The Nightmare Scenario.

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IGF contributing author Bruce Bawer's new book, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within, marshals far too many facts to be easily dismissed. As Jonathan Rauch writes in his backcover blurb, "Some books are merely important. This one is necessary."

Among other issues, Bawer details a frightening rise of gay-bashings in Europe by Muslim immigrants, who cite their faith as their motivation-including a beating suffered by his Norwegian partner in Oslo. He writes:

"Soper!" ("Faggot!") the man shouted, charging at him. ... My partner got off at the next stop. So did the man, who leapt on him, kicking and punching. This was in a busy downtown square, crowded with people on their way to work; but although several passersby stopped to watch the assault, no one made a move to intercede. ...

When we got to the police station, the officer on duty told us that the assailant and his wife were there already-and that the wife had accused my partner of attempted murder. This, he explained wearily, was a familiar tactic in the immigrant milieu: rushing to the police station to file charges against your victim before he can report you. We were outraged. But the cop shrugged it off and urged us to do the same.

And on and on, in France, the Netherlands, Germany, and throughout Europe, where attacks and intimidation are mounting rapidly, "while Europe sleeps."

The Right Side of the Rainbow blog links to a recent Mark Steyn column, which notes:

...radical young Muslim men are changing the realities of daily life for Jews and gays and women in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo and beyond.

Steyn is a conservative, and the fight against Islamofascism may indeed make strange bedfellows of (some) gays and (some) conservatives (i.e., those who believe in conserving Western Civ.). But (some) social conservatives on the religious right may well envy what radical Islam has in store for the "perverts," while (some) gays on the anti-American, anti-Israel left will dream their sweet, false dreams of benevolent multiculturalism and moral relativism, until it's too late to save themselves.

Note: As requested, I've added some additional "somes" to the above.

More Recent Postings
02/19/06 - 02/25/06

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The Sodomy Delusion

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First published in the Chicago Free Press on February 22, 2006.

In a recent column I wrote that members of the religious right want gays to be invisible if their sexual behavior cannot be entirely suppressed. That prompted a friendly correspondent to write the following:

Many conservatives also have these two contradictory beliefs:

  1. Homosexuality leads to misery and unhappiness, and homosexual sex is totally repulsive. (But)

  2. Nonetheless, it's so appealing that if people find out about it, many will want to try it. ... (O)nce they get "hooked" they can't or won't stop.

This is absolutely on target. Two decades ago the late polymath scholar Joseph Wallfield, who wrote under the name Warren Johansson, formulated what he called "The Sodomy Delusion," published in an obscure monograph called Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of Homosexuality by historian Wayne R. Dynes (who also edited the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality).

Johansson characterized the Sodomy Delusion as a set of paranoid beliefs inculcated by the Christian Church in the Middle Ages. It includes the following components:

  • Homosexual acts, particularly by men, undermine people's moral character and assure their eternal damnation.

  • Communities that tolerate homosexual acts are inevitably visited with catastrophes such as earthquakes, droughts, plagues, floods, and infestations.

  • So society should punish people who engage in homosexuality as severely as possible and make every effort to blot out any awareness or record that anyone ever engaged in homosexuality. (The Catholic Church typically destroyed church trial records of people accused of sodomy.)

Most of these beliefs can still be found among many fundamentalist Christians. Reconstructionist R.J. Rushdoony called for the execution of people who engage in homosexual acts. Anita Bryant, Pat Robertson and others blamed droughts and other disasters on the tolerance of homosexuality. Even now many fundamentalists are eagerly awaiting the inevitable earthquake to damage San Francisco, so they can say "I told you so."

Johansson then set out a series of contradictory beliefs held by people in the grip of the Sodomy Delusion. We could call them "Johansson's Antinomies." They include the following:

  • Everyone is by nature heterosexual BUT everyone is susceptible of the demonic temptation to commit sodomy, and potentially guilty of the crime.

  • Everyone regards the practice with loathing and disgust BUT whoever has experienced it retains a lifelong craving for it.

  • Everyone hates and condemns the crime of sodomy BUT the practice is ubiquitously threatening and infinitely contagious.

  • Sodomy is a crime committed by the merest handful of depraved individuals BUT if not checked by the harshest penalties it would lead to the suicide of the human race.

