The same issue of New York Times yesterday that contained Maureen Dowd’s op-ed piece about the Catholic church’s current muddle, about which I just blogged, also has a reflection by Frank Rich on the Mel Gibson saga about which I commented several times in the past week.
Rich’s take: Gibson’s latest round of mind-boggling statements about various minority groups is nothing new. What has changed is the cultural context that is receiving those statements.
In 2004, when defenders of Gibson like Fightin’ Bill Donohue of the Catholic League made outrageously anti-Semitic statements about Gibson’s outrageously anti-Semitic “The Passion of the Christ,” and when everybody and his grandfather fell all over themselves to praise the movie, Gibson got a free pass for his longstanding abusive language about targeted minority groups.
Today, things are different , Rich notes:
The cultural wave that crested with “The Passion” was far bigger than Gibson. He was simply a symptom and beneficiary of a moment when the old religious right and its political and media shills were riding high. In 2010, the American ayatollahs’ ranks have been depleted by death (Falwell), retirement (James Dobson) and rent boys (too many to name). What remains of that old guard is stigmatized by its identification with poisonous crusades, from the potentially lethal antihomosexuality laws in Uganda to the rehabilitation campaign for the “born-again” serial killer David Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”) in America.
And I hope he’s right. I hope Rich is correct in his conclusion that, in the response to Mel Gibson’s latest hateful diatribes, we’re hearing “the last gasps of an American era.”
In this conclusion, much hinges, however, on the demographic changes that are said to be re-making American culture, with the browning of America and the coming of age of a generation of citizens who do not share many of the blatant prejudices of the generation now relinquishing control of the political sphere.
In my view, though, we’re still not there yet, and we remain in a dangerous time in which savage backlash is still possible, as hate groups massage powerful national media narratives about the threat posed by illegal immigrants, gays, and other vulnerable minority groups. As Richard Socarides points out, though many LGBT activists are praising the recent Massachusetts court decision challenging the constitutionality of DOMA and the trial about prop 8 in California as a tipping point for gay rights in the U.S., alternative voices—like those of Jonathan Rauch and Jonathan Capehart—still warn us of the potential for backlash.
Of the potential for powerful, ugly backlash that could set the gay rights agenda in the U.S. back decades.
Through it all, as I’ve consistently argued on this blog, the support of the current president and his administration for gay rights remains crucial. And it’s just not there.
This places LGBT citizens in an extremely dangerous situation, in which promises have been made to us and broken, in which crumbs have been tossed our way, and in which the religious and political right are now hankering for blood—in the full awareness that if they go for the jugular of the gay community, the current administration and the Democratic Congress will not demonstrate a shred of moral rectitude and stand up to defend the gay citizens of the U.S.
And why should they, when their “faith-based” supporters include evangelicals and Catholics of the ilk of Michael Sean Winters, who wrote recently in one of his articles to which I just linked in a previous posting,
They [i.e., “libs,” to use Winters’ term] want restrictions on abortion lifted. They want gay marriage enacted. They want an end to the war in Afghanistan. Who knows what else. Not only would these policies have precisely zero chance of getting through the Congress, they would alienate long-time Democrats like me.
With friends like these in the Democratic coalition that has promised to grant long-withheld rights to LGBT citizens, who needs enemies? (News flash to Michael Sean Winters: when interracial marriage was enacted, it stood precisely zero-chance of getting through state legislatures or the national legislature. Ditto with the Civil Rights act of 1964, or the integration of the armed forces by Truman. In each instance, a combination of principled, determined leadership at the level of the White House and judicial refusal to continue unconstitutional discrimination trumped popular opinion, which ran heavily against these necessary steps towards the realization of democracy.)
I hope Rich is right. When I read Winters and his threats to withhold support from a Democratic administration that might fight against the injustice of denying marriage to gay citizens, I remind myself not to forget the warnings of Rauch and Capehart. We may be in for reaction—savage backlash—rather than the diminution of prejudice that Rich predicts.
And if that backlash occurs, Christians of the “left” (read: center-right) like Michael Sean Winters will be working alongside their right-wing brothers to turn the clock back to 1950 for their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.
