Fred Clarkson on Christian Right's Determination to Renew Itself by Alliance of Catholic Leaders and Evangelical Right: Important Discussion

As one week ends and another begins, I want to take note of a very important new article by Fred Clarkson  at the Political Research Associates' website. It's entitled "Christian Right Seeks Renewal in Deepening Catholic-Protestant Alliance." Fred's thesis is that, far from being moribund, as many political commentators keep suggesting, the religious right is alive and well in American politics, and is now renewing itself via an alliance between the U.S. Catholic bishops and right-wing evangelicals.

DADT Ends: Celebrations, Unfinished Business

The "don't ask, don't tell" ban on service by openly gay members of the military officially ended at midnight last night, and I'm celebrating, though, as John Aravosis notes at Americablog Gay this morning, there's still much work to do to assure full equality of LGBT service members with other soldiers.  There are still not equal partner benefits for gay couples in the military, for instance.  (And that subject remains always in the forefront of my own mind, since, as I've shared on this blog frequently, I don't have health insurance and Steve's employer won't provide partner benefits.  It's a constant struggle, deferring necessary health care as long as possible, since we simply can't afford insurance or expensive health care for me . . . . And it's a struggle too many folks in our nation live with; and more folks shouldn't be placed in this position of tremendous anxiety due to sheer prejudice, in my view).

Remembering: One Gay Soldier Who Gave His Life

We Americans are a famously insular folk, and readers of this blog in other places may not be aware that today is a national holiday in the U.S.: Memorial Day, a day set aside to remember those who have died in the nation's wars.  Steve and I are using the holiday weekend to spend some time in Minnesota, so that he can visit his mother, whom he hasn't seen since his father's funeral.  And his aunts who are Benedictine sisters, who remain constantly welcoming and affirming of us as a gay couple, while Steve's über-Catholic siblings don't welcome us.  One of them even warned us not to come home to visit his mother on this whirlwind trip. 

Prominent Right-Wing Catholic Priest-Activist Fr. Euteneuer Caught in Scandal

Remember Fr. Thomas Euteneuer, the priest-director of the high-profile right-wing Catholic Republican party front "pro-life" beltway organization Human Life International?  Euteneuer came on my radar screen back in 2009 when he published a Good Friday homily entitled “Good Friday: The World’s First Exorcism,” which he apparently first delivered in 2006, and which he then published on his HLI  blog in 2009.  A homily that was, well, flat crazy.  And not a little dangerous.  

Cindy Jacobs Explains It All for Us: DADT Repealed, Birds Fall from the Sky

Max Brantley at the Arkansas Times blog notes (citing Right-Wing Watch) that right-wing Christian nutcase homophobe evangelist Cindy Jacobs explains it all for us: Jacobs explains why birds fell from the sky on New Year's eve in Beebe, Arkansas, that is.

DADT Ends, and Some Catholics Refuse to Rejoice

With the end to official discrimination against a targeted minority in the American military, I've received several fascinating comments here by someone who works as publicity director for a Catholic anti-abortion group in the U.S.  He's clearly intently unhappy to see legalized discrimination against gay human beings ended in the military.

John Lewis and Louis Gohmert on Discrimination in the Military: Who Owns the Future of American Democracy?

Another way to put the point about Archbishop Dolan and Bill Donohue: these battles about who owns central Christian symbols are really also about who will ultimately prevail as history moves along, and as a rich, multifaceted tradition like Catholicism moves along with the current of history.  And as the meaning of its central symbols unfolds under the impulse of historical development, as believers appropriate the symbols and apply them to their experience in ever-shifting cultural contexts.

Top Catholic Chaplain Opposes End of Discrimination Against Gay Service Members

 

 

You know that line in the Catholic catechism that deplores discrimination against gay and lesbian folks?  Well, