IGF CultureWatch

First appeared in April 1999 in Miami's Weekly News and other publications.

SHOULD GAY MEN AND LESBIANS arm themselves for self-preservation? The question itself comes across as incendiary. Most gay folks, after all, abhor violence. Firearms are a part of the world of criminals, thugs, and bigoted rednecks. Guns are the weapons of patriarchy. We seek to live in peace and want to end, not instigate, human brutality.

But the world doesn't seem so simple anymore. Gay people constantly face the threat of violence. Every day we are attacked, beaten and, yes, even killed. The media seem only recently to have discovered this, with the high-powered coverage of the sensational murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, followed by the brutal killing of Billy Jack Gaither in Alabama. But scan any gay paper and it's hard to avoid stories of gay people badly beaten and bashed in what are termed "unprovoked attacks."

I've been thinking about the issue lately, after reading a column by Jonathan Rauch in the March 20, 1999 issue of National Journal, a Washington-based policy weekly. Rauch is also a contributor to the Independent Gay Forum -- a group of gay writers exploring new approaches to old problems. He begins his column, titled "And Don't Forget Your Gun," with an anecdote about Tom, who found himself "running, possibly for his life," one summer evening in San Jose, as he and a friend were walking through "a dicey neighborhood." They caught the eye of a group of urban youth, one of whom yelled, "Hey, you faggots!" The gang then rose "like a flock of gulls...shouting taunts and threats: When we're done with you, they'll find your bodies!"

As Rauch tells it, what happened next stopped the attackers in their tracks. "Tom suddenly stops, turns, and levels a semiautomatic handgun" that he pulled out of his backpack. The gang turns tail and runs.

The moral: protect thyself. Being in shape and knowing some jujitsu isn't enough. Buy a handgun and learn how to use it.

But, you say, putting more guns on the street is nothing but an invitation to urban mayhem. If everyone carried a concealed weapon, our cities would all become Dodge City. Arming the citizenry is no way to stop crime. Being pro-gun is a surrender to violence.

The pro-gun lobby points out that violent crimes, including street attacks, actually decrease in jurisdictions that have okayed carrying concealed weapons. But having just said this, I can hear the gasps among some readers. The fact that gay people could possibly be on the same side of an issue as the National Rifle Association -- the very personification of a "conservative" lobby -- is enough to provoke some activists to come "gunning" for me, if only metaphorically. We all know that Charlton Heston and his friends are the enemy, right?

Now I know this issue is complex. I suspect that I could never bring myself to own -- or especially use -- a gun. Apart from the danger of self-injury, I don't think I would ever risk taking someone else's life, even in an attack situation. I know many other gay men and women feel the same.

But I also believe we should at least think about guns more than we have. Gay people are a minority, and minorities make easy targets. Look at Kosovo. At the risk of reaching too far to make a point, it's worth noting that the Nazis strengthened gun control laws after taking power in 1933, and began house-to-house searches to discover firearms in the homes of suspected opponents. Soon after, Jews were barred from businesses involving firearms, and on November 11, 1938, Hitler issued a decree forbidding Jews from possessing firearms, knives, or truncheons under any circumstances and to surrender them immediately, thus ensuring that no effective defense could be waged against his genocide (which began in earnest in 1941).

Gays in America aren't in that situation, but we confront "little Hitlers" every day, and some of us don't survive. What if a gun defense were common enough that would-be attackers couldn't be sure of what they were in for if they decided on a fun night of fag bashing? It's not an unreasonable query. Almost half of all Americans live in the 31 states with so-called "shall issue" laws, which require the authorities to approve a permit for anyone over 21 who is mentally sound, has no criminal record, pays a fee, and takes a gun safety course. Should gay people be encouraged to take advantage of the right to bear arms?

There's another reason I've been thinking about how complicated and confused the whole "gun issue" is. I just saw Bernadette Peters in the Broadway revival of "Annie Get Your Gun." My fellow gays in the audience went wild over the show, which tells the story of sharp-shooter Annie Oakley (who discovers, to her chagrin, that "you can't get a man with a gun"). The real Annie Oakley was arguably the first great female professional athlete in America, and spent her life breaking down barriers against women. But she generally isn't lionized by contemporary feminists, according to a recent biography. Why? One reason is that she advocated that women learn how to use guns and arm themselves. During her life, she encouraged the formation of Annie Oakley gun clubs for women, which sprouted across the country. That legacy leaves many modern feminists and liberals uneasy.

