After I posted yesterday (here) about the noteworthy silence of the American Catholic center re: the Iowa and Vermont decisions this week to abolish obstacles to marriage for gay citizens, an interesting discussion ensued. These comments are actually at the following posting (here), but as Carl notes when he starts this thread, he’s responding to the previous posting, which brought up the response of American Catholic centrists to gay issues and gay people.The discussion is valuable, and I’d like to build a reader-response posting around it. Carl notes,
It occurred to me that there is a process unfolding here. Initially, those who were the vocal "far left" gave up and left. Rather than silencing their voices, the right then began directing their rhetoric at the "not quite so far left". This caused the NQSFL to become the vocal "far left" who eventually gave up and left.
Now, the "left of middle" became the "far left". Rather than silencing their voices, the right began directing their rhetoric at the left of middle, who now became the "far left", who became more vocal, but eventually gave up and left.
The reason you don’t hear the voice of the middle, is that the middle keeps getting pushed to the left. At that point, they become vocal, get fed up and leave. Those who are the far left today, are in actuality, the middle and right of middle of yesterday.
And Colleen replies,
Bill, I agree with Carl's assessment as it pertains to our generations, but with the younger generations the process may be going in the opposite direction.
The longer the right keeps screaming, kids that used to be more moderate and now leaning more to the left, and getting vocal about it. My daughter is just one example and especially on the issues of equal rights, economic injustice, and the ecology.
The combination of the two events does not bode well for organized religion. Toni Blair is more or less speaking to the same phenomenon and getting smashed by the 'boomer' right.
I agree with both points. As I’ve noted before on this thread, in my view, in the final decades of the 20th century, neoconservatives succeeded in moving both the political and the religious conversation to the right, so that what is now considered the political center and the center in many mainstream churches is well to the right of what was considered the center in previous decades.
As that has happened, the left has been marginalized (and has often assisted in marginalizing itself through ideological in-fighting). What we may be seeing now both politically and religiously is a new opening to the political and religious left—though I suspect that this opening is more fragile and endangered than many of us would like to hope.
At the same time, there’s a demographic shift that is definitely moving away from the neoconservative political and religious ideas that have dominated the American imagination in the past several decades. And that shift is terrifying to the political and religious right.
The shift is very apparent on the issue of gay marriage. A number of compelling demographic studies indicate that, because of the move away from right-wing politics and religion Colleen is describing among younger voters, the last good shot the right has—nationwide—to ban gay marriage is 2012. After that the demographic curve veers sharply away from support for initiatives banning gay marriage.
Look, for instance, at Nate Silver’s recent map of the future of gay marriage, state by state, which is gaining a lot of attention on blogs this week (here). This projects a demographic trend based on various data, in which support for gay marriage moves inexorably through the nation as younger voters begin to vote—though that trend predictably lags far behind in the evangelical heartland of the Southeast, my region of the country, which has been dead wrong about its interpretation of the bible in the past, and seems intent on proving itself dead wrong yet again.
In response to this demographic trend, what does the religious and political right intend to do? In my view, Bruce Wilson is absolutely on target when he argues, in several recent postings at the Talk to Action website (here and here) that the right will now make a concerted effort to move African American and Latino voters to the right, using the gay marriage issue (and gay lives) as a wedge.
Why did Tony Perkins respond to the Vermont vote this week with the seemingly bizarre observation that “same-sex 'marriage' is a movement driven by wealthy homosexual activists and a liberal elite determined to destroy not only the institution of marriage, but democracy as well” (here)? He did so because he and other right-wing political strategists hope to stir up a politics of social resentment among Latino and African American voters.
The meme being developed here is a meme of privileged white gays illicitly claiming victim status, when they are actually far more privileged than are people of color. This meme depends on resentment as its driving force. It depends on suggesting that gay rights are a special privilege being demanded by a pampered group of largely white citizens.
This meme, of course, willingly and deliberately falsifies the real, complex, picture of gay life in the U.S., which comprises citizens from all walks of life, from all racial backgrounds, living in every region of the country. As I have noted on this blog, studies indicate that the wealthy-gay myth the right is exploiting here is without any basis in fact. Many gay and lesbian Americans and their families suffer economic privation, and that privation is likely to be more pronounced where laws do not protect gays from discrimination.
It is also likely to be more pronounced among gays and lesbians of color—that is, among the brothers and sisters and sons and daughters of those the political and religious right hope to manipulate by using anti-gay prejudice as a means of winning votes for the right. This is a politics that depends on the willingness of those targeted to repudiate the gay and lesbian members of their own families.
This is ugly. It is cynical. It is, above all, strategic on the part of the religious and political right. This is a strategy that will continue to have play in American politics as long as the groups being targeted in this way allow themselves to be so targeted and so used, as long as churches do not repudiate polarizing and hate-mongering political strategies that betray the central values of the gospel, and as long as those in the comfortable center refuse to risk engagement and continue their comfortable silence. And, as Colleen notes, until the demographic shift now underway among younger voters relegates this politics of ugly, cynical scapegoating of a stigmatized minority useful to those who depend on hate and resentment to drive the political process to the dustbin of history.
Meanwhile, for my money, chief among the reasons Mr. Gingrich has just become Catholic is to try to keep cementing the strong alliance between the evangelical right, the Catholic right, and neonconservative political leaders. Demonizing gay people and creating a politics of fear and resentment around gay lives and the gay marriage issue is central to that alliance. As Frank Cocozzelli persuasively argues in a Talk to Action posting today (here), Newt and those strategizing with him now hope to ride into the White House in 2012. And the horse they believe they can ride in on is the horse of homophobic fear and resentment.
