IGF CultureWatch

First published on Nov. 5, 2003, in the Chicago Free Press.

It is a striking fact that people who are anti-Semitic are so often homophobic and many who are homophobic are anti-Semitic as well.

At the end of October, Malaysia's prime minister - dictator, actually - Mahathir Mohamad retired after ruling for 22 years. Shortly before, in mid-October, Mahathir gave a widely publicized speech to a gathering of leaders of Islamic countries in which he charged that "Jews rule the world by proxy" and "get others to fight and die for them. " Further, "They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they can enjoy equal rights with others. "

If we took such charges seriously enough to rebut them, we could point to Jews serving in the American and other western militaries as well as the fact that military service is mandatory in Israel, where Jews have fought and died since 1948 repelling repeated invasions from surrounding countries who oppose Israel's mere existence.

We could point out that democracy was invented not by Jews but by ancient Greeks. Natural human rights were first conceived by the English philosophers Hobbes and Locke. Socialism was invented by early 19th century French writers. And Communism was invented by Plato, another Greek, as an ironic construct - as the Soviet Union so painfully discovered - of the politically impossible.

But clearly such factual corrections would have little impact. The hostility comes first, then "facts" are imagined or rearranged to support the prejudice. Does that sound familiar?

It is now barely recalled that in 1998 Mahathir suddenly turned against his presumptive successor Anwar Ibrahim, accusing him of corruption and sodomy and after a flamboyant show trial had him sentenced to prison for 20 years. The charges were almost surely false, prosecution testimony coerced and perjured, and human rights groups protested the whole affair as politically motivated.

Far from being unique, Mahathir is all too typical. Most Arab countries are both viciously homophobic and obsessively anti-Jewish. Saudi Arabia lashes, imprisons and executes gays and not only prohibits Jewish (and Christian) worship services but has its government-owned newspapers print absurd medieval libels against Jews.

Egyptian police conduct sweeps of gay cruising areas and entrap gays they meet on gay websites. At the same time, Egyptian government television broadcast an interminable mini-series based in part on "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," a late Czarist forgery about supposed Jewish plans for world domination.

In the West, the Catholic church from its beginnings has been both homophobic and anti-Jewish. The anti-Jewish sentiment was attributed to the supposed responsibility of "the Jews" for the death of Jesus in the gospel legends (John 19:12-15; Matthew 27:25). Given the Catholic view that Jesus sacrificial death was necessary for mankind's redemption, you would think Catholics should be grateful to "the Jews" for helping it happen, but then no one ever claimed Catholic doctrine was logical.

In any case, it was not until the 1960s that the Catholic church formally declared that, oh, by the way, "the Jews" were not responsible for the death of Jesus after all. Small comfort to the generations of Jews excluded, harassed, assaulted and killed in pogroms by pious Christians doing the Lord's work.

It is scarcely necessary to recount the arrest, torture, executions and burning at the stake of "sodomites" when the Catholic church held political power, nor the innumerable hate-inspiring sermons denouncing homosexuality and "sodomites" in both Catholic and evangelical Protestant churches. Even today the Vatican and conservative Protestant churches inveigh against homosexuality and are the strongest supporters of sodomy laws and opponents of gay equality.

The reasons for the frequent appearance of both hostilities in the same person or culture are complex, speculative and deserve a column of their own. But here is a start.

Most people seem to want to think that however they are is the right way to be - that their conduct and beliefs are true and natural for everyone. Both gays and Jews diverge in noticeable ways from the usual, the familiar, so people conclude that gays and Jews must be wrong to be as they are. And since how "we" - the majority - are is "natural" the others are somehow "unnatural" and probably malicious in rejecting the obvious superiority of our practices and beliefs.

Thus Jews are an affront to Christianity because they do not accept the founding Christian myth that Jesus is a savior or messiah - or, in Islam, Mohammed the last and truest prophet. Since the truths of Christianity (or Islam) are so blindingly obvious to their proponents, they think that Jews are being willfully stubborn when they refuse to accept them as true and may well be motivated by evil intent to harm Christians (Muslims) and undo Christianity (Islam).

In a similar way, gays are an affront to heterosexuals who cannot imagine that anyone can really have different desires from their own except by virtue of something unnatural about them or else motivated by evil intent to harm heterosexuals or undo heterosexuality. So mere difference is interpreted as opposition and then as a threat.