I suspect most gay people will never agree to carrying lethal weapons. But rigorous debate on the pros and cons of arming ourselves for self-defense, rather than a simplistic rejection, just might lead some to consider the option, which could mean more lives saved, rather than lost, due to guns.

First appeared March 20, 1999, in the National Journal; slightly revised.

MY FRIEND TOM is running, possibly for his life. It is a sweet summer evening in San Jose, and he and a colleague have just left work and are walking through a dicey neighborhood when they catch the eye of some young men, as many as 20 of them, sitting around an old car in a driveway. "Hey, you fucking faggots!'' one of the young men shouts. Tom and his colleague walk past, quickly, but their persecutors rise like a flock of gulls and follow, shouting taunts and threats: "When we're done with you, they'll find your fucking bodies!'' The two pick up the pace and the men come after them. ``Run,'' says Tom, but the gang breaks into pursuit while Tom, trying to hold the pace, gropes in his backpack. The two reach a streetlight and there, where everybody can see, Tom suddenly stops, turns, and levels a semiautomatic handgun.

Oh.

At that point, the young men chasing my friend lost their enthusiasm for blood sport. Tom and his colleague left the neighborhood as fast as they could. And if there had been no gun? "There's no question in my mind,'' says Tom, "that my friend and I would have been at least very seriously beaten, and maybe killed.'' I asked how the gang reacted to the gun. Tom says their leader demanded officiously: "Have you got a permit for that?''

Tom didn't have a permit, which is bad -- but then he probably couldn't have gotten one if he had tried, which is also bad. California is among the states where, if you want permission to carry a concealed weapon, you have to prove that you are of ``good moral character'' and that you have some special reason to carry. Tom could have shown that he was of good character, but he had no special reason. Until, of course, the reason arose one summer night.

As recently as a dozen years ago, almost every state was like California. Today, by contrast, almost half of all Americans live in the 31 states with so-called ``shall issue'' laws, which require the authorities to approve a permit for (typically) anyone over 21 who is mentally sound, has no criminal record, pays a fee, and takes a gun-safety course. Florida began the stampede in 1987. Before then, about 17,000 people in the state had concealed-weapon permits; today, about 250,000 do. The Daytona Beach News-Journal notes that a number of local judges have permits. ``I became convinced that some of these people might become dangerous,'' one judge told the paper. ``So I took a firearms course, got the permit, and kept a weapon handy in the courthouse.''

Any time now, a national majority will live in ``shall issue'' states. Colorado, Missouri (with a referendum in April), Nebraska, and Ohio (with a new Republican governor) are all candidates to switch to ``shall issue'' this year, with the noisy support of the National Rifle Association. Grover G. Norquist, a conservative activist who expects to join the NRA board later this year, busies himself lobbying for concealed-carry when he is not busy lobbying for lower taxes--both issues, he says, being sides of the same conservative coin. "The more people who view themselves as independent of the state,'' he says, "the more people who are available to the center-right coalition.''

In effect, and to the horror of many liberals and gun- control groups, America is now running an uncontrolled national experiment in self-policing. There are something like 70 million handguns in the country, and the odds have increased dramatically that today you passed one of them in the street.

So what do we know about the results of the experiment? First, that about 1 percent to 5 percent of a state's population typically take out concealed-gun permits. Second, we know what does not happen: America does not turn into the Dodge City of myth, with fender-benders becoming hailstorms of lead. (Actually, Dodge City, Kan., wasn't the Dodge City of myth. It was much safer than today's Washington, D.C., with homicides running to one or two per cattle-trading season and marshals mostly concerned, writes the historian Roger Lane, ``with arresting drunks and other misdemeanants.'') People who are willing to register with the sheriff, pay a fee, and take a gun-safety course turn out to be unusually law-abiding, safer even than off-duty cops. In Florida, only 0.13 percent of concealed-carry licenses were revoked from 1987-97 for criminal activity of any sort. No murders seem to have been committed by people carrying licensed guns in public. The ``shall issue'' law may actually deter bad behavior, since if you get into any sort of trouble you can lose your license.

