IGF CultureWatch

Originally appeared May 31, 2002, in The Washington Blade.

Syndicated columnist Mubarak Dahir recently slammed "several gay writers," whom he did not identify, for using the assassination of Dutch gay politician Pim Fortuyn as an excuse to demonize Muslims. He charges that these writers "have even marked followers of Islam as responsible for Fortuyn's demise, if not his actual murder."

As one of the writers in question, I must dispute Dahir's characterizations. Dahir, usually a more accurate writer, offers no evidence that anyone has blamed Muslims for Fortuyn's murder. He fails to quote anything that columnist Paul Varnell or I wrote in our Fortuyn essays. He refers to "gay writers masquerading as experts on the Dutch political system," as if we could not possibly be informed on the subject, and as if only experts approved by him have a right to comment. This is merely a ploy to avoid seriously addressing our arguments.

Dahir suggests that there has been no similar criticism of Christians, despite the fact that the religious leaders most often criticized by gay Americans are the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Dahir asserts that "few mainstream religious leaders of any faith openly embrace us," whereas a number of Protestant denominations perform gay weddings and ordain gay ministers. Where are the gay-affirming Muslims?

I once dated a devout Muslim who expressed anger at the portrayal of Muslims as terrorists, while he himself celebrated the murder of the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses. He insisted that he did not have to read the book in order to make conclusions about it, and that no one had the right to commit blasphemy.

When Martin Scorsese released his film of the Nikos Kazantzakis novel The Last Temptation of Christ, there were indeed cries of blasphemy by theocratic Christians who demanded that the film be banned. But unlike censors in Muslim countries, the fundamentalists are not in charge here, and filmgoers were mostly free to make up their own minds. In his acclaimed novel The Tin Drum, German author Günter Grass refers to Jesus as "Athlete of Athletes, world's champion hanger on the cross," and describes seagulls attacking a carcass as "the Holy Ghost descending to feast the Pentecost." Instead of being sentenced to death, he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Three decades ago, when I began questioning my Roman Catholic upbringing, my uncle, an Augustinian priest, said to me, "Who are you to question centuries of Church teaching?" My answer was, "A human being with a brain." Yet I later managed to graduate in the Honors Program at Villanova University, where my uncle had been a prominent official. The card catalog in the campus library still noted books that were on the old Index Prohibitorum, but the condemned books were nonetheless available on the library shelves. Christendom has its problems, but it has had a Reformation. Islam desperately needs something similar.

Dahir quotes Fortuyn as condemning "third-generation Moroccans" who "won't live by our values." The values to which Fortuyn referred were social tolerance and equality for gays and women. Dahir does not explain what is wrong with these values or with defending them. He also attacks Fortuyn for blaming crime on gangs of immigrant Muslim youths, while ignoring the fact that Fortuyn's crime statistics were accurate. Apparently we are expected to ignore reality to protect Muslim sensibilities.

Dahir attributes criticism of Muslims to "fear and ignorance and stereotyping." As my colleague Bruce Bawer writes, "Fear is right. Fear of having a wall dropped on you! Fear of gay-rights advances in the Netherlands and other countries in western Europe - and of liberal democracy generally - being watered down, or reversed, by a growing Muslim minority that, generation by generation, refuses to adapt to democratic ways." As to ignorance, Bawer asks, "Ignorance of what? The strong, vibrant democratic systems in place throughout the Islamic world?"

According to Dahir, "Muslims are the new communists. an easy scapegoat for all our political woes." Here Dahir joins the leftists who talk, against overwhelming evidence, as if the Communist threat to the West was entirely invented by Joe McCarthy. Does Dahir claim that the persecutions of gays in Muslim countries were fabricated? As to scapegoating, even after September 11, Muslims enjoy far more protections in the West than under Islam, which may be one reason so many come here.

Islam has a serious problem in its treatment of gays and women, and in its suppression of free expression and free worship. Portraying critics of this as villains is mere evasion. I can sympathize with the cautious approach of Faisal Alam, leader of the gay Muslim group Al-Fatiha, since he has received death threats as I have not, but that only illustrates the problem. And I do not recall any Christian fundamentalists flying fuel-laden aircraft into office buildings. I do not blame Dahir for this. I just want him to stop his distortions and stop blaming the West for defending its hard-won secular tradition of personal liberty.

GIVE CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE, opponents of gay equality can be creative in desperation. Lately, they have been finding ingenious ways to use the Catholic priest scandal to criticize the entire gay civil rights project. The essence of their argument is that gays are incurably promiscuous, that this promiscuity is a kind of moral disease, and that it threatens to lay low every traditional institution it infects.

Stanley Kurtz, writing recently in the influential conservative magazine National Review, has applied this argument to same-sex marriage. The argument must be rebutted, and it can be.

Kurtz, a writer of considerable intelligence and subtlety, has specialized in arguing against the conservative case for gay marriage. That case has rested in part on a prediction (and a hope) that gay marriage would reduce gay promiscuity. This would improve the lives of gays and benefit society by, for example, increasing social stability and reducing the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. Let's call it the "domestication effect."

Using the crisis in the Catholic Church as an example, Kurtz questions the likelihood of a domestication effect. Kurtz argues that gays go into the priesthood promising to meet the strictures of the institution (celibacy), perhaps sincerely believing they will, but soon fall prey to their profligacy. Similarly, in Kurtz' view, gays would go into marriage promising to meet the strictures of the institution (fidelity), perhaps sincerely believing they will, but would soon fall prey to their profligacy. If gay priests can't keep their vows of celibacy, it's unlikely gay spouses will keep their vows of monogamy.

In fact, Kurtz argues, it's worse than that: "The priesthood scandal is a stunningly clear case in which the opening of an institution to large numbers of homosexuals, far from strengthening norms of sexual restraint, has instead resulted in the conscious and successful subversion of the norms themselves." That is, gays will not only fail to benefit from marriage, they will hurt it. As a conservative who believes traditional institutions like marriage are valuable, I take this charge very seriously.

There are many ways to respond to Kurtz's analogy. One would be to question the comparison of an institution that allows some sexual outlet to participants (marriage) to another that completely forbids it (the Catholic priesthood). Human nature may simply be better equipped to deal with restricted sexual access than with none at all.

Yet another response would be to note that Kurtz's argument has no apparent application to gay women, who can't even become Catholic priests.

But I want to attack Kurtz's conclusion that gay men will somehow destabilize marriage. First, let's make a concession to Kurtz for the sake of argument: suppose the magnitude of the domestication effect is indeed very small. We can doubt gay male promiscuity is simply an artifact of repressive laws that will wither away when those laws are gone. Of course, we cannot know for sure because no other regime has been available to gay men. But even if we concede that many gay men will not be changed much by marriage, will gay male marriage change marriage?

Surely even Kurtz would agree that at least some gay male couples in marriage would remain monogamous, just as many gay priests have remained celibate. And surely at least some, however small, domestication effect would take hold. This domestication effect will provide at least small benefits to gay men and to society, benefits that all principled conservatives should welcome. In a cost-benefits analysis, that's a point for gay marriage.

Then what's the cost? Though Kurtz never explicitly spells it out, he appears to fear that straight couples will see gay spouses living it up sexually and do the same (that is, to a greater degree than they already do).

But this genuinely conservative nightmare sounds fanciful to me for two reasons. First, women will always be present in straight marriages and women will for the most part demand fidelity, as they always have. That won't change because they hear a few married gay men have open arrangements.

Second, even assuming gay men are uncontrollably promiscuous and that access to the social support marriage provides will not change that, it borders on paranoia to think they will manage to subvert marriage itself.

To see why, let's do some math. Conservative critics of gay equality like to say that homosexuals are no more than three percent of the population. I'd bet gays will get married at a lower rate than the general population, so gay married couples will likely represent less than three percent of all marriages.

Gay male married couples will be even rarer at first. The experience of Vermont civil unions shows that twice as many lesbian couples as gay male couples get hitched. Two-thirds of homosexual unions would probably be female pairings, which will be largely sexually closed (perhaps more so than straight couples).

The potentially problematic gay couples - the gay men - will represent perhaps one percent of all marriages. Some of them will manage to be faithful all or most of the time, so the truly troublesome unfaithful gay male couples will represent less than one percent of all marriages.

These paltry numbers will undermine the institution of marriage? Undermine it more than the large percentage of married people who already acknowledge in studies they have been unfaithful? To state the proposition is to refute it. Perhaps gay conservatives have more faith in the institution of marriage than its traditionalist defenders do.