We have all heard these contradictory claims made at various times by anti-gay polemicists from the average Catholic bishop to the average fundamentalist Protestant minister. Even today some polemicists view it as the conclusive anti-gay argument to ask rhetorically "But what if everyone became homosexual?"

To Johansson's list we might add some more recent refinements. For instance:

  • The current version of Johansson's first antinomy is that everyone is by nature heterosexual BUT people-especially young people-can be easily lured to try homosexuality if they see films or plays or television programs that include homosexuals or see people who they know are homosexual or even learn that homosexuals exist.

  • The current version of the fourth antinomy is the religious right claim that homosexuals are only a tiny fraction of the population-just 1 or 2 percent, BUT homosexuality is growing like wildfire.

Of course, anti-gay polemicists have been saying this for many years so we may wonder how homosexuality could have been growing like wildfire for years yet still be only 1 or 2 percent of the population.) Then, too:

  • Homosexuality is viewed as a form of moral depravity that undermines a person's whole moral character BUT people keep being shocked to learn that someone believed to be of unimpeachable moral character such as a conservative religious leader is revealed to be "involved in" homosexuality.

Notice that when they are found out, such men usually blame alcohol or "stress" although alcohol or stress never seem to make homosexuals become "involved in" heterosexuality.

A special Catholic antinomy holds that the celibacy of the priesthood is a special calling and a gift of the Holy Spirit BUT men with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" are expected to be celibate throughout their entire lives despite the manifest absence of such a special calling and/or gift of the Holy Spirit.

Where facts and reasoning are insufficient to condemn homosexuality, total fabrication will serve. Elsewhere in Homolexis Prof. Dynes traces the diffusion of a medieval legend that on the night Jesus was to be born, all the sodomites in the world died because the Savior refused to be incarnated as a human unless the world were free of homosexuality.

That could lead us to a final antinomy:

  • Jesus (supposedly) hated sodomy most of all the sins BUT (unaccountably) never thought to mention any disapproval of it at any time during his public ministry.

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Same Old, Same Old,

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Writing in the American Prospect, E.J. Graff breathlessly announces an exciting new strategy to energize the gay movement and the fight for marriage equality. Here it comes: "LGBT groups are helping to build a new progressive coalition from the ground up." Ta-da!

Sadly, it sounds like the "new strategy" is once again to practice diversity fetishism with an alphabet-soup-of-the-left project, which always does so well (not). If you believe that a grand coalition led by the likes of Urvashi Vaid (a blast from the past, see here) and built around efforts by the NAACP, the United Farm Workers, and "Asian American and Pacific Islander groups" will win over the suburban independents, enjoy your fantasy.

More. Reader Lori Heine commments:

We have not done ourselves any real favors by becoming so entangled with broad, Left-Wing coalitions. In my conversations with conservatives, I generally find these individuals less hostile to gay rights than they are to liberals in general. And they tend to stick all "liberal" issues together into one big, gooey, scary mess.

I believe we would get a better reception from those Right-of-Center, or even at the Center, if we made them deal with our own issue apart from any other. ...

Quite so, or at least ensure a real "diversity" of approaches, with frozen-in-time "progressives" outreaching to labor unions and racial-grievance collectors, while those of a more conservative or libertarian bent form alliances with their kindred spirits.

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The Adoption Battle.

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USA Today looks at the growing efforts to ban gays and lesbians from adopting children, which it labels "a second front in the culture wars" over same-sex marriage. Steps to pass laws or secure November ballot initiatives are underway in at least 16 states.

It could be that before too long, gays-especially couples-who are able to do so, really will have to relocate themselves to those states that don't trample them underfoot.

Reason Online responds, primarily by referencing Julian Sanchez's Reason magazine article on the growing fight. Sanchez suggests that opponents of gay adoption:

...visit Florida and ask a child in foster care which makes him feel more threatened: the thought of being raised by homosexuals, or the prospect of an indefinite number of years spent passing through an indefinite number of homes.

One of the Reason blog's readers disputes that the kids would choose the gay parents (I guess some probably wouldn't, depending on whether they're old enough to have imbibed schoolyard homophobia). Another reader paraphrases libertarian humorist P.J. O'Rourke along the lines of:

I am such an extreme Republican that I support gay marriage and adoption. If gay people get married and raise kids, pretty soon they'll be living in suburbs, driving SUV's and voting Republican.

Well, in another universe where Republicans where true to their own best values, maybe.

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Sight Unseen Preferred.

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The "Ask Amy" advice column receives a query from a Colorado woman who had a gay couple move in next door, and who was so shocked by witnessing a goodbye kiss one morning that (on the advice of her pastor) she circulated a petition urging that they refrain from such displays of affection. The woman can't understand why her gay neighbors took it personally.

This dovetails with the point Paul Varnell makes in his recent column, "The War on Gay Visibility."

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Flawed Messenger.

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I'm glad former congressman Kweisi Mfume, one of the leading Democratic candidates for Maryland's U.S. Senate seat, has endorsed marriage rights for gay couples. However, his endorsement would be more likely to sway the uncommitted if his own record on marriage had been more, let's say, supportive (i.e., Mfume has fathered five children out of wedlock with four different women). His more recent behavior has also been less than exemplary on the marriage front.

True, Mfume is certainly less of a hypocrite than gay marriage opponents such as Bob Barr, the former Georgia congressman who pushed the Defense of Marriage Act prohibiting federal recognition of gay unions, which led many to wonder which of his three marriages (via two divorces) he was defending. Still, supporters like Mfume aren't very likely to advance the cause.

More Recent Postings
02/12/06 - 02/18/06

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Cowboys and Hunters

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I liked this column in The Advocate by gay outdoorsman David Stalling, who-referencing the elk hunt in "Brokeback Mountain"-posted a query at a website for bow hunters. He writes:

For fun, on the Big Game Forum, I posted a new thread: "Brokeback Mountain: Best Elk-Hunting Movie?" Since folks on this site often and justly complain of poor Hollywood depictions of hunting, I mentioned that here was a good positive portrayal. The response didn't surprise me. People with screen names like Terminator, Sewer Rat, Bearman, and ElkSlayer wrote things like "No queers could really hunt elk"; "Elk are too majestic an animal to be killed by faggots"; "Imagine a gay elk camp: guys would worry that camouflage makes them look fat."

A lot of anti-gay swill? Sure. But considering that the media images of gays (excepting Brokeback) run the gamut from "Queer Eye" to "Will & Grace"-and these are the representations upon which GLAAD, HRC and The Advocate bestow their effusive praise-is it really any wonder that rural America sees gays the way it does?

Maybe Willie Nelson's new gay cowboy song will help. Or maybe not.

More. I guess not. Willie means well, but the song (penned by Ned Sublette in 1981) promotes the same old stereotypes that conflate sexual orientation and gender identity:

"What did you think all them saddles and boots was about?...Inside every cowboy there's a lady who'd love to slip out."

Alas, still more confusion about sexual orientation and gender identity isn't what gay people need.

Say Anything blog's posting has a link to an audio excerpt.

Some very thoughtful comments (ok, obviously not the first one). Check 'em out.

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Brave Move.

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As Variety reports, gay Indian Muslim filmmaker Parvez Sharma is directing a documentary called "In the Name of Allah" about gay, lesbian, and transgender Muslims across the Muslim and Western worlds. He's working with Sandi Dubowski, whose documentary "Trembling Before G-d" movingly looked at gay orthodox Jews as they told their stories.

Good luck to Sharma and Dubowski. But as the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto warns:

One wonders how this will go over in the Muslim world, which has not of late gained a reputation for tolerance. And if Muslims react to "In the Name of Allah" with half the fury they've directed at those Danish cartoons, which side will our Western multiculturalists come down on?

I guess we'll see.

Given Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh's brutal murder by an Islamic militant upset over Van Gogh's making a movie about the mistreatment of women in Islamic societies, Sharma and Dubowski are brave men.

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Right on the Internet

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First published in the Bay Area Reporter on February 16, 2006.

Perhaps more than any invention since the printing press, the Internet has decentralized information and opinion. The marketplace of ideas, including ideas about the appropriate tactics and even direction of the gay-rights cause, is more robust than ever. Gay-conservative bloggers and Web sites, of which there are now dozens, are major competitors in this marketplace.

When I began writing my syndicated OutRight column in 1994, a narrow ideological band monopolized the gay press. The views expressed in gay periodicals, either explicitly in opinion columns or implicitly in "news" features, ranged from liberal to radical. It brought to mind what Dorothy Parker once said of Katherine Hepburn's performance in a movie: "She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B." This limited range could and did produce disagreement that the protagonists regarded as profound. But to an outsider it was all pretty dismal.

Gay publishers and editors acted as gatekeepers of opinion, defining what was acceptable. There were a handful of libertarians writing for gay papers, but real conservatives could hardly be found. Even gay periodicals that ran my column back then often felt the need to run a left-wing counterpart, as if doing so was necessary to provide "balance" in a paper already dominated by liberal views and reporting.

Two nearly simultaneous developments changed this. First, beginning in the 1980s mainstream gay people, whose wide spectrum of political views mirrors the country's, came out of the closet in large numbers. They could not be ignored. And they could not understand why their sexual orientation necessarily entailed support for things like high marginal tax rates or liberal abortion laws.

Second, the flowering of the Internet in the mid-1990s ensured that anybody could become a self-publisher whose views were immediately available to millions of people.

The day of the opinion gatekeeper is finished. What has taken its place? A cacophony of views, including those of gay conservatives and libertarians, whose energy and intellectual vibrance seems disproportionate to their numbers.

Here are a few of the Web sites and blogs by gay writers who dissent in important ways from the tactics and goals of the gay left and its organizations. Not all of these writers can easily be categorized as either conservative or libertarian. All are committed to equality for gay Americans.

(1) Independent Gay Forum (www.indegayforum.org): This ought to be the first stop for anyone interested in gay conservative and libertarian views. It features columns from more than 40 different writers (including me) on just about every gay-related topic. It also features a terrific blog called CultureWatch, written by Steph H. Miller, who has something trenchant to say about everything.

(2) Andrew Sullivan (www.andrewsullivan.com): Sullivan is the granddaddy of all bloggers, and easily the most widely read gay blogger in the country, getting 70,000 to 80,000 visits a day. Passionate, perceptive, and wickedly smart, he's interesting and challenging even when he's wrong. Cruise him daily.

(3) Jonathan Rauch (www.jonathanrauch.com): Rauch is one of the most influential and finest gay authors on the planet. He writes for respected mainstream publications, like The Atlantic and National Journal, on a wide range of issues. His recent book, Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, is the best and most concise argument for gay marriage I've ever read. While his Web site is not a blog, it will quickly get you to his irreplaceable work.

(4) Bruce Bawer (www.brucebawer.com): Bawer wrote the most important book of the 1990s on gay issues, A Place at the Table. It awakened a generation of gay Americans to the possibility of an alternative to gay-left orthodoxy. Now he's defending classical liberal values against Muslim extremism. Also not a blog, this site will give you entree to Bawer's best stuff.

(5) Beth Elliott (www.thebethzone.com): Elliott, who has been active on gay issues since the 1970s, calls herself "a girl-kissing California girl with a Southern heritage and a Jesuit education." Her irreverent blog effectively takes on lesbian-feminist shibboleths from a libertarian perspective.

(6) Gay Patriot (www.gaypatriot.net): Two skillful and informed pundits take turns whacking at Democrats and the gay left on this blog. It's probably the most reliably conservative gay blog on the Internet.

(7) Tim Hulsey/My Stupid Dog (www.mystupiddog.blogspot.com): Hulsey, a "gay, conservative grad student and former writing teacher," ruminates articulately on culture and politics. When I want a thoughtful analysis of a movie I'm thinking about seeing, I go to Hulsey's blog.

(8) Jon Rowe (www.jonrowe.blogspot.com): Rowe is a libertarian college professor with a law degree. His blog covers everything from constitutional theory to sex to religion, all the things one shouldn't talk about in polite company. It is intelligent, refined, and measured—qualities badly lacking in much of the blogosphere.

There are many more good ones:

and too many more to list.

Be aware that many blogs often offer little more than links to, or quotes from, substantive points made by others, contributing nothing original of their own. But whether you're a budding gay conservative looking for some intellectual support or a skeptical gay liberal monitoring the right, you'll find something on the gay-conservative Internet to keep your mind humming.

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