IGF CultureWatch

Every movement struggles with the desire for the ideal and the need for the practical. A column I recently wrote addressed the fallacies in the argument that the gay civil rights movement must include protection for gender identity in gay civil rights laws because gays "owe" transgender activists some debt for drag queens' participation in Stonewall. I made three points:

1. the importance of Stonewall has been exaggerated;
2. the importance of drag queens to Stonewall has been exaggerated; and
3. even if I am wrong about #1 and #2, that doesn't mean we must include transgenders in gay civil rights laws, since there are numerous considerations of practical politics here.

Most replies to that column, as usually happens when one writes critically about the "T" in "GLBT," consisted of name-calling. Many responses called the column "transphobic" or "elitist" because it would "leave some people behind," as if every law doesn't do that in some fashion.

There were, however, a couple of rational responses that challenged me on substantive grounds. These responses argued that there is a close connection between gay and transgender issues that ought not be ignored by gay civil rights laws. These responses raise important issues.

There are two separable questions when it comes to inclusion of gender identity in gay civil rights laws. First, is inclusion warranted as a matter of principle? Second, if it is warranted as a matter of principle, is it sensible as a matter of practical politics?

On the first question, I am not convinced that gay and transgender issues are so connected that principle dictates they be dealt with together in all legislation. The standard argument from principle seems to be that gay issues are a subset of all gender issues because gays, by having same-sex mates, transgress traditional gender/sex boundaries.

There are many things to say about this argument, but let's focus on one basic point. Since the beginning of the gay civil rights movement, there have been people trying to claim the cause is really about something other than homosexuality. For some 1960s and 1970s activists, it was really about ending an unjust capitalist system, or supporting movements for national liberation, or ending racism, or eliminating poverty. For many (especially male) activists, it was really about sexual liberation generally, as if we were fighting for the right to fornicate in the streets or with children.

I distrust claims that gay civil rights is really about something else (like poverty or gender). To me, such arguments seem like another way of erasing gay lives and concerns by subsuming them to some other cause favored by the advocate.

Such arguments are also reductionist: they reduce the gay experience to one aspect of life. Take the issue of our supposed "gender transgression." Many gay people see themselves in gender-conforming terms and seek gender-conforming traits in their mates. Is this in itself wrong? I don't think so, any more than it's wrong to prefer tall lovers to short ones or brown-haired ones to blondes. Does having a same-sex mate transgress traditional gender expectations? Of course, but this singular act of rebellion does not make a gender revolution of the type transgender activists seek.

On the second, practical issue, even if I were convinced that as a matter of principle gay and transgender issues are linked, I would still hesitate before adding "gender identity" to gay civil rights legislation.

As a legislator, I might personally support protecting transgenders from much private discrimination. But unfortunately, very few of my fellow legislators (in most places) would share my view. I could, of course, take the time and effort to explain it to them, but that period of education might add years to the final passage of my gay civil rights law. In the meantime, gay people will continue to face discrimination.

Not every law has to address every problem. Progress means that you get what you can while you can get it. Then, when you can get more, you do so. Progress comes by degrees, not (usually) by revolutions. The black civil rights movement did not fight to protect people from age discrimination. Was that ageist?

In almost every jurisdiction in the country where both gays and transgenders are protected, the protection for gays preceded the protection of transgenders by many years. This gap allowed people an opportunity to see that the world didn't end by protecting gays and that taking the additional incremental step of protecting transgenders also wouldn't cause it to end. This pace may be unsatisfying but it's preferable to waiting for a perfectly inclusive law that may never come.

I suppose one could respond that there is a very practical concern for gays involved here: if gender expression is not protected by law some gays will face discrimination for their gender presentation (butch women, effeminate men) rather than for their sexual orientation (gay) and yet will not be protected by the law.

This scenario is theoretically possible, but is not very likely. Almost any gay person subjected to discrimination for being gender variant will have been subjected to explicitly anti-gay abuse and thus will have some legal recourse under a law that protects sexual orientation but excludes gender identity. I certainly would not hold up the passage of a gay civil rights law to reach extraordinary cases.

We need to begin a reasoned, substantive, open discussion of these issues. The inclusiveness of "GLBT" might make us feel good, but it shouldn't become a talismanic barrier to progress.

Originally appeared April 3, 2002, in the Chicago Free Press.

The New York Times published a dispiriting little article recently about how college students tend to be "guarded and private about their intellectual beliefs." According to one college dean, "Students are interested in hearing another person's point of view, but not interested in engaging it, in challenging it, or being challenged."

Part of the reason must lie in the way that the humanities and social sciences are frequently taught these days, particularly the deadening influence of doctrines such as deconstruction and multiculturalism.