On Nov. 2, the Episcopal Church consecrated their first gay bishop. This is the highest church rank an openly gay person has achieved in any major Christian church.

Gene V. Robinson, the new bishop of New Hampshire, is extraordinarily brave. People have called on him to step down. A maelstrom of publicity has swirled about him. His consecration ceremony was attended by 4,000 who greeted him with a standing ovation‹but a spokesman for 38 opposing bishops also spoke during the ceremony, saying that Robinson's " 'chosen lifestyle' is incompatible with Scripture and the teachings of this church," according to the Associated Press.

Most commentators on the church expect the result to be a split between the congregations who support Robinson and the more conservative "confessing congregations" who don't.

That's a lot of pressure on one man - the knowledge that he is the catalyst for the church he clearly loves breaking apart.

Yet it has never been clearer that one man is doing the right thing.

No one can predict the future of course, but I say this with certainty: the world will not end as a result of Robinson's consecration. The sky will not fall. The church, yes, will probably split - but churches have split before and survived.

And really, it is not Robinson who is splitting the church. It is the conservatives who are pulling away, who have announced they are unable to commit to working through these issues. They are breaking up this marriage of churches because they are unwilling to see their own faults, unwilling to recognize that on this they may be wrong.

Robinson said, "They must know that if they must leave, they will always be welcomed back."

But they won't come back. They were waiting for the more liberal churches to do something like this; they were eager to take their stand against the gays and lesbians who had previously huddled at the fringes of church life. The conservatives are willing to carve a church to pieces in order to protect the blinders of their own bigotry.

It's ridiculous, really - are gays and lesbians really such a great evil that they cannot be countenanced by the rest of the church? I mean, the Episcopalians once didn't ordain women, either (the Bible commands that women keep silent in the churches, after all) and there was great controversy around that - but gays and lesbians are somehow more sinister.

So there will be a backlash against Robinson. A gigantic, church-shaking earthquake of a backlash.

But the end result will be tranquility.

Why? Because people are adaptable. They are afraid of what they don't know - they are afraid of what might happen. But when the Episcopalians realize that their church is still the same church, that their lives are still the same prayerful lives, then the pressure on Robinson will ease and things will go on.

Soon, even most anti-gay (or uncertain about gays) Episcopalians will realize that Robinson's choice of life partner doesn't affect their own lives of faith at all. Life will continue the way it always has.

That's why it's important that Robinson didn't step down. By not bowing to the pressure - by staying firm in the face of increasing world adversity and in the knowledge that history books would note that he was the cause of perhaps the worst Episcopal split in the history of the church - Robinson has advanced the civil rights of all of us.

But Robinson alone is not enough. One person can always be considered an exception, as in: "I like you, of course, but you?re an exception - you're not like those other gays and lesbians out there."

What Robinson needs is for other gay and lesbian bishops to join him - not just in his church, but in other churches. He needs other gay and lesbian clergy to be open in their sexual orientation, to teach their congregations that leaders are leaders no matter whom they fall in love with. He needs gays and lesbian clergy around the world to stand beside him - and beside their gay and lesbian members - despite the negative publicity, and despite the chance that they could lose their livelihoods and be thrown out of their own churches. He needs all of us to pressure our own denominations to accept and elevate gay clergy to higher offices.

There are, of course, many brave gay and lesbian clergy who are already doing all these things. They marry same-sex couples against the wishes of their denominations. They introduce their partners into the regular give and take of church life. They rail against bigotry. They may be unsung on the national stage (or they might be demonized, depending how prominent they are) but they are all gay and lesbian heroes. They are changing the churches one strong example at a time.

And changing the churches is important, because it hits people at the core of their belief system. Because of this, Robinson is not just incidentally important. He's not just a footnote to a controversy. He is the key that will help change thousands of hearts.

All we need is for other clergy - and other congregations - to join him in pushing through the door.

Will everyone in California and around the country please take a deep breath? It appears gay groups and leaders, especially in California, badly misjudged the recent election recalling Democratic Governor Gray Davis and stridently overstated their case against his replacement, Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. The recall was not about gay issues, it was about economics. And Schwarzenegger is in no sense "anti-gay," he's the kind of Republican who could help change the GOP for the better.

