IGF CultureWatch

"Oh God, our maker, we gladly proclaim to the world that Jeanne and Ellie are loving partners together for life. Amen."

By saying those words to bless the relationship of two women, Reverend Don Fado and 94 other United Methodist pastors (as well as 71 other clergy members who lent their names in absentia) could lose their clerical jobs. Fado acknowledged this at the holy union ceremony they all jointly presided over on January 16. "If anybody wants to file charges against us, this is what the charges are for; for praying this prayer."

The ministers did not marry Jeanne Barnett, 68 and her partner of 15 years, Ellie Charlton, 63. They simply proclaimed, as a body, that Jeanne and Ellie have committed themselves to one another for life. More important, it seems, they "gladly" did so. If they had scornfully done so, or had done so filled with bitterness, hostility, grievance or alarm, well, that might have been all right.

There are many issues at work in this ceremony: questions about morality and love, religion and politics, equality and "special rights." But one fact may say more about this event than any other?it took place in Sacramento.

Historically in this country, the movement for gay rights has come from big cities like Los Angeles and New York -- and, of course, San Francisco, not a big city in numbers, but the cosmopolitan equal of any city in the world. The concentration of gay men living in such cities helped drive the movement for gay equality. There was a certain spirit, if not necessarily safety, in numbers. This fact, however, often put cities at odds with more rural areas, as gay rights laws were introduced in state capitals.

But now the questions about justice and fairness first raised in the cities are coming up everywhere. Lesbians and gay men in Bakersfield and Victorville may have had more to risk by coming out than their counterparts in West Hollywood and the Castro, but the compromises of the closet are tedious no matter where you live. It's something like a full-time job to keep track of all the fabrications and half-truths, and that's wearying, whether you work on a stock exchange or a dairy farm.

So it should be less surprising than some might expect to know that the holy union ceremony did not come from the organized gay rights establishment in San Francisco or Los Angeles. In fact, it did not originate with anyone who is actually homosexual. In St. Mark's church in Sacramento, Rev. Fado heard his church leadership's command that no Methodist minister could bless a same-sex relationship. The patent unfairness was too obvious for him to ignore. How could he have permission to bless a house, a car, a pet, but not the relationships of some of his own parishioners, children of God who had made a lifetime commitment based in love and faith?

It was only when Rev. Fado asked his congregation if any same-sex couple would step forward that Jeanne and Ellie came into the public eye. Neither woman views herself as a gay rights activist. When asked the question, both laughed timidly. The best they could say, Ellie confessed, was that they identify themselves as "quiet advocates for change."

It is those quiet advocates who demonstrate how profoundly the successes of the gay rights movement have changed the movement. Anti-gay leaders like Gary Bauer and James Dobson may rail against homosexual "extremists" and "radicals," but they have little to say about homosexual moderates and conservatives. People like Jeanne and Ellie wanted only to live their lives decently and honestly, and endured furious and unwanted publicity to demonstrate how hard it is for a same-sex couple to achieve the modest respectability every married heterosexual couple takes for granted.

They are not alone. Across the nation, millions of same-sex couples, every day, quietly negotiate the preposterous half-rules and unspoken protocols they are expected to live by. And they are joined by millions of heterosexuals like Rev. Fado, who are finding it harder and harder to maintain a separate set of rules for lesbians and gay men.

That is why the scene for these new gay rights battles will increasingly be places like Sacramento, or Laramie, Wyoming, or Hawaii or Vermont. A decade ago, author Neil Miller published In Search of Gay America, and found people across the country willing to talk about being gay in every corner of the country, and in every walk of life. Those people are still there, and by the simple example of their lives, their friends and co-workers, relatives and ministers may be more ready than ever to support them.

In other words, the gay rights movement isn't just for activists any more. No one was ever excluded from the movement, but in the early days a lot of people passed. Political activism isn't in everyone's blood.

But justice is. That's what drove Rev. Fado to issue his challenge, and it's what drove Jeanne and Ellie to accept. But it's also what made buses and carloads of people come from Modesto and Fresno, Yreka and Oregon to show their support. The hundreds of people who surrounded the Convention Center in a "Circle of Love," as well as the thousand or so who attended the ceremony, probably couldn't name a gay radical. But by just being present in Sacramento, their quiet advocacy was moving the mountains radicals have been talking about for decades.

BERNADETTE J. BROOTEN is Kraft-Hiatt Professor of Christian Studies at Brandeis University. A key passage in Paul's Epistle to the Romans (1:18-32) has for a number of years served as a touchstone for her research. Yet the design of her book radiates far beyond the bounds of conventional scriptural exegesis. Her work throws light on the understanding of ancient lesbianism, the status of women in Roman times, and attitudes toward same-sex love in general.

In fact, "Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism" (University of Chicago Press, 1996. 412 pp.) ranks as one of the most important books ever to appear on ancient Mediterranean sexuality. Working with almost superhuman diligence, Professor Brooten has laid bare a surprising wealth of information on lesbian behavior in areas where evidence was previously thought to be scant. Her monograph has important implications for male homosexuality as well. Moreover, despite the subtitle, the very substantial first part of the book (pp. 29-189) deals with attitudes and practice in the Hellenistic and early Romans worlds.

Unlike some who would appear to be seeking to redress the misogyny of our culture by downplaying its instances, Brooten does not shrink from dealing with unpleasant matters. She records the disdain and condemnation of ancient writers, both pagan and Christian, for female-female relations. Fearlessly, she challenges earlier authorities, such as John Boswell and Michel Foucault, whose writings now pass in some quarters as virtually canonical.

Not only does Brooten command the modern scholarly literature, she is at home with original documents written in at least four of the older tongues: Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic. While she scrupulously cites the latest secondary literature and the original sources, her erudition is carefully disciplined. The extensive reference notes appear at the bottom of the page where they belong, enabling scholars to check every significant point. Only in a few instances, dealing with controversies in the contemporary conceptualization of same-sex behavior, do the notes seem overlong.

Brooten provides a wealth of material on the condition, status, and behavior of women in Roman and Early Christian times: In this realm there is no substitute for reading her book. The scope of the following remarks is more modest: the bearing of her findings for sexual orientation in general, including that of men.

After first reviewing the familiar texts from Greek and Latin elite authors, including Lucian, Plautus, Ovid, and Martial, Brooten turns to four categories of evidence that have been neglected. The harvest is surprising.

The first area of her original studies is magical spells from Egypt commissioned by the love-sick to elicit compliance from a desired partner. While these have been collected for almost a century from papyri, scholars have been slow to assess the significance of the nonheterosexual ones. Three have so far been published that seek to bind a woman sexually to another woman. The language of these spells is direct, sometimes even violent, affording us a glimpse of the feelings of ordinary people.

The second realm is the astrological literature. The ancients believed that the stars could determine many aspects of the personality, including sexual orientation. While the effects could be quite complex, they show that there could be lifelong sexual orientations, involving several types of male homosexual and lesbian attraction. In the view of these writers such inclinations were not mere preferences to be adopted or discarded at will, but they were even cosmically ordained. Such views posed a problem for some ancient writers who thought that such attractions were "against nature" (para physin). Here, Brooten's findings significantly contradict those of Foucault and his followers who believe that the concept of sexual orientation came into existence only in the nineteenth century.

The third category is the medical. Some handbooks in this field held that same sex behavior, especially that of the female, could be a disease. Again Foucault and his associates are mistaken in their claim that "medicalization" of same-sex behavior took place only in the nineteenth century.

Finally there is the sphere of dream interpretation, especially as seen in the treatise by Artemidorus. Although here the yield is sparser, Brooten makes interesting contrasts between the views of the ancients and modern dream interpretation belonging to the schools of Freud and Jung.

In agreement with most other scholars in the field of ancient Mediterranean sexuality, Brooten sees sexual relations as governed by normative asymmetry in which one partner (the "active" inserter) is superior, the other (the "passive" receptive) inferior. This principle combines with an androcentric one in which the male is superior to the female. In this view no stigma necessarily attaches to male homosexuality because the penetrator maintains the principle of superiority; moreover the male partners, as adolescents or slaves, may be fulfilling the appropriate role as inferior. In this light, however, female-female relations are always suspect, because in accordance with the asymmetry principle one partner should be inferior, the other superior. But women are never supposed to be superior.

This set of principles leads her to conclude that among pagans of the early Roman period, which are her focus in the first part of the book, lesbian relations were reproved. For this she finds considerable evidence. "Monstrous, lawless, licentious, unnatural, and shameful - with these terms male authors throughout the Roman Empire expressed their disgust for sexual love between women" (p. 29). If these principles prevailed during this period, however, they must have appeared earlier, in classical Greece, for example. Why did dislike of lesbian behavior apparently increase in the concluding centuries of the pre-Christian era?

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We now turn to the passage from Paul's Epistle to the Romans, which Brooten addresses only after her assemblage of the highly significant background materials reviewed above. The core of the Roman's passage is the following (1:26-27) in the rendering supplied by Brooten which, in my judgment, follows the Greek closely:

"[a] For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. [b] Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural. [c] And in the same way [homoios] also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameful acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error." [punctuation slightly altered]

It is clear that [a] represents the topical sentence. Instances illustrative of the general principle so stated, two of them, follow. As the second example [c] is more explicit than the first [b], and as modern interpreters are likely to perceive lesbian behavior as the almost inevitable counterpart of male homosexual behavior, it is difficult to resist the impulse to read the content of [c] back into [b] which is then interpreted as a condemnation of lesbianism. We tend to see lesbianism and male homosexuality as paired - as does Brooten in this instance. However, elsewhere she produces evidence that ancient writers were capable of pairing male homosexuality with female promiscuity, including prostitution.

Thus our way of reading is not necessarily the way ancient authors and their audiences would interpret the sequence of argument in Roman 1:26-27. For one thing, given the general androcentrism of the era, why would Paul mention women first? Possibly, there is another reason for the order, that this is a temporal sequence: First the women transgressed in some way, and then later the men.

More direct light is afforded on this passage in a short section of the Testament of Naphtali, belonging to a category of ancient writings that Brooten, exceptionally, did not exploit sufficiently. This text belongs to the so-called Intertestamental writings, a body of texts originating in Jewish circles during the period of the Second Temple (ca. 500 B.C. to A.D. 70). The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs were probably written in the period 150-100 B.C. and thus available to Paul. The writer is elaborating on a text in First Enoch, another Intertestamental writing, which has to do with the Watchers, the sons of God who mated with human women in the time before the flood. In Hellenistic Judaism they were increasingly identified with the fallen angels and their offspring with demons, the source of evil.

"Sun, moon, and stars do not alter their order. The gentiles, because they have wandered astray and forsook the Lord, have changed the order. ... But you, my children, shall not be like that. ... [D]o not become like Sodom which departed from the order of nature. Likewise the Watchers departed from nature's order" [Testament of Naphtali, 3; ed. J.H. Charlesworth, p. 812]

Several assertions anticipate the animadversions of the Romans passage. First is the central idea of the order of nature, against which we transgress at our peril. The notion of nature is wholly Greek and is foreign to the Old Testament. While the Greek word physis does occur in 3 and 4 Maccabees and in the Book of Wisdom, these text were originally written in Greek and are not currently accepted as part of the canon of the Hebrew Bible. Accordingly, the idea of nature as a cosmic norm is part of the Greek heritage that insinuated itself into Jewish thought during the Hellenistic period. Violations of nature, of course, need not be sexual. However, in a late work, The Laws, the philosopher Plato specifically stigmatized both male and female homosexuality as "against nature" - para physin, the same expression used in Paul's text. In effect, works of Hellenistic Jewish provenance, such as the Testament of Naphtali, "predigested" the Greek material for the use of interpreters like Paul.

Elsewhere in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs we learn that women scheme treacherously to entice men. Because of this proclivity they seduced the Watchers (equivalent to the Nephilim of Genesis 6), who were induced to mate with them before the Flood. Ever since the birth of the Giants from these unions, the earth has been visited by two types of spirits: the spirits of truth and the spirits of error. In this view, the tendency of women to seductiveness caused disaster at a particular point of human history; it continues to this day. Hence the need to call attention to the capacity of women for misdeeds.

Although both the Sodomites and the Watchers were guilty of various errors, the pairing of them in this passage reflects types of sexual activity which would violate the order of nature. The sodomites sought forcible homosexual relations with angels who were the guests of Lot, while the Watchers actually mated with the daughters of men, producing the Giants. Note that in this passage the express "likewise," homoios, links two different sexual transgressions, one (in our terms) homosexual, the other heterosexual. What they have in common is that they risk God's wrath.

In discussing the work of another scholar, James Miller, Brooten briefly mentions the role of the Watchers in the Testament of Naphtali. As she aptly remarks, "[i]ntercourse between the Watchers, who were sons of God, and human women transgressed the order of nature by crossing the boundary between the human and the divine" (note to p. 249). However, she does not seem to see how well this notion fits with Paul's condemnation in Romans 1:26. In fact if one adopts the Watcher interpretation, Paul's offers a spectrum of sexual misdeeds, from those with partners that are too different, extraterrestrial, to acts with partners that are not different enough, same-sex persons, Sexual orthodoxy requires that which is in between: male-female relations.

To return to the Romans passage, in the interpretation offered here, Paul refers first to the historical misdeeds of human women in offering themselves to the extraterrestrial beings. These acts would have been a kind of upwardly mobile counterpart of bestiality since they involve sexual behavior that crosses species lines. Then a modern instance of challenge to the natural order is offered, that of male homosexuality. Of course, it could be objected that this interpretation is only probably, but then the same is true of Brooten's. At the very least, one must conclude, despite Brooten's impressive gathering of materials, that Paul - as distinct from some later interpreters - did not certainly have lesbian activity in mind in Romans 1:26.

Even if Brooten's interpretation is accepted, this would remain, as she acknowledges, the only possible mention of lesbian sexuality in the entire body of scriptures. Mainstream biblical criticism generally agrees that male homosexuality is reproved in a number of passages (Gen. 19; Leviticus 18 and 20; Romans 1:27; and I Cor. 6:9 - to cite only the most salient ones). While it is true that some modern homosexuals and homosexual-friendly writers, including Canon Bailey and John Boswell, have sought to mitigate the force of a number of these passages, Brooten - in my view soundly - seems to accept them.

It is true that much of the later interpretation of the Romans passage is doubly homophobic. As Brooten correctly remarks, "whether or not Western people have ever heard of Paul's Letter to the Romans, it affects their lives" (p. 196). Thus, in the present writer's view, the Romans passage, though not originally lesbophobic, became so, because of the understandable tendency to take the particulars of verse 27 and apply them retrospectively to the preceding verse, which is less clear.

Unfortunately, this expansive interpretation was destined long to flourish; as such, it has been one of our afflictions. But if we look backward toward the complex of ideas that dominated the Hellenistic Judaism in which Paul was trained, we see something different. Man-crazy women, who are even willing to sleep with extraterrestrial beings, parallel man-crazy men, who wish to sleep with other members of their own sex.

Stated briefly, the picture that emerges is this. Roman society strongly disapproved of lesbianism, while remaining relatively tolerant of male homosexuality. The scriptural tradition, certainly of the Old Testament and probably that of the New Testament as well, ignores lesbianism while severely castigating male homosexuality. In expanding its hegemony over a once-pagan Mediterranean environment, Early Christian and medieval tradition imposed a Jewish tradition of strongly disapproving of male homosexuals, while adopting, possibly from Roman sources, a less salient, but still significant disapproval of lesbian conduct.

Since the Protestant Reformation, Christians have been advised to look at Scripture without regard to later commentaries and accretions. If my conclusions are correct regarding the exclusion of lesbian conduct from the sphere of condemnation, a striking asymmetry emerges. To take only the most salient passages (Lev. 18:22, and 20:13; Romans, 1:26-27; and I Cor. 6:9), the Bible condemns male same-sex behavior. Nowhere does it unequivocally forbid lesbian relations. Those who regard the Bible as a coherent guide to ethics and behavior (and not simply a disparate collection of remarkable ancient documents) must explain this inconsistency.

Originally appeared November 21, 1998, in National Journal.

AT A MOMENT when Washington's eyes are fixed on Kenneth Starr and Saddam Hussein, I make bold to ask you to divert your attention, for just a few moments, to two other men, named John Geddes Lawrence and Tyrone Garner. In the occasionally great state of Texas, in the sometimes peculiar United States of America, the two of them are scheduled to be arraigned before a judge on Nov. 20 -- the day this column is published -- for the crime of having sex in the privacy of Lawrence's home.

At about 11 p.m. on the night of Sept. 17, Harris County sheriff's deputies entered Lawrence's unlocked apartment in the suburbs of Houston. They had received a tip, which was false, that an armed intruder had broken in. They found not a robber but Lawrence and Garner having sex. Under Texas' law, homosexual (but not heterosexual) oral or anal intercourse is a class C misdemeanor carrying a fine of up to $500. So the police arrested the two men. One of them, according to their attorney, Suzanne B. Goldberg of the Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund, was trundled out of the apartment in his underwear. Before bail was arranged, they spent that night and the next day and some of the next night in jail.

Well, the law is the law, right? "If we just say, �Let this thing go away,'" Harris County District Attorney John B. Holmes Jr. told the Houston Chronicle, "then we're not really complying with the law and I'm not comfortable with that." Next up, the trial, the probable conviction, and a court battle that gay activists hope may end in the overturning, at long last, of Texas' 119-year-old sodomy law. "I've always said that the best way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it," Holmes said insouciantly. Nice that he could be so cheerful. "The defendants, like anybody who's arrested by the police, have had their lives turned upside down," says Goldberg.

Today, 19 states have sodomy laws, five of which specifically apply only to homosexuals and all of which are effectively enforced only against homosexuals. "One of the arguments used for anti-sodomy laws is that they are never used," Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., said in an interview. "This Texas situation totally rebuts that."

I know, you have enough on your mind right now without worrying about the odd priorities of law enforcement in Texas. Still, let me suggest a few groups of people who ought to care about ridding the country of sodomy laws.

One group, of course, is homosexuals. My partner and I, for example, don't much enjoy being class 6 felons in the state of Virginia, where he lives. Civil libertarians should care, and do. I want to suggest, though, that several other groups of people?conservative moralists, respecters of law, and you? should also care.

Conservative moralists now find themselves in a pickle. On the one hand, the elections this month gave them a poke in the eye. Christian Right governors lost in two conservative Southern states; Matt Fong, the Republicans' failed Senate challenger in California, got in trouble when it became known that he had given $50,000 to the Rev. Louis Sheldon's anti-gay Traditional Values Coalition. The Republicans who did best were centrists who eschewed judgmental rhetoric, notably the Brothers Bush.

One response would be for Republicans to give up moralizing. They can't, though, because their most loyal voters are moralizers; and, much more important, they shouldn't, because the country needs to hear what the moralists have to say. In the long run, the politics of vacuous nonjudgmentalism ducks issues that voters need to decide: who is accountable for crime and social rot, what to do about teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock childbirth, and so on. Wherever personal lifestyles have public implications, morals talk is essential.

But the moralists have a problem, and it is one that Barry Goldwater would recognize: Every time they open their mouths, they scare people. They sound intolerant, censorious, crabby. Somehow, they need to convince the voters that they know the difference between promoting morality and legislating it. Coming out for the repeal of sodomy laws furnishes them with just such an opportunity.

Lately, religious conservatives, having painfully learned that anti-gay rhetoric has become a wedge issue against Republicans more than against Democrats, are trying to turn the tables by insisting that it is they who are oppressed and who favor real toleration. "We just want to be left alone to raise our families our way," they say, "with equal rights for everybody but no special rights for anybody." So why are the voters unconvinced?

On ABC's Nightline in July, Janet Folger of the Center for Reclaiming America, a Christian conservative group, said, "No one wants to take away from the rights that every citizen enjoys, the equal rights that are enjoyed even by those in the homosexual community. ...But what the problem is... (is) in special rights." In that case, should homosexuals "enjoy" the "equal right" to make love in private? Well, it turns out, some equal rights are more equal than others. Pressed on whether she supported criminal sodomy laws, Folger danced all around the room before finally owning up: "I guess if you're looking at sodomy laws, there are sodomy laws on the books that I very much support."

Those sodomy laws are America's last true Jim Crow laws. To criminalize the expression of intimacy between consenting adults, in the privacy of their homes, is malice dressed up as morality. Now imagine that the Christian moralists stepped forward and called for the repeal of sodomy laws, proclaiming, "We think homosexuality is sinful, but it's a matter for the pulpit, not the police." By showing that they do, after all, take seriously the distinction between moralizing and criminalizing, conservatives could earn some of the credit they need to gain the public's trust on moral issues.

People who value respect for law should also care. In Paula Corbin Jones' sexual-harassment suit against President Clinton, the law demanded to know the name of every woman other than his wife with whom Clinton had "had," "proposed having," or "sought to have" sexual relations during the whole span of his career, beginning when he was attorney general of Arkansas. When the law behaves like that, the public decides that maybe lawbreaking isn't so bad. And when the law busts adults for expressing intimacy in private, it begs to be despised.

A third group should care: people who want America to be a better and more just place. Many such people pooh-pooh sodomy laws on the grounds that they are rarely enforced. But they are enforced, often indirectly. In July, the North Carolina courts revoked Fred Smith's custody of his two children partly because his relationship with his partner involved illegal acts. The laws are enforced directly, too, and not just in Houston.

One warm spring day in 1995, in Topeka, Kan., Max Movsovitz parked his car in Gage Park and busied himself with some paperwork. He knew he had parked in a spot where gay men meet one another, and he was open to such a meeting, but he also knew that the police conducted stings there and he had no intention of either soliciting sex or engaging in it in the park. After a while, a man drove up and started a friendly conversation, soon steering the discussion to sex. He said he was looking for friends and asked what Movsovitz was into. Movsovitz acknowledged that he liked oral sex. Oh, said the man, would you do that to me? Movsovitz agreed. The undercover officer arrested him on the spot.

Unbeknownst to Movsovitz, in Topeka it is illegal to agree, while in any "public place," to have same-sex relations, even if the sex is to be conducted at home. If a woman meets a man in the park, lets him chat her up, and accepts his invitation to go home for a little you-know-what, that is perfectly legal. Movsovitz, on the other hand, was convicted and, this past summer, lost on appeal. He was fined $ 199 and was ordered to stay out of Gage Park for two years. The local newspaper reported his arrest for "trying to solicit homosexual sex acts from plainclothes police officers in Gage Park." He told me: "I was stunned. I always say it was like getting punched in the stomach. I was like physically -- I couldn't eat. It was just so humiliating and infuriating. Nothing like this happens in my family."

This year is the centennial of Oscar Wilde's release from prison, where he served more than two years for sodomy. After 100 years, Lawrence's and Garner's 24 hours or so in jail no doubt represents some sort of progress over Wilde's two years in jail. But in Topeka's Gage Park, the stings are still going on. In Houston, a sodomy trial begins.

First appeared in Reason, November 1998.