With deconstruction, the point is not to learn about ideas in order to assess their merits and figure out which ones are better and worse, but only to "deconstruct" them - to see where they come from, how they are used and whose interests they serve.

Similarly, multiculturalism teaches students to see all cultural outlooks as self-contained wholes, presumably internally coherent and largely incommensurable with other views. Thus all views are immune to criticism from other views, and therefore, by default, equally valid.

Both doctrines fall prey to severe criticism and each can easily be turned back upon itself: "Deconstruction" can be deconstructed (as excellently by Prof. Stephen Cox in "Critical Review," Winter 1989); and, "multiculturalism" is, after all, just one viewpoint among many, no more valid than some opposing view.

But students probably do not think their own thoughts out to that "meta-analytical" level and their professors are not likely to teach any analysis that calls their teaching into question.

In any case, both doctrines are profoundly anti-intellectual. Neither provides students with any way to discover or develop reasons why they should accept some views and not accept others. They leave the impression that it is impossible and somehow even wrong to try.

This discourages reasoned discussion: It creates a disincentive for students to express any opinion about whether something is good or bad, true or false, right or wrong, if they have been taught that, in the nature of things, their opinion cannot have any justification.

But this means that anyone influenced by these ideas is left without a way to explain to critics why democracy is good, why a free press is good, why individuality is good, why free-market economy is good or why religious freedom is good.

Thoughtful people, philosophers even, once offered persuasive arguments for each of these ideas, and the force of the arguments actually prevailed since each of these institutions we now enjoy constitutes a major change from earli er authoritarian regimes where they were entirely absent.

Even today we face assault from people, Old Testament-minded "Christian Reconstructionist" at home and Islamic militants abroad, who oppose these institutions, so we had better be prepared to argue for them anew rather than treating those other viewpoints as "interesting" but immune from criticism.

As with many issues in the general culture this has direct relevance for gays and lesbians as we seek acceptance as legal and moral equals. Most obviously, both "Christian Reconstructionists" and Islamic militants want homosexuals to be executed.

But even more, we need to be able to prove the merits of our claims to skeptics, the "undecided," and those who are new to our issues. And we need to be able to reassure ourselves, particularly those many of us still in the closet, that our cause is just.

We must be prepared to offer reasons why homosexuality is good: why being gay is not pathological or a psychological defect; why homosexuality is legitimate no matter whether it is genetic, chosen, or the result of obscure psychological processes; why homosexual sex has value and what it contributes to our well-being.

For instance, one of the prominent claims of the religious right is that the American Psychiatric Association simply yielded to political pressure when it removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses in 1973.

But in fact there were a large number of cogent arguments for the change, based on numerous psychological studies and rooted in good psychiatric and psychological principles. We need to be able to reproduce those arguments and show people the religious right is wrong.

What will not work is the kind of response we often hear from gay organizations, that anti-gay claims are "hateful and divisive rhetoric and all fair-minded Americans will reject these hateful and discriminatory words that promote hateful, anti-gay violence," etc., etc. That is just hot air, convincing no one, and implies that we have no good arguments for our side.

Similarly, since our sexual relationships are as valuable in our lives as they are in everyone else's, we must defend our sexual activity as healthy, self-actualizing, fostering relationships, expressing affection, and sometimes just extremely entertaining.

In the face of an artificial distinction between homosexual orientation and homosexual activity, we need to develop and promote a public language to help people see why defenses of our "orientation" but not our "activity" simply grant victory to our opponents.

Humans are not pure spirit and celibacy is contrary to human nature. For us to seek acceptance or inclusion based on the idea that sexual activity is separable from our "selves" is deeply demeaning to the bodies that we are. But most of our gay organizations are silent about sexual behavior while our opponents condemn it as their rhetorical trump card.

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO I was a candidate for the Roman Catholic priesthood. One night during a candidate retreat I was alone in a monastery rec room with a youngish priest - let's call him Fr. Jack - who was attempting to counsel me as I struggled with the difficult decision of whether to enter training that year. Fr. Jack, who seemed genuinely concerned about my emotional state, offered to give me a massage. The proposition was simultaneously strange and appealing, and I nervously accepted. He began with my back and proceeded slowly to cover virtually every inch of my body - except, notably, my genitals and buttocks. Fr. Jack then looked at me in an eager and suggestive manner and asked, "Is there any part of you that is still tense?" Quite uncomfortable at this point, I blurted, "Um, yes - my mind!" and then quickly gathered my shirt (which one of us had removed) and excused myself.