What is harder to say is what we all want to know. Do concealed weapons, lawfully carried, reduce crime, or increase it?

The most comprehensive study of the subject is also the most controversial. John R. Lott Jr., an economist at the University of Chicago Law School, assembled data for all 3,054 U.S. counties over 18 years (1977 through 1994) and controlled for all sorts of variables. ``This study uses the most comprehensive set of control variables yet used in a study of crime, let alone any previous study on gun control,'' he writes in his book More Guns, Less Crime, published last year by the University of Chicago Press.

The title gives away the punchline. ``When state concealed-handgun laws went into effect in a county, murders fell by about 8 percent, rapes fell by 5 percent, and aggravated assaults fell by 7 percent.'' (Note: This is after controlling for other variables.) ``On the other hand, property-crime rates increased after nondiscretionary laws were implemented. . . . Criminals respond to the threat of being shot while committing such crimes as robbery by choosing to commit less risky crimes that involve minimal contact with the victim.''

Moreover, and maybe more surprising, Lott also finds that women and blacks -- who are, for different reasons, disproportionately vulnerable to violence -- benefit disproportionately from ``shall issue'' laws. Thus, for example, each new concealed-gun permit issued to a woman increases women's overall safety three to four times as much as a new permit to a man increases men's safety.

In 1997, two economists, Ian Ayres and Steven Levitt, found that people who install LoJack radio-tracing systems in their cars pay about $600 each for devices that, by deterring auto theft, save society more than 10 times that amount. The trick is that LoJack is hidden; the thief doesn't know which car has it (steering-wheel clubs, by contrast, just displace theft to unprotected cars). If Lott is right, concealed guns have the same sort of effect. In Oregon, he finds, each new concealed-carry permit saves the state $3,500; in Pennsylvania, $5,000. So law- abiding people who pack heat are doing the rest of us a favor.

If Lott is right. Predictably, other scholars have found all sorts of things wrong with his work. ``Lott's research is so fundamentally flawed in a number of different ways that his research really can't tell us anything about what the effects of these laws are,'' says Jon Vernick, of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. Also predictably, and somewhat annoyingly, the results of concealed-gun studies tend to coincide with the authors' predisposition toward gun control generally. Gun nuts love ``shall issue.'' Gun-control nuts hate it.

This is annoying because it is so obtuse. The question of whether guns should be available readily is completely distinct, logically and empirically, from the question of who should be carrying guns around. As it happens, I've lived in two countries with strict gun laws, Japan and Great Britain, and if I could press a button and make America's guns vanish, I would do so in a blink (and I'd repeal the Second Amendment while I was at it). It turns out that a country with few guns is a better place to live than a country with, say, a fifth of a billion guns.

But the fact is that America is awash with guns, and this fact is not going to change in my lifetime, and criminals carry guns already. A rational country would make guns harder for criminals to get (that's gun control) but easier for lawful citizens to carry (that's "shall issue''). By contrast, the current policy in states such as California--easy to get, hard to carry--is perversity incarnate.

In 1999, the debate is not about whether ``shall issue'' causes much harm -- by now we would have heard of any mayhem -- but whether it does much good. So why in the world are liberals clinging to opposition to concealed-carry? No doubt because the gun debate has been infected by the culture wars, and people have taken up sides, and liberals feel obliged to revile any proposal supported by the likes of the NRA and Grover Norquist. This is a pity, as thinking with one's knees usually is. Liberals should be on Tom's side.

WE ARE ALL Tinky-Winky now.

And I mean that in the scariest sense.

Jerry Falwell has expressed deep concern that a children's TV character named Tinky-Winky on the popular show, Teletubbies, is homosexual. The evidence is quite convincing to Falwell, who lays out his case in the February edition of the National Liberty Journal. Tinky-Winky has the voice of a boy but he carries a purse. Further, according to Falwell, "He is purple -- the gay-pride color; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle -- the gay-pride symbol."