FOR CONNOISSEURS OF SURREALISM on the American Right, it's hard to beat an exchange that appeared about a decade ago in the Heritage Foundation magazine Policy Review. It started when two associates of the Rev. Jerry Falwell wrote an article which criticized Christian Reconstructionism, the influential movement led by theologian Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, for positions that even they as committed fundamentalists found "scary." Among Reconstructionism's highlights, the article cited support for laws "mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards". The Rev. Rushdoony fired off a letter to the editor complaining that the article had got his followers' views all wrong: They didn't intend to put drunkards to death.

Ah, yes, accuracy does count. In a world run by Rushdoony followers, sots would escape capital punishment�which would make them happy exceptions indeed. Those who would face execution would include not only gays but a very long list of others: blasphemers, heretics, apostate Christians, people who cursed or struck their parents, females guilty of "unchastity before marriage," "incorrigible" juvenile delinquents, adulterers, and (probably) telephone psychics. And that's to say nothing of murderers and those guilty of raping married women or "betrothed virgins." Adulterers, among others, might meet their doom by being publicly stoned�a rather abrupt way for the Clinton presidency to end.

Mainstream outlets like the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post are finally starting to take note of the influence Rushdoony and his followers have exerted for years in American conservative circles. But a second part of the story, of particular interest to readers of this magazine, is the degree to which Reconstructionists have gained prominence in libertarian causes, ranging from hard-money economics to the defense of home schooling. "Christian economist" Gary North, Rushdoony's son-in-law and star polemicist of the Reconstructionist movement, is widely cited as a spokesman for free markets, if not exactly free minds; he even served for a brief time on the House staff of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), the Libertarian Party presidential nominee in 1988, when Paul was a member of Congress in the '70s. For his part, Rushdoony has blandly described himself to the press as a critic of "statism" and even as a "Christian libertarian." Say what?

An outgrowth of Calvinism, modern Reconstructionism can be traced to Rushdoony's 1973 magnum opus, Institutes of Biblical Law. (Many leading Reconstructionists emerged from conservative Presbyterianism, but as with so much of today's religious ferment, the movement cuts across denominational lines.) Not one to pursue a high public profile, Rushdoony has set up his Chalcedon Institute in off-the-beaten-path Vallecito, California, while North runs his Institute for Christian Economics out of Tyler, Texas.

As a "post-millennialist" school of thought, Reconstructionism holds that believers should work toward achieving God's kingdom on earth in the here and now, rather than expect its advent only after a Second Coming of Christ. Some are in a bit of a hurry about it, too. "World conquest," proclaims George Grant, in what by Reconstructionist standards is not an especially breathless formulation. "It is dominion we are after. Not just a voice not just influence not just equal time. It is dominion we are after."

Well, OK, it's easy to laugh. Yet grandiosity does sometimes gets results, especially when combined with an all-out conviction that one is historically predestined to win (the Communist Party in the '30s comes to mind). Reconstructionism has a record of turning out hugely prolific writers, tireless organizers who stay at meetings until the last chair is folded up, and driven activists willing to undergo arrest (Reconstructionist Randall Terry founded Operation Rescue, the lawbreaking anti-abortion campaign) to make their point.

Politically, Reconstructionists have been active both in the GOP and in the splinter U.S. Taxpayers Party; but their greater influence, as they themselves would doubtless agree, has been felt in the sphere of ideas, in helping change the terms of discourse on the traditionalist right. One of their services right off the bat has been to allow everyone else to feel moderate. To wit: almost any anti-abortion stance seems nuanced compared with Gary North's advocacy of public execution not just for women who undergo abortions but for those who advised them to do so. And with the Rushdoony faction proposing the actual judicial murder of gays, fewer blink at the position of a Gary Bauer or a Janet Folger, who support laws exposing them to mere imprisonment.

Among other ideas Reconstructionists have helped popularize is that state neutrality on the subject of religion is meaningless. Any legal order is bound to "establish" one religious order or another, the argument runs, and the only question is whose. Put the question that way, and watch your polemical troubles disappear: if we're getting a theocracy anyway, why not mine?

"The Christian goal for the world," Recon theologian David Chilton has explained, is "the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics". Scripturally based law would be enforced by the state with a stern rod in these republics. And not just any scriptural law, either, but a hardline-originalist version of Old Testament law -- the point at which even most fundamentalists agree things start to get "scary". American evangelicals have tended to hold that the bloodthirsty pre-Talmudic Mosaic code, with its quick resort to capital punishment, its flogging and stoning and countenancing of slavery, was mostly if not entirely superseded by the milder precepts of the New Testament (the "dispensationalist" view, as it's called). Not so, say the Reconstructionists. They reckon only a relative few dietary and ritualistic observances were overthrown.

So when Exodus 21:15-17 prescribes that cursing or striking a parent is to be punished by execution, that's fine with Gary North. "When people curse their parents, it unquestionably is a capital crime," he writes. "The integrity of the family must be maintained by the threat of death." Likewise with blasphemy, dealt with summarily in Leviticus 24:16: "And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him."

Reconstructionists provide the most enthusiastic constituency for stoning since the Taliban seized Kabul. "Why stoning?" asks North. "There are many reasons. First, the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost." Thrift and ubiquity aside, "[e]xecutions are community projects�not with spectators who watch a professional executioner do 'his' duty, but rather with actual participants". You might even say that like square dances or quilting bees, they represent the kind of hands-on neighborliness so often missed in this impersonal era. "That modern Christians never consider the possibility of the reintroduction of stoning for capital crimes," North continues, "indicates how thoroughly humanistic concepts of punishment have influenced the thinking of Christians." And he may be right about that last point, you know.

The Recons are keenly aware of the p.r. difficulties such views pose as they become more widely known. Brian Abshire writes in the January Chalcedon Report, the official magazine of Rushdoony's institute, that the "judicial sanctions" are "at the root" of the antipathy most evangelicals still show towards Reconstruction. Indeed, as the press spotlight has intensified, prominent religious conservatives have edged away. For a while, the Coalition on Revival (COR), an umbrella group set up to "bring America back to its biblical foundations" by identifying common ground among Christian right activists of differing theological backgrounds, allowed leading Reconstructionists to chum around with such figures as televangelist D. James Kennedy (whose Coral Ridge Ministries also employed militant Reconstructionist George Grant as a vice president) and National Association of Evangelicals lobbyist Robert Dugan.

In recent years, however, the COR has lost many of its best-known members; former Virginia lieutenant governor candidate Mike Farris, for example, told The Washington Post that he left the group because "it started heading to a theocracy...and I don't believe in a theocracy". John Whitehead, a Rushdoony protégé who, with Chalcedon assistance, launched the Rutherford Institute to pursue religious litigation, has moved with some vigor to disavow his old mentor's views.

Prominent California philanthopist Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr., who has given Rushdoony's operations more than $700,000 over the years, may also be loosening his ties. According to the June 30, 1996 Orange County Register, Ahmanson has departed the Chalcedon board and says he "does not embrace all of Rushdoony's teachings". An heir of the Home Savings bank fortune, Ahmanson has also been an important donor to numerous other groups including the Claremont Institute, the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and�just to show how complicated life gets�the Reason Foundation, the publisher of this magazine (for projects not associated with its publication).

The continuing, extensive Reconstructionist presence in fields like the home schooling movement poses for libertarians an obvious question: How serious do differences have to become before it becomes inappropriate to overlook them in an otherwise good cause? The printed program of last year's Separation of School & State Alliance convention constituted an odd ideological mix in which certified good guys such as Sheldon Richman, Jim Bovard and Don Boudreaux alternated with Chalcedon stalwarts like Samuel Blumenfeld, Howard Phillips, and Rushdoony himself.