The current pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church reminded me of this event. I do not mean to suggest that Fr. Jack was a pedophile. The massage, though sexual at some not-very-hidden level, was not tantamount to sex. More to the point, I was about eighteen years old at the time - not a child, and not incapable of granting or withholding consent. But the story involves a number of issues that have been raised, often confusedly, in discussions of the ongoing scandal: priestly sexuality; priestly homosexuality; authority, secrecy, and vulnerability.

The scandal by now is familiar to anyone paying attention. In brief, there has been a disproportionately high incidence of sexual abuse among Roman Catholic priests, and the Church hierarchy have been going to great lengths to cover it up. These things by themselves would be bad enough, but in fact it's worse: Not only have the hierarchy covered up the scandal, but they have repeatedly reassigned known pedophiles to posts which put them in contact with children. These reassignments are perhaps the most inexplicable aspect of the scandal. The pedophilia can be explained (to an extent) as a psychological disorder combined with moral weakness. The cover-up can be explained as a misguided attempt at damage-control. (To say that these two things can be explained is not to say that they should be excused - both involve culpable behavior.) But the reassignments are sheer reckless stupidity. The current priest-shortage notwithstanding, there are plenty of posts within the church that do not involve youth ministry. (Next time you're in Church, consider the ratio of blue hair to baseball caps and you'll see what I mean.) If these known pedophiles were to be reassigned at all (and that's a big "if"), why not restrict them to working with older parishioners?

The Vatican's response to this and other difficult questions has been - you guessed it - to change the subject and scapegoat gays. In a recent interview Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls contended that most of the sexual abuse cases involved teenage boys, not children, and thus did not really constitute pedophilia. He then inferred that gays must be unfit for the priesthood: "People with [homosexual] inclinations just cannot be ordained," he concluded, suggesting that ordinations of gay men should perhaps be invalidated.

Navarro-Valls' proposal, if implemented, would eliminate about half of the priests in the United States. (As a former candidate who spent a lot of time with priests and seminarians, I can confirm that this oft-repeated estimate is a reasonable one.) But does his argument for the proposal work? Even supposing (what seems likely from the reports) that the majority of the victims have been male, Navarro-Valls' conclusion doesn't follow. For the question to ask is not what percentage of sexual abusers are gays, but rather, what percentage of gays are sexual abusers. Consider an analogy: The vast majority of rapists are male. But it does not follow (and it is not true, pace Andrea Dworkin) that the vast majority of males are rapists. Thus, eliminating males from a given population would not be a fair or appropriate way of curtailing rape. Analogously, even if most sexual abusers within the priesthood were gay, it would not follow that most gays within the priesthood were sexual abusers. Eliminating gays from the priesthood would be horribly unjust to the vast majority of gay priests, who are innocent of sexual abuse and as horrified by it as the rest of us.

Thus, Navarro-Valls' point about gays is a red herring. It is one thing to be attracted to persons of the same sex; it is quite another to be inclined to abuse persons of the same sex, be they children or otherwise. Conflating these distinctions not only slanders gays, it misdirects our attention away from the real problem, which is sexual abuse. Such scapegoating is a familiar tactic, sadly, and it is morally repugnant - far more so, I would contend, than the clumsy advances of Fr. Jack when I was eighteen.

Which brings me back to the age issue. Navarro-Valls is correct that in some of the cases, pedophilia is not the real problem. (It is difficult to know the percentages, since the Church has been stubbornly uncooperative in releasing data.) There's a big difference - legally, psychologically, morally - between sex with an eight-year-old and sex with a seventeen-year-old. Cases of the latter type, which often involve seminarians and seminary candidates, may be an abuse of power and a violation of priestly vows, but they are not pedophilia.

Eliminating gays from the priesthood would, indeed, eliminate many of these latter cases. But it would also eliminate a good many decent priests, and needlessly so. For the real culprit here is not homosexuality, but rather the Church's refusal to address the issue of sexuality directly and realistically. Human beings are sexual, and priests are no exception. Celibacy is demanding, and repression and denial are not helpful in mastering it. If the Church is serious about addressing sexual misconduct, it should focus on healthy ways for its priests to manage their sexuality, which does not disappear once they take vows.

Fr. Jack is a prime example, and my memory of him reminds me of the saying "There but for the grace of God go I." Had I decided during that retreat to enter religious life, I would have done so as an eighteen-year-old with no sexual or romantic experience to speak of. I would have been thrust into an all-male environment where I would be forbidden not only to have sex but also to masturbate. And sooner or later my sexuality would have asserted itself - doubtlessly in the awkward manner characteristic of the sexually immature. Perhaps I, too, would have eventually found myself attracted to a naive and fresh-faced seminary candidate, and perhaps I too would have behaved like a creep. (For the record, I decided to enter when I was nineteen and then withdrew almost immediately, correctly believing that I needed more "life experience.") Navarro-Valls' scapegoating of gays doesn't solve such problems; it perpetuates them - while ignoring far more serious ones. It is time for the Church to worry less about protecting its image and more about protecting the people it serves.

