations also overlaps.

The active membership of most of these groups, especially the more than 70 transgender groups listed, is probably tiny. Even many of the gay groups aren't very large. To take just one example, the Houston GLBT Political Caucus, "representing" gays in a metropolitan area of more than four million people, regularly gets fewer than 30 people at meetings.

Let's assume very generously that the 300 groups average 1,000 non-overlapping members each. That's a total of 300,000 people-well short of "millions" and less than five percent of the 7.5 million gay adults in the country.

Do the listed groups even represent their own members? A fascinating recent article in the Washington Blade about growing defections from the United ENDA front quoted gay Democratic activist Peter Rosenstein as saying that few of the 300 groups canvassed their members before taking a stand.

For example, Geoff Kors, head of Equality California, acknowledged that his group did not poll its members. But, he added, he had received lots of supportive emails. Getting email from people who agree with you is not a vote.

United ENDA could assert that it speaks for many in the community who aren't members of the signatory groups. The problem with claim that is that there are no reliable polls telling us how many gay people would forego their civil rights until "gender identity" is included.

More than two-thirds of the United ENDA signatories appear to be headquartered in states or cities where gay people are already protected from discrimination. I'm confident many members of the Harvard University Transgender Task Force and the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club of San Francisco fully support making gay people in Mississippi wait until ENDA is ideologically pure, but they don't speak for anyone outside their privileged precincts.

In short, there is simply no good evidence for United ENDA's claim that the community opposes an incremental approach to civil rights.