Lest such relations become unduly frictionless, here's a clip-and-save sampler of Reconstructionist quotes to keep on hand:

• On the link between reason and liberty: "Reason itself is not an objective 'given' but is itself a divinely created instrument employed by the unregenerate to further their attack on God." The "appeal to reason as final arbiter" must be rejected; "if man is permitted autonomy in one sphere he will soon claim autonomy in all spheres. We therefore deny every expression of human autonomy�liberal, conservative or libertarian." Thus affirmed Andrew Sandlin, in the January Chalcedon Report.
• Intellectual liberty (other religions dept.): Hindus, Muslims and the like would still be free to practice their rites "in the privacy of your own home. But you would not be allowed to proselytize and undermine the order of the state. Every civil order protects its foundations," wrote the late Recon theologian Greg Bahnsen. Bahnsen adds that the interdiction applies to "someone [who] comes and proselytizes for another god or another final authority (and by the way, that god may be man)."
• Intellectual liberty (where secularists fit in dept.): "All sides of the humanistic spectrum are now, in principle, demonic; communists and conservatives, anarchists and socialists, fascists and republicans," explains Rushdoony. "When someone tries to undermine the commitment to Jehovah which is fundamental to the civil order of a godly state�then that person needs to be restrained by the magistrate. Those who will not acknowledge Jehovah as the ultimate authority behind the civil law code which the magistrate is enforcing would be punished and repressed," wrote Bahnsen.
• On ultimate goals: "So let us be blunt about it." says Gary North. "We must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God."

First appeared October 14, 1998, in the Houston Chronicle; has been read into the Congressional Record.

THE WICKED MURDER OF MATTHEW SHEPARD by two thugs, assisted by two equally contemptible accomplices, has resurrected a debate about the need for hate-crime laws.

Shepard, an openly gay University of Wyoming student who had been widely praised for his talents, ambitions and personality, last week was beaten senseless and left for dead, tied up like a scarecrow along a fence on a little-traveled country road. Miraculously, he was found by passers-by many hours after the attack, still struggling for life when he was rushed to a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he died Monday while on life support.

Local law enforcement officials in Laramie, Wyoming, where the crime took place, quickly arrested the alleged perpetrators�two men who performed the assault and two women who helped them hide their deed�and it looks like they will be punished to the full extent the law allows if they are convicted. With Shepard's death, they face a possible death sentence.

Laramie, a university community of 27,000 people, is feeling both shame and outrage, a sentiment shared by all right-minded people throughout the country, indeed around the world. News of this brutal assault has appeared everywhere in print and broadcast media.

The crime against Shepard has renewed calls for passing hate-crime legislation, both in Wyoming and nationwide. Wyoming Gov. Jim Geringer and President Bill Clinton have said that this attack shows the need for such laws.

This would be a mistake. It would be a mistake because hate-crime laws, however well intentioned, are feel-good laws whose primary result is thought control, violating our constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and of conscience. It would be a mistake because it suggests that crimes against some people are worse than crimes against others. And it would be a mistake because it uses a personal tragedy, deeply felt by Shepard's family and friends, to advance a political agenda.

Hunter College Professor Wayne Dynes, editor of the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, notes that hate-crime laws, if they are to be applied in a constitutional manner, must be content-neutral. He notes this example: "Countless numbers of people, aware of the unspeakable atrocities under his leadership, hated Pol Pot. This hate was surely well warranted. If one of the Pol Pot haters had killed him, would this be a hate crime? Why not?"

Dynes adds: "In seeking to exculpate the killer, we would get into the question of whether some hate is 'justified' and some is not." He concludes that hate-crime prosecutions "will be used to sanction certain belief systems�systems which the enforcer would like, in some Orwellian fashion, to make unthinkable. This is not a proper use of law."

Under our system of justice, everyone is equal before the law. Those accused of crimes are entitled to certain constitutional protection, which we must cherish, and the victims of a crime�whether a Bill Gates or the poorest street-sweeper in a slum�are entitled to the same respect. (In the Middle Ages, the law required a greater punishment for killing a rich man or noble than it did for killing a peasant or a laborer. Our law recognizes no such distinctions.)

So, too, with class- or group-based distinctions. Is it worse to kill a man because he is foreign-born than it is to kill him to steal his car? Is it worse to kill a woman because she is black than because she cut you off in traffic? Is it worse to beat up a fat sissy boy if the bullies think their victim is gay, or if they dislike him because he is fat? Crime is crime; assault is assault. All deserve punishment.

Hateful thoughts may be disagreeable, but they are not crimes in themselves. The crimes that result from hateful thoughts�whether vandalism, assault or murder�are already punishable by existing statutes.

In a speech at the University of Texas last year, libertarian activist Gene Cisewski said: "We should be anti-violence, period. Any act of violence has to be punished swiftly and severely and it shouldn't matter who the victim is. The initiation of force is wrong and it doesn't matter why the mere fact you had a motive is enough."

Cisewski acknowledged the good intentions of those who propose hate-crime laws. He noted that "the reason for the call for (such laws) comes from bad enforcement of the laws." Police and prosecutors have been willing to look the other way when victims came from unfavored groups. Luckily, in the Shepard case, the authorities seem unwavering in their prosecution. This is, unfortunately, not always the case.

The answer, Cisewski suggested, and I agree, is that "we hold every law enforcement official and every court official who administers justice to the standard that every American is guaranteed equal protection under the law."

Hate-crime laws set up certain privileged categories of people, defined by the groups to which they belong, and offer them unequal protection under the law. This is wrong. It is sad to see a young man's personal misfortune used by various special-interest groups to advance such an agenda.

We are all shocked and dismayed by the assault on Shepard. Such brutality cannot, should not be countenanced. Let us not multiply the crimes of his attackers by writing bad law in response.

THE DUST JACKET PROMISES: "Finally, there's proof that homosexuals can change." Says D. James Kennedy, whose ministry launched a national "ex-gay" ad campaign: "John Paulk has the most hopeful and promising message for gay men that I have ever read." How could he say this if he'd read the book? Here's columnist Cal Thomas' blurb: "The greatest cover-up in America has nothing to do with party politics, but with the politics of sex. The myth that many are forced to accept is that homosexuals can't change their orientation, and God help the person who says they can." Did he read the book or is he just recommending it? If he read it he didn't understand it or his own politics of sex is mounting a cover-up. But then, can right-wing religionists afford to plow through page after page of gay Harlequin sex and camp merely to endorse what their market savvy says must be true at any rate? Can heterosexual advocates stand to read Paulk's graphic reminiscences of "cutoff blue jeans with bleached-out holes ... providing glimpses of pale flesh ... pelvises unabashedly writh[ing] together ... my eyes danc[ing] along with the hundreds of writhing male bodies?"

Catholic psychologist Joesph Nicolosi, known for so-called reparative therapy for homosexuality, supplies a "clinical" foreword. "The homosexual condition," he posits against scientific consensus, "is not really about sexual preference; it's about gender-identity confusion." This itself is confusing for in his own book he writes of homosexuals who "are inappropriate for reparative therapy because they show no signs of gender identity deficit." He asserts that Paulk's homosexuality was about "his alter ego, Candi" (Paulk's drag queen persona) and that "Christ and Candi could not coexist within the same soul. When Christ came in, Candi went out. It had to be, simple as that." He applauds Paulk's "shift in self-concept from 'gay' to the new understanding, 'I am a (still unactualized) heterosexual man.'" Accordingly, Paulk "overcame his homosexuality" by changing his identity. Nicolosi allows for "years of sublime and seemingly random occurrences [or] 'little miracles' [that] can cure." Yet in his own book, he says that instead of a "cure" as such, it's about an "improve[ment in] a man's way of relating to other men." Indeed, Paulk's book reveals no cure. But it's not as Nicolosi has it: Candi or Christ. It's Candi and Paulk's other masks (drugs, alcohol, prostitution, promiscuity, poor choices in boyfriends, or marriage to an "ex-lesbian") over against Paulk's inability to accept his homosexual orientation and achieve a mature homosexual relationship as a Christian.