Originally appeared March 27, 2002, in the Chicago Free Press.

Editor's note: Pim Fortuyn, 54, was assassinated May 6, 2002, outside a radio studio in Hilversum, The Netherlands.

Dutch politics has recently been roiled by the emergence of an openly gay candidate who denounces Islam as backward, wants to limit foreign immigration, curtail street crime, improve public services, cut back a welfare state often labeled "bloated," and shake up the bland "old boy network" of Dutch politics.

Pim Fortuyn is generally described as an author, television personality, and former professor of sociology with a Marxist perspective. He has attracted much media attention for employing a butler and traveling in a chauffeur driven Mercedes.

But his ideas are what have aroused most interest. Journalists have difficulty finding an accurate label for him. "Populist" seems the safest, non-polemical term. But his detractors, mostly on the political left, frequently denounce him as racist, fascist and other terms of abuse.

But judging from a New York Times article, those claims seem counter-intuitive, slanderous, even crazed. And it may be Fortuyn's opponents who better deserve the labels they use.

Fortuyn points out, for instance, that many Muslim immigrants do not learn Dutch and refuse to adopt the Dutch national culture of tolerance and equality. The immigrants' version of Islam is backwards, he says, because, among much else, there is no equality between men and women and because Muslim clerical leaders attack homosexuals.

It does seem clear that many Muslim immigrants come from historically sexist and homophobic regions such as Morocco, Turkey and Indonesia, bringing their cultural views with them. And Muslim Imams in Rotterdam have repeatedly denounced gays as immoral. Rotterdam Imam El Moumni said on Dutch television that homosexuality is "a disease that threatens society."

There is a fascinating phenomenon here. A man who urges immigrants to embrace their adopted nation's liberal values of political tolerance, women's equality and respect for gays is the one denounced as a racist and fascist.

Yet insofar as immigrants suppress women, denounce the very existence of gays, and, we may reasonably suppose, are hostile to Jews, the immigrants seem far closer to those who originally bore the labels now being applied to Fortuyn.

At this point we can begin to suspect that terms like "racist" and "fascist" are just empty rhetoric, swear words, with no cognitive content. They are designed merely to delegitimize someone without taking the trouble to provide evidence or argue against their ideas.

One of the deepest political problems for any open, free society is what measures it must take in order to preserve its fundamental values of openness and tolerance against counter-pressures from people who reject those very values. But the problem is scarcely solved by denying the problem exists or by denouncing people who try to preserve a free society as racists or fascists.

The Dutch, with their historical experience of real fascism, can surely recognize and reject any politicians who threaten any sort of authoritarianism. Gays in particular, as targets of fascist oppression, would presumably welcome a politician, gay or not, who wanted to preserve a society where they are accepted.

And sure enough, when a Times reporter visited a gay bar to ask for opinions about Fortuyn, the bar-owner said, "Oh course most of my clients voted for the prof. His ideas about what's wrong are crystal clear."

Most of Fortuyn's other policy ideas don't seem fascist or racist either. Rather the opposite.

He wants local mayors to be popularly elected rather than appointed. Generally, people on the left view democracy and fascism as opposites. But in this case the man who wants to expand democracy is the one labeled racist and fascist. Does this fit a pattern of dissimulation and obfuscation by Fortuyn's critics?

Fortuyn also addresses popular concern about rising crime rates and street violence. According to the Times, police attribute both to "gangs of immigrants from Morocco, Turkey, and the Caribbean." If true, it hardly seems racist to say so. And Fortuyn apparently has support from many earlier immigrants who fear street crime as much as anyone else.

The crime problem may be exacerbated by an inability or unwillingness of more recent young immigrants to acclimate to Dutch culture, even to act out their rejection in anti-social ways. If so, the problem is to foster cultural integration in some way. But vigorous police vigilance can help in the meantime.

Fortuyn also says he would like to revive military conscription. Since The Netherlands is not surrounded by foreign enemies, we can speculate that Fortuyn hopes to draw young immigrants into Dutch culture by requiring common service in the national military.

We can oppose conscription as hostile to personal liberty and believe there are better ways to integrate immigrants, but urging it is hardly fascist. Conscription was supported by U.S. Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Even now proposals for mandatory national service come more from the left than the right.

It is worth recalling which U.S. president ended conscription: Richard Nixon. And what presidential candidate first urged an end to conscription: Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964. Both men were viewed as on the political right.

History is often embarrassing to facile polemics that way.