There were sensible reasons why a good citizen might have opposed the recall and might have been dubious about Schwarzenegger. The recall process undermines representative democracy, the basic design of our political system. There were also good reasons to be nervous about Schwarzenegger, a novice who offered generalizations as a platform.

But the fear that Schwarzenegger would bring a right-wing Black Death to gays, a fear expressed by some gay politicos during the campaign, was not sensible.

There were, first, the attempts by gay groups to use guilt-by-association arguments to dismiss the election as a "right-wing recall" because it was initially funded by a politician with anti-gay views. It was not that. In the end, the recall was supported by a strong majority of the state's voters in a high-turnout election. Solid blocs of Latinos, union members, the poor, and women supported it.

Even 42 percent of gay voters backed it in a state where they are probably even more liberal than elsewhere in the country. No wonder. The recall had nothing to do with voter resentment over social issues like domestic partnerships or gay rights generally. Not every election is about us.

There were, second, the hysterical denunciations of Schwarzenegger as some kind of crypto-fascist out to repeal all gay-rights laws and then perhaps to exterminate us. Openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Tom Ammiano predicted that gay-friendly state laws "would be jeopardized." Geoff Kors, the leader of Equality California, the state-wide gay lobbying group, cautioned that a win for Schwarzenegger would "empower" the "right wing" to recall "not just the governor, but the gains we have made for LGBT civil rights during his administration." In a front-page story on the eve of the election, one gay newspaper published completely unsubstantiated, last-minute "rumors" by anonymous sources that Schwarzenegger "supported apartheid."

Hyperventilating harder than anyone else, however, was openly gay state assemblyman Mark Leno, who knows better. "Our community needs to come out and vote as if our lives depended on it," he warned, "because they do." Get that? Schwarzenegger is out to kill you.

All of this was at stark variance with the facts. Schwarzenegger is a moderate, even liberal, Republican on social issues like abortion and gay rights. A statement on his official campaign website affirmed this: "I am for equal rights for all," said the supposed Hitler wannabe. "I do believe that gay couples are entitled to full protection under the law and should not be discriminated against based on their relationship."

Sounds like support for anti-discrimination laws and for domestic partnerships to me, views Schwarzenegger repeated in live television interviews. It's no surprise that fully one-third of gays voted for Schwarzenegger. And even that number, relying on an exit survey of self-identified gays, is probably an undercount of the gay vote for Schwarzenegger.

Schwarzenegger opposes gay marriage, true, but so do the leading Democratic contenders for president and so does Davis himself. It's also true that, again on the eve of the election, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Schwarzenegger "would not have signed" the comprehensive domestic-partners legislation recently enacted in California. But the story gave no source or rationale for this purported policy view, and I have seen no confirmation of it from Schwarzenegger's camp.

What counts now is whether Schwarzenegger would support a repeal of the new domestic-partners law, something being pushed by one of California's genuine far-right-wingers, State Sen. Pete Knight.

As of now, there is no reason to believe Schwarzenegger will back a repeal. He has publicly supported domestic partnerships. Further, he does not owe the far right anything; their candidate was social-conservative State Sen. Tom McClintock, who finished with just 13 percent of the vote compared to Schwarzenegger's 49 percent.

Many gay leaders and organizations in California and around the country seem to lack any understanding of the GOP, particularly the active struggle between those in the party who see no reason to hound gays and those who think they are commanded by God to do so. They have no appreciation of the significance of electing a gay-friendly Republican governor in the nation's most populous state. Schwarzenegger's election demonstrates how much the national party can gain by embracing a big-tent strategy.

Blind to this, gay organizations know only one rule: all Democrats good, all Republicans really bad.

This cartoonish world-view reminds me of what historian Richard Hofstadter had to say about the excesses of the far right in his 1964 book, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Extreme conservatives, he argued, took sound positions - like anti-Communism - and warped them into conspiratorial lunacy. The extremists lacked any sense of proportion.

When it comes to the GOP, gay activists often exhibit their own paranoid style. Reasonable concern about the party is morphed into take-no-prisoners rage. Where there is nuance, they see stealth. Where there is clear support, they see outright opposition. Where there are potential friends, they see bigots. Their paranoia is discrediting them, burning bridges, and hurting us.