Originally appeared May 16, 2002, in the San Francisco Bay Times.

Just as musical silences can be as eloquent as any note struck, political silences can speak volumes. The silence of America's national gay organizations after the assassination of gay Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn is revealing. Let me summarize it this way: If you are gay and perceived to be on the political right, do not send to know for whom the bell tolls. It does not toll for thee.

Fortuyn, an outspoken defender of the rights of gays and women against intolerant Muslims who enjoy his country's public benefits while attacking its values, was widely and falsely characterized by news reports as a racist, right-wing extremist -- despite the racial diversity in his own party. Responding to media distortions is normally the stock in trade of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, yet in this prominent case GLAAD has had nothing to say.

The Human Rights Campaign has been quick to issue press releases and organize vigils when it connected the killings of gay people to a climate of hate. Yet now, when an openly gay candidate is murdered after being demonized by establishment politicians and journalists, HRC is silent. And the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which considered the Persian Gulf War a vital gay issue, sees no relevance when a man who stood a good chance of becoming the world's first openly gay head of government is savagely cut down.

One explanation for this silence might be uncritical acceptance of stories that caricatured Fortuyn as just another fascist clone, despite his liberalism on many issues and his loathing for France's Jean-Marie Le Pen. But there is a more telling explanation. Pim's campaign was a nuisance because he highlighted the conflict between two cherished liberal values: the rights of gays and women on the one hand, and multiculturalism on the other. By criticizing Islam, he broke a taboo.

There is nothing progressive about refusing to distinguish cultures that persecute gays from those in which we have thrived. We are not supposed to notice that our rights have prospered in the capitalist, democratic West, because this would contradict the notion that all cultures are created equal. Never mind that the Islamists who hate us do not share this egalitarian view, but instead wish to impose Islam on the entire world. According to the left's double standard, any projection of Western values - even domestically - represents economic and cultural imperialism, while the most violent hate-mongering is overlooked if done in the name of the oppressed.

As Steven Emerson details in his book American Jihad, America's open society is being used against us by our enemies, who have only to couch their activities as religious or charitable or civil-rights related in order to operate with impunity. They are aided by a left that romanticizes Palestinians the way earlier radicals romanticized Ho Chi Minh.

This can have comical results. As Steve Miller of the Independent Gay Forum reports, a group calling itself Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism participated in a recent pro-Palestinian rally at UC Berkeley. A Palestinian objected, saying, "Gay people have no place in society, whether in Palestine or in the U.S." When someone took issue with him, he replied, "You are a cultural imperialist." Meanwhile, the only Middle Eastern country that respects gay rights, Israel, is condemned by queers for defending itself.

Freedom cannot last without preserving the social climate that nourishes it. Why should any country, much less one of 16 million people on a mere 16 thousand square miles, feel obliged to continue welcoming immigrants who refuse to embrace its values or its language? How is it unreasonable to oppose criminal gangs of immigrant youths? Dismissing such concerns as racist rather than considering their merits will not make them go away. And reacting to the murder of a democratic candidate as if he had it coming, simply because he had the temerity to challenge prevailing wisdom, is depraved.

Fittingly, Fortuyn is attacked from the right as well as the left. In a posting on The National Review's "The Corner" the day of Fortuyn's funeral, Rod Dreher called Pim a "libertine" and compared the West to Weimar Germany as a society endangered by moral decline. In fact, as a champion of personal responsibility, Pim opposed threats to liberty whether they were dressed in the censoriousness of the religious right or the nannyism of the socialist European mega-state.

The reaction to Pim's death in many quarters demonstrates how right he was about the bankruptcy of the political establishment. It is not Fortuyn, smeared posthumously as both a libertine and a fascist, who represents the decadence of the West, but the entrenched elites who are indignant at his challenge to their simplistic political categories. In death, Pim's invigorating voice has not been silenced. As I join my Dutch cousins in their grief for what has been taken from them, I recall the words of Walt Whitman:

"Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac."

HE CAME CLOSER than any other openly gay person in modern history to leading an entire country. He was smart, articulate, and charismatic as he defended gay equality against all enemies. In a just world, history would put him on a par with other courageous gay trailblazers like Harvey Milk.