It's been a long time since a prominent real American has denounced a television character, so there's certainly reason to have a little fun with this. And at least when Dan Quayle went after Murphy Brown, the discussion could sound serious. This time around, it's tough to get too high-minded when you're castigating someone named Tinky-Winky, and explications are coming from a production company called Itsy Bitsy Entertainment.

But there are two reasons to take this story very seriously.

First, it gives the lie to one of the religious right's most frequent arguments about why they are not being mean-spirited and bigoted about homosexuality?hating the sin, but loving the sinner. This argument is often stated another way. The objection to homosexuality, it is claimed, does not have to do with sexual orientation, but with sexual conduct.

Lesbians and gay men have long known that was simply disingenuous, and Falwell now shows that it is. I doubt that, even taking his fevered imaginings to their most absurd lengths, Falwell believes Tinky-Winky was having sex with anyone. In short, this case is not about Tinky-Winky's sexual conduct, it is about Tinky-Winky's sexual orientation. Falwell's condemnation of Tinky-Winky is based only on factors he believes suggest Tinky-Winky could be identified publicly as gay --use of a color associated with gay rights, the triangle that gays adopted from their Nazi persecutors, and use of a "purse" by a "boy," neither of which can reliably be determined in the fanciful world of the Teletubbies.

In all of this, sexual conduct is entirely absent, and, given the character, is nearly unthinkable. How could this case, then, be about anything other than sexual orientation entirely independent of sexual conduct? And if that's true, then how is Falwell's objection to homosexuality not simply prejudice against people who do no more than identify themselves publicly as homosexual, without taking anything else about that person into consideration? Does Falwell believe, could Falwell believe that Tinky-Winky is a sinner without having had sex? And if he's not a sinner, why is he a bad role model for children?

That leads to the far more important reason this story is worth consideration. Falwell is not alone in spending an awful lot of his free time worrying about who is and who is not homosexual. Since he cannot look at sexual conduct to "prove" his case, he has to look for other evidence. But that search for evidence, the very need to search for evidence, should be troubling, and not just for lesbians and gay men.

When the desire to root out homosexuality becomes so relentless that even whimsical TV characters are under suspicion and investigation, how can heterosexuals escape the frenzy? The stigma about homosexuality has long been the chief problem in closed environments like the military, where heterosexual women in particular have been suspected of being lesbian. This places on them a burden of "proving" their heterosexuality. But how does a heterosexual prove heterosexuality? That question continues to plague the American military.

But Falwell helps us understand that this isn't just a problem in the military. Against a prejudice this dogmatic and about a factor that is so deeply personal and subjective, every heterosexual is vulnerable. On the day the Tinky-Winky story broke, the popular television series, "Dawson's Creek" aired an episode in which a high school boy is suspected of being gay -- for reading a poem he wrote that could be interpreted to mean that. Or it could have had the meaning he thought it had when he wrote it, which was not at all about secret homosexual desire. Similarly, shows like "The Simpsons," "Seinfeld," "Friends" and many others have explored, in comedic ways, how heterosexuals react when suspected of being gay. In Falwell's world, homosexuality is something everybody has to worry about.

This is one of the ways prejudice about homosexuality is different from prejudice about race or gender. Few white people are suspected of being black or Asian, and very few who do not intentionally want to do so are mistaken for a member of the opposite sex. Yet anyone can be suspected of being homosexual. Anyone.

And once suspected, the entire array of discriminatory behaviors -- from discomfort in the workplace to firing, from rude comments to physical violence -- are available. Lesbians and gay men know this from long experience. I'm sure many other lesbians and gay men are having the same mixed feelings I am seeing how the prejudice can run out of control. Heterosexuals shouldn't have to prove to anyone their sexual orientation in order to escape prejudice. But neither should homosexuals, or television characters or anyone.

Tinky-Winky is probably going to be fine, as will the children who watch him or her or it. But as long as the Falwells of the world continue to obsess about sexual orientation, Tinky-Winky's plight illustrates how our basic humanity is under attack as morality itself is being reduced to cartoon size.