Paulk doesn't get into the "ex-gay" program until late in the book - and his homosexuality continues there. One day, house leader John Smid comes to Paulk and tells him: "Something very significant has just happened, and I feel I need to tell you: ... You were healed [past tense] from homosexuality." It's news to Paulk. But he takes it as "hope ... that God was actually going to change me" - future expectation. Meanwhile the residents are still having sex on the sly and Paulk's in love with one of them. But that guy's in love with another guy and Paulk's furious. He hides his hurt and anger by testifying at churches that he is "changed."

He poses in a group photo for an Exodus "ex-gay" ad captioned: "Can Homosexuals Change? WE DID!" But he writes that he and the others were "disappointed ... that our homosexual struggles were still so strong and frequent. Shouldn't we have been at least half-way healed by now? And what about heterosexuality? That seemed distant, unattainable." Claiming to be "ex-gay," he wasn't, "no matter how hard I tried." Smid's solution: "The label of ex-gay is still connected with your past. ... So from now on ... you're not an ex-gay; you're a man. And not just a man, but a heterosexual. That's how everyone sees you." So Paulk decides to gain so much weight that "I was looking less and less gay." He throws away all his designer clothes and "felt an incredible new sense of freedom."

While giving his "change" testimony on a Christian talk-radio show, "I found myself attracted to the man who was screening the incoming calls." After the show Paulk tries to engage him in conversation. Noticing the man's wedding ring, he thinks to himself: "This man is heterosexual and married. He doesn't want sex with you. And would you want to tempt him into something that might destroy his marriage?" Paulk backs off.

Thinking that he needs to get married, Paulk begins "going out" in mixed-gender "ex-gay" groups: "We could relate to each other as if we were brothers and sisters." And so it goes.

In his chapter on this wedding with an "ex-lesbian" - and it's the next to the last chapter of the book - he still worried he's not "sufficiently changed ... I questioned whether I would be sexually compatible in a heterosexual relationship." So a mentor gives him "some details about female anatomy." At the wedding, during the vows, he finds himself day-dreaming about sex with men. As his "past [boyfriends, prostitution, drag shows, etc.] careened through my mind ... I heard myself say, 'I John, take you, Anne....'" At the wedding reception, he resists leaving until it's so late "I was out of excuses." Finally getting to the bridal suite, he carries his wife "over the threshold (how light she felt!) and into the room. Lush, wood trim stretched everywhere."

After two miscarriages they have a baby boy. Paulk fantasizes his son as "a tall, thin young man ... a younger version of Billy Graham ... travel[ing] the country someday" telling thousands he's "living proof [that] sexual orientation can change." He'll be "a living defense for us." That vision, he says, reminds him "of other spotlights I myself once basked in" on the drag queen circuit. Thus ends "the remarkable story of how one man overcame homosexuality." For now.

First appeared in The Windy City Times August 27, 1998.

A study published in Pediatrics suggested that self-identified gay high school students are more likely to engage in "risk behavior" than are other students. Religious right groups claim this shows gays are "self-destructive" while the study's own author suggests that such behavior is a response to rejection by the majority culture. There are problems with both interpretations.

---

A SEEMINGLY HARMLESS AND INOFFENSIVE little article about teen-age gays recently became a focus of controversy between gay-supportive researchers and the religious right.

Back in May, Dr. Robert Garofalo and colleagues published a study in Pediatrics suggesting that self-identified gay high school students are more likely to engage in a variety of "risk behaviors" than other students are.

In a survey of 4,159 Massachusetts high school students, the researchers found 104 students who said they were gay, lesbian or bisexual. The gay youths were 2-3 or even more times more likely than other students to smoke dope, use alcohol, use cocaine, inject drugs, be threatened with a weapon, miss school out of fear, attempt suicide, and so forth.

Then on July 14, a group of religious right and "ex-gay" organizations placed an advertisement in the Washington Post citing the article as evidence that gays are trapped in a self-destructive lifestyle.

"Studies also show a high degree of destructive behavior among homosexuals, including alcohol, drug abuse, and emotional or physical violence," said the ad, "it's not lack of acceptance... it's... the visible response to a broken heart."

After a distressing three-week time lag, Garofalo stated publicly that he was "horrified and angry" at how the religious right had interpreted his study.

In an Aug. 4 interview with the Boston Globe Garofalo fumed, "It's a complete misrepresentation of what the research actually says. It comes to the completely opposite conclusion of what the paper concluded."

Garofalo told the Globe that the youths' behavior was actually a result of the alienation that gay teenagers face "in a culture that is often unaccepting."

Robert Knight, point man on gay issues for the Family Research Council, fired back, saying there is no merit to the theory that alienation can produce self-destructive behavior. Rather, said Knight, "homosexual behavior is the symptom of deeper, unmet emotional needs. Everyone in their heart know the behavior is wrong. People who are caught up in it are covering their emotional distress by abusing substances."

Frankly, there are problems with both interpretations.

Go back to Garofalo's article. Although Garofalo could establish a statistical link between being self-identified as gay and a greater tendency to experience these "psychosocial and medical risk factors," the survey could not show was what was a cause and what was an effect.

Garofalo acknowledges this in the article: "There are several limitations to this study... We can only examine the association between sexual orientation and health risk behaviors and not draw conclusions about causality." If he now thinks the "risk behaviors" are a response to a hostile culture, that could be true, but nowhere in his article does he say that.

Let us start with the fact that 104 seems a surprisingly low number of gay students. Sure enough, 62 additional youths said they were "not sure" about their sexual orientation and surprisingly 387 (9.3 percent) refused to answer the question at all. No doubt too some of those who marked "heterosexual" simply lied.

So many young gays can be found in the "non-gay" group that had lower rates of all those risk behaviors.

Even among the 104 who said they were gay, fewer than half said they had engaged in most of 40 the "risk behaviors" listed. That suggests that many of the self-identified gays were handling themselves quite well even by the stringent standards of the survey.

All this scarcely supports the religious right theory that "homosexuals" engage in self-destructive behavior because of "emotional distress" over behavior they know to be wrong. But it also weakens Garofalo's broad claim about gay alienation, at least for many students.

But what about those who do engage in sex, alcohol, drug use, and so forth? The study also found high rates of missing school because of fear, having personal property damaged, being physically attacked, being threatened with a weapon, and so forth. For Robert Knight to ignore the impact of verbal and physical hostility on young gays' attitudes and sense of self seems plainly dishonest.

Is Garofalo's interpretation about "alienation" the better one? It is certainly appealing to many of us who remember an uneasy youth. But "alienation" is too vague to do much work; it obscures more than it illuminates. No doubt there is hostility toward young gays, but does the hostility produce alienation which then induces risk behaviors? Does risk behavior cause alienation? Or does behavior somehow prompt the hostile reaction? What exactly is going on?

For one thing some of the categories seem odd. it seems strange to treat smoking cigarettes as a risk behavior like cocaine use. And why is having three or more sexual partners in your life a risk behavior? Drug use might be a response to stress, but can also just be fun. And why would social hostility cause high rates of steroid use? The whole thing is a conceptual tangle.

Now think of some possible ways to link being gay, engaging in risk behaviors, experiencing hostility and alienation.

• Gay youths might feel more alienated from a hostile society and less restrained by traditional social norms and more willing to smoke, drink, do drugs, have lots of sex and antagonize their peers.
• Gay youths who are insecure might have a desire to "act out" and behave in a exaggeratedly cross-gendered fashion, take drugs and deliberately flout social convention. This may cause them to be harassed at school.
• Gay youths who are harassed at school may drink and use drugs as an escape and seek more sexual partners as a source of self-affirmation and needed pleasure.
• Gay youths who find that gay sex was not the terrible, dangerous thing they had been told might have less reason to believe societal warnings about drugs.
• Youths who realize they were gay at a young age might act cross-gendered, thinking that is how to be gay. That could induce other youths to harass them, and then they might use drugs for escape, compensatory pleasure and so forth.

There are other possible combinations. And different causal links may be true for different students. Questionnaires cannot tell us these things.

Ultimately, researchers will just have to go and talk with young gays and ask them how they feel about their lives, the reactions they get, the pressures they face, how they cope with stress, and what expectations and hopes they have for the future.

That would not be a bad idea for Robert Knight either.

Thursday, August 13, 1998

DEAR FATHER MORROW:

I have read with interest your remarks at the Family Research Council's anti-gay conference yesterday here in Washington, and I wanted to share my thoughts with you.

I am a graduate of the Saint Catherine Labouré Elementary School Class of 1970, where I was a straight-A student. I grew up in the parish and received my Baptism, First Communion, and Confirmation there. I also attended my mother's funeral there. As you can see, I have extensive ties to your parish...

You will be less happy to learn that two days before my graduation from Villanova University twenty years ago, I came out as a gay man. Since then, in addition to my career as a computer specialist, I have cofounded the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington, written and officiated at a gay wedding ceremony, and worked for equal rights as a member of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, DC, of which I have been president since January, 1996. I am writing to you today to take strong issue with your remarks at the FRC conference.

Referring to the "not negligible" number of people with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" (which makes them sound like loose change that fell behind the sofa cushions), you state, "This inclination, which is not objectively good, constitutes for most of them a trial." This is a reference to the Church's declaration that homosexuality is an objective moral disorder; it is objective only in the sense that an authoritarian religious organization has so declared it. Since there is in fact no objective basis for such an assertion, it is no more objective than any religious dogma. Your citation of First Corinthians 6:10 that homosexual acts are intrinsically wrong is hardly persuasive, since if I took the trouble I could cite Old Testament verses in defense of slavery, among other horrors. It is amazing, and less than inspiring, how otherwise intelligent and decent people make selective use of biblical texts to justify their preexisting prejudices.

I presume that in any case you would agree with another participant in the FRC conference, who stated that of course we would not want to carry out the biblically prescribed death penalty for homosexuals today. While I appreciate such generous sentiments, they help make clear that it is not homosexuality itself which constitutes a trial for homosexual children growing up, but rather all the bigotry and intolerance disguised as religion which they face as they come to terms with their sexuality�often with a frightening degree of isolation. No child is done any favor by a ministering adult who insists that the child's most basic feelings for another person are somehow intrinsically wrong. All this does is add to the disproportionately high suicide rate among gay youth.

The bottom line, in a practical context, is that, whether you and the Roman Catholic Church Magisterium like it or not, a great many people�including self-professed Christians�disagree with your religious views on homosexual sexual acts being intrinsically wrong, and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees their right so to do.

You state that "legislation protecting homosexual persons becomes protection of behavior or a point of view. This is quite different from laws which prevent discrimination based on race, sex or age." As a matter of fact, it is rather like religion, since religion is chosen. Your reference to "a point of view" as something not deserving protected status is telling. No doubt the Church, despite the Reformation being four centuries behind us, would like to enforce its point of view on everyone. Indeed, the Archdiocese of Washington does not just defend its views at right-wing conferences, but also lobbies against the equal rights of gay citizens before the DC Council�such as when Cardinal Hickey denounced the District's Domestic Partners law in 1992 as equivalent to marriage (which, unfortunately, it is not), and denounced the District's repeal of its sodomy law in 1993.

Let me tell you something, Father Morrow. When I see my lover asleep beside me, I am as happy as a mortal can be and as sure of the rightness of my love as Monsignor Russell used to be of his reactionary approach to Church discipline [in punishing dissent on birth control]. That you can talk seriously about sharing God's love when you work for an institution that supports laws that would imprison me for my own love, is as hypocritical and perverted as anything can be.

Your remarks at the FRC conference make clear that you oppose the constitutional principle of the separation of church and state, and that you advocate the forcible imposition of your religious beliefs on the rest of the population by the state. This is the case despite your disingenuous protestation that "every sign of unjust discrimination" against us "should be avoided," since you quickly make it clear that you consider legal discrimination against us to be entirely just.

I am quite prepared to participate in a bloody war before I will allow your narrow and intolerant vision of America to prevail, before I will give up my liberty as a gay citizen. But already gay people are gradually winning the cultural war that was declared against us by the sorts of people who attended the FRC conference with you. We are also beginning to win the political war, as demonstrated by the crushing defeat in Congress last week of the attempt to overturn the President's executive order barring anti-gay discrimination in the federal workplace.

In reading about your weekly "support group" for homosexuals, I am thankful that I long ago escaped the repressive clutches of St. Catherine's. I can assure you of this: if any of my nephews or nieces should turn out to be gay, and I should learn that they are in the "loving embrace" of a "support group" that teaches them that they are intrinsically disordered, I will storm into the room and interpose myself bodily between you and them, and any sibling that supports such ministering to flesh and blood of mine will have to leave my body cold and bloody on the floor before I will allow such abuse in the name of love to continue. Not with my family, you don't.

It is appalling that a minister of Christ should fail to recognize the very real harm that your intolerance (however dressed up as pastoral care) can cause to real citizens and real families, such as the loving gay couples and their adopted children that I know�not to mention the gay child that I was when I first arrived at St. Catherine's in September 1962. I owed it to every boy I ever gave a valentine at that school not to let your remarks at the FRC hatefest go unchallenged.

Sincerely,

Richard J. Rosendall
St. Catherine Labouré Class of 1970

First appeared in the Windy City Times July 30, 1998.

DURING THE MIDDLE OF JULY, a coalition of conservative religious and political organizations mounted an assault against gays by placing ads in national newspapers claiming that gays can change and be "healed."

The three ads featured a "former lesbian" prominently displaying a wedding ring, a crowd shot of "ex-gays" who have "changed," and a football player who says his free speech rights were violated when people criticized things he said about gays.

The ads claimed gays can change their sexual desires, can become heterosexual, and that they should do so because being gay is sinful, unhealthy and destructive.

So it seems. But do the ads actually say homosexuals can become heterosexuals?

No, they do not. Nowhere do the ads say gays can become heterosexual or develop heterosexual feelings. In fact, the words "heterosexual" and "heterosexuality" do not appear anywhere in any of the three ads.

On closer examination the ads seem very cagily written, as if they were drafted by a lawyer who was acutely aware of what he could and could not get away with.

Instead, the ads say gays can "leave homosexuality," leave "this lifestyle" and "leave their homosexual identities." They can "overcome homosexuality" and become "ex-gays."

What do gays leave homosexuality for? For "sexual celibacy and even marriage," say the ads. This claim is so central that it is repeated in two of the ads. Yet celibacy is the cessation of activity, not of feelings. And although the ads suggest "even" the possibility of marriage, they do not claim that ex-gays stop having gay feelings or are heterosexual.

Clearly what becoming "ex-gay" means is ceasing homosexual behavior (referred to as the "lifestyle") and ceasing to think of oneself as homosexual (the "homosexual identity"). By doing these things, gays can "overcome" their homosexuality and be, not heterosexual, but "ex-gay."

The key to reading this language is that the religious right uses "homosexuality" not to mean homosexual feelings, but to mean engaging in homosexual activity. Otherwise the religious right could not say gays can "walk out of homosexuality . . . into sexual celibacy." For them, if you are not doing it, you are not being it.

In a similar vein, psychologist C. A. Tripp reports in his book The Homosexual Matrix that one interview subject told sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey he had once been homosexual but he had been cured by therapy. The man explained, "I have now cut out all of that and I don't even think of men -- except when I masturbate."

The same emphasis on behavior enables the evangelicals to refer to "nurture, not nature," as "the real cause of homosexual behavior." This is true enough since any particular act is chosen rather than genetically determined.

But the ads also offer a theory of how homosexual feelings arise that suggests they are "non-genetic" and therefore pathological (ignoring the possibility that they are neither genetic nor pathological). The ads assert that gays are gay because they have a defective "gender-identity," that is, a defective sense of their own gender-their own maleness or femaleness.

Anne Paulk, the "former lesbian" in the first ad, recounts how she was molested as a child and as a result felt unlovable, "rejected my own femininity" and "became drawn to other women who had what I felt was missing in me."

In other words, gays are gay because they felt rejection in childhood, failed to bond with a same-sex parent or experienced sexual violence and psychological abuse in childhood. Any of these can give children a deficient sense of their own gender identity, which leads them to try to remedy that deficiency by seeking sexual partners of the same sex. And that's how gays are made.

There are a host of inadequacies in this wacky little theory, starting with the fact that many of us had a reasonably happy childhood, good parental relationships and were not abused; some heterosexuals had far less happy childhoods than many of us did. The ex-gays ignore these contradictions.

A more basic problem is that viewing same-sex attraction as trying to make up for a deficiency in one's maleness or femaleness misses the whole point. As psychologist Tripp pointed out, most gay men are sure of their maleness, "sometimes super-sure of it." Homosexual desire, he says, is fueled not by the height of a person's self-assessment, but by the distance he feels between that assessment and his aspiration above it.

(Interestingly, the ex-gay theory also fails to account for heterosexual desire, unless heterosexuals are trying to make up for a deficiency of opposite sex qualities. Don't try to think about this.)

In the venerable religious tradition of frightening sinners by describing the wages of sin, the ads also warn of the dangers of homosexuality. But they do so somewhat dishonestly.

The ads warn that homosexual behavior accounts for a disproportionate amount of sexually transmitted disease (STD) and that gays exhibit high levels of self-destructive behavior.

There is no question STDs are common among a certain subset of sexually active gay men in urban areas, but they are not the majority of gays, however conspicuous they may be. STDs are not a problem for homosexuality per se, but for sexually very active gay men. The ads dishonestly imply that the threat is to all gay men.

No doubt too some urban gay men engage in excessive alcohol and drug use and other potentially harmful activities, but the article cited in a footnote (Pediatrics, May 1998) refers only to a subset of self-identified gay youth, not to all gay men. And the article states: "It is important to realize that the majority of [gay] youth cope with a variety of stressors to become healthy and productive adults." The ads ignore that "important" statement.

Similarly deceptive is the ads' claim that a great deal of "emotional and physical violence" is found "among homosexuals." The Pediatrics article cited for this states: "gay youth face violence and victimization" including "being threatened/injured with a weapon" by others, presumably people who do not like gays. So the physical violence is actually found "among" heterosexuals rather than gays.

In the end, the religious right has finally taken off the gloves, asserting that the cure -- the only cure -- for homosexuality is Christianity, and even it will not stop homosexual feelings, nor do evangelicals care much about that. They took their best shots, only to reveal the weakness of their claims and their arguments.

It turned out that all they had were pop-guns.

Originally appeared July 26, 1998, in the New York Times.

WHO'S AFRAID of former homosexuals?

At first blush, of course, it's easy to see why the recent newspaper advertisements promoting the "truth" about homosexuality - that it can allegedly be changed - might provoke a strong response from homosexuals and their allies.

The advertisements, sponsored by 15 religious-right organizations, featured Anne Paulk, a self-described "wife, mother, former lesbian," and were intended to advance the idea that homosexuality is a free and sinful "choice" and therefore unworthy of civil rights protections. This idea is marshaled by fundamentalists who, sadly, see nothing uncivil about describing another group of functioning, productive citizens as "diseased."

The campaign is clearly a desperate gambit to change the terms of the debate about homosexuality, a debate the religious right has been steadily, inexorably losing for two decades. The leaders of the far right realize that unless they can redefine homosexuality as a pathological illness, it is only a matter of time before the logic of civil rights protections embraces a group of people they find threatening.

But in its desperation, the right may well have overreached. A closer examination of "reparative therapy," the psychoanalytic treatment that allegedly turns homosexuals into heterosexuals, reveals it to be far less threatening to the argument for gay equality than first meets the eye. Indeed, in some ways, the arguments and ideas behind reparative therapy paradoxically strengthen, rather than weaken, the case for gay rights.

Take the notion of a "cure." Even the reparative therapists themselves believe it to be extremely difficult in most cases, requiring therapy five times a week often for years. They claim a "success" rate of about 30 percent, but their patient population is skewed to those most willing and desperate to make a change. A more realistic figure of a conversion rate for a representative population of gay men would be far lower.

As Freud himself argued, "In general, to undertake to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual is not much more promising than to do the reverse."

Freud was also ahead of the game in distinguishing between a psychoanalytic "conversion" and what most people think of as a cure.

He once wrote to a mother who was seeking his help to change her gay son: "In a general way, we cannot promise to achieve it."

Or, in the words of a contemporary reparative therapist, Steven Richfield, the most realistic goal of such therapy is "a satisfying heterosexual adaptation which is not jeopardized by the periodic intrusion of homosexual fantasies."

One of his patients puts it in more human terms: "I've come to accept that there is a part of me that I may never be able to get rid of. But maybe I can learn to live with it."

Then there's the notion that homosexuals "choose" their sexuality.

If the literature of reparative therapy teaches anything, it is how deep homosexuality runs in a person's identity, and how enormously difficult it is to alter. Most reparative therapists think sexual orientation is fixed in early development before the age of 18 months or, at the latest, three years.

The most prominent psychotherapist in the field, Charles Socarides (whose own son is gay), specifically denies that homosexuality is a choice. What he and other reparative therapists argue, in fact, is something very advantageous to the argument for gay equality: Even if homosexuality is not genetic but environmental, it is still involuntary.

In other words, homosexuals have as much choice over their sexual orientation as they do over their race or sex.

Of course, reparative therapists would be appalled at the comparison of sexual orientation with gender or race. For them, homosexuality, while unchosen and deeply ingrained, is still a pathology or psychological disorder.

But this part of their argument is increasingly unpersuasive. As more and more gay men and women live and work openly in our society, the clearer it becomes that they are not demons, disease-carriers or psychopaths. We have our problems - gay men in particular - but the problems are recognizably human problems: of love, commitment, sexuality and intimacy.

Moreover, the contribution gay people make and have always made to society and civilization is hardly the mark of psychological dysfunction. I wonder whether Trent Lott, who recently compared homosexuals to compulsive thieves, has ever read Whitman or Proust or Auden. Or listened to the music of Copland, Tchaikovsky or Britten. If he does, does he think: kleptomaniacs?

There is, however, one final glimpse of hope in the rhetoric of the religious right in this matter. In its advertisements, the right admirably insists that "ex-gays" be allowed a forum, and to be free from abuse, derision or condescension.

I couldn't agree more. The kind of struggle that these people have had in their lives is a struggle that just about every gay person recognizes. It is the struggle to become who you are. If someone genuinely feels he cannot live with himself as a gay man and decides to submit to grueling therapy and join a particular sect of American Protestantism to be able to live a heterosexual life, then who am I to stand in his way? These conflicts are so deep, these choices so personal, that only the individual can resolve them.

But by the same token, doesn't the "ex-gay" owe the same tolerance to me? Shouldn't this struggle be deemed beyond the reach of politics and coercion? If one owes it to an ex-gay not to cast aspersions on her sincerity and mental health, should one not also owe it to a lesbian?

I would not, moreover, deny someone her civil rights because she resolved this issue in a heterosexual way. I wouldn't deny her the right to marry the person she loves, nor would I deem her beneath the civic responsibility to defend her country in the military. On what principled, nonsectarian grounds, then, would she plausibly deny those same civil rights to me?

In a strange but beautiful way, then, the religious right may have finally stumbled onto the true moral ground. The more you think about it, the rights of former homosexuals are truly indistinguishable from the rights of gay men and women. Those rights include the pursuit of happiness as one sees fit, and equal protection of the laws in a republic where no single religion is privileged.

So let the leaders of the religious right continue their battle for self-determination. But let them apply that principle universally. They will discover that they have joined the gay rights movement after all.