But chances are you never heard of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn (pronounced "For-town") until he was recently assassinated, if then. And chances are what you heard was slanted and defamatory.

Fortuyn, 54, was running as the leader of his own party in Dutch parliamentary elections held on May 15. If his party had captured a sufficient number of seats he could have been the next Prime Minister of the Netherlands, the only country in the world that recognizes full-fledged gay marriage. But as he left a radio interview on May 6 he was shot dead.

Fortuyn was controversial. In a country with an extremely generous social welfare system, he argued for cutbacks in the bureaucracy. He wanted reforms in bloated and inefficient public services for education and health care. He criticized Dutch environmental policy as feel-good politics and as having "no more substance." He emphasized the need for law-and-order in a country that has the second-highest homicide rate in Western Europe.

At the same time, Fortuyn supported his country's tolerant social policies on matters like euthanasia, abortion, prostitution, and drug use. He made no apologies for being a gay man, nor, in the Netherlands, did he have to.

But Fortuyn also wanted to hold the line on immigration and for this he was demonized by legions of the politically correct. He worried that his country's liberal democratic values were under attack from an influx of immigrants, a disproportionate number of which have come from repressive and undemocratic Islamic countries.

Islamic clergy in the Netherlands have ridiculed homosexuals as "lower than pigs." Their attitudes toward the role and rights of women have been no less retrograde.

Fortuyn responded by calling Islam a "backward culture" in its attitude toward gays and women. "How can you respect a culture if the woman has to walk several steps behind her man, has to stay in the kitchen and keep her mouth shut?" he asked.

Candid remarks like that caused a stir. Fortuyn was denounced by political elites as an "extreme right-winger" and a racist. Just a day before his assassination, a writer for the New York Times accused him of "modernized fascism." These labels were ceaselessly applied to him by media in the U.S. and Europe even after he was dead. (By contrast, his assassin was described in the media as "an animal rights campaigner" and was remembered by friends in the Times as "a gentle and kind nature lover." Like many extreme environmental and "animal-rights" activists, the assassin apparently loved everything in nature except people.)

Was Fortuyn a racist? Hardly. He bitterly rejected comparisons between himself and the continent's true neo-fascist and racist, France's Jean-Marie Le Pen. As his successor for party leadership, Fortuyn chose a black immigrant from the Cape Verde Islands. Another party candidate is Moroccan-born.

As for his criticism of Islam, anti-gay views should not be exempt from criticism just because they spring from religious faith. Islam is backward when it comes to matters like basic human dignity for gay people. So are other religions, including many Christian sects. But it's worth noting there is not one predominantly Christian country in the world where homosexual acts are still punishable by death, as they are in Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia.

In his concerns about the ultimate impact of immigration on his country's institutions, Fortuyn probably exaggerated. The Netherlands already has among the most restrictive immigration policies in Europe, rejecting two of every three would-be immigrants. The American experience has been that wave after wave of immigrants, initially feared as having hostile values and alien religions, have enriched our country. As an American, I say open the floodgates to people who want to come here.

But if I were Dutch I might see immigration differently. A small nation of 16 million people, the Netherlands is already the second most densely populated country in the world. Almost 10 percent of the country's population is non-European, the highest rate in Western Europe. Rotterdam, the country's second-largest city, is now 45 percent foreign-born. Unlike Americans, the Dutch have a long history, culture, and language uniquely their own. Those things are surely worth preserving.

The most important thing Fortuyn did for gays, however, was simply to stand his own independent ground against vicious criticism. He proved a gay person could support free markets, individual liberty, a rollback in government bureaucracy, and tough anti-crime measures. He identified with the problems of hard-working, middle-class citizens. What's more, it appeared they increasingly identified with him.

Fortuyn refused to be shoved into a particular politics because of his sexual orientation. He defied standard expectations about what gays should think and say, and so made room for the rest of us to do likewise. It's not surprising the media was unable to compose a coherent or truthful sentence about him, unaccustomed as they are to seeing a gay person think for himself.

Some people are ennobled by their untimely deaths; when they are gone, we suddenly realize how much promise was lost. James Dean was not a great actor, but he might have been. John Kennedy was not a great president, but he could have been. Pim Fortuyn was not given the chance to show that a homosexual could be entrusted with the stewardship of his nation's most precious values, but he should have been.