SHOULD THE GAY CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT rename itself "The Transgender Rights Movement?" You'd think so, if you believe the recent comments of some of our leaders. For example, openly gay Houston City Councilwoman Annise Parker recently wrote, "Transgender is a much broader term than gay, and encompasses the entire group of gays and lesbians" who by their choice of same-sex mates "transgress" gender boundaries.

Georgia gay leader Cindy Abel also calls gays "gender transgressors." In a recent column she proclaimed, "We're not so different from those whose internal identity doesn't match their exterior bodies."

Since when?

This whole business about gays as "gender transgressors" and not matching our "exterior bodies" calls to mind the long-discredited theories of the early German gay civil rights advocate, Karl Ulrichs. In a well-intentioned effort to help gays in his time, Ulrichs concocted a theory that homosexuals constitute an "intermediate" or "third" sex - not really male or female. He even invented a special name for us: urnings. "That an actual man would feel sexual love for a man is impossible," Ulrichs wrote in 1870. "The urning is not a true man. He is a mixture of man and woman. He is man only in terms of body build." Ulrichs's theory was, of course, completely wrong.

Parker, Abel, and other gender rebels (some of them transgender but most not) often cast their theories as a plea for the "inclusion" of transgender issues in the gay civil rights struggle. However, they are nothing more than the modern-day inheritors of the embarrassing legacy of Ulrichs and his hypothesis about gays as some kind of third sex. Some people must have not been to school in the last century. They are trying to resuscitate the urning.

Our new gender rebels argue that gays transgress at least one boundary expected of them, whether male or female: they have sex with people of the same sex. This one fact, we are told, makes gays natural upstarts against the very idea of defined gender roles. At heart, like Ulrichs, they really don't believe that an "actual man" can love another man. If a man loves another man it must be because he challenges the very concept of manhood itself.

The evidence concerning how we gays see ourselves suggests otherwise. A recent study by psychologist Michael Bailey concluded that gays see themselves in gender-conforming terms and seek gender-conforming traits in prospective mates. Bailey studied the personal ads in gay magazines. Out of 673 personal ads placed by gay men, 98 percent described themselves as masculine or in similar terms. Of 210 ads placed by gay women, 59 percent described themselves as feminine or in similar terms. If Bailey had not counted athletic activities as masculine, an even larger percentage of the gay women's ads described themselves in feminine terms.

Equally frustrating for our gender rebels, Bailey found that 96 percent of gay men and 80 percent of gay women sought partners with gender-conforming traits. Bailey also studied gays who never placed such ads and came to the same conclusions.

None of this is very shocking to those of us who live in the real world, as opposed to the fantasy-land of the gender rebels and their urnings. All of us, gay and straight, exhibit gender-nonconforming behavior at some times and to varying degrees. Are we all gender transgressors by that logic? A single riotous act is not exactly a revolution.

Among gays, moreover, gender nonconformance has historically served the function of signaling to other gays who we are. Gender nonconformance is an observable trait, after all; homosexuality is not. And we have needed to conceal ourselves because of anti-gay prejudice. Gender nonconforming behavior among gays may often be, in that sense, a vestige of the need to "hide" produced by the very homophobia we are supposed to be fighting.

And the fact that some of us occasionally exhibit gender nonconformance no more makes the gay civil rights struggle a "transgender movement" than the fact that some of us have good taste in design makes it an "interior-decorating movement." All such reductionist theories, whether invented by our enemies or by our supposed friends, confine gay life to a particular pattern and thus do us a great disservice. They fuel stereotypes that hurt us - not because being an effeminate man or a butch woman is bad - but because they are stereotypes.

Our gender rebels may retort: "Fine. Gays may not be fighting oppressive patriarchal gender roles, but we ought to start fighting them." That's an interesting but much more radical argument, because it shifts the debate from focusing on what gays are to what gays should be.

Poor souls, our rebels must try to enlist us in a war against gender that few of us believe in, and indeed, one in which most of us appear to be fierce partisans for the other side. It seems that someone, whether from the far right or the far left, is always trying to tell us how to live.

But the gender rebels are entitled to their idiosyncratic strategy for achieving equality. I will leave them to the care of Karl Ulrichs, the "third sex" theory, the mythical urnings, and the other anti-gay stereotypes they hold so dear. We gender patriots have work to do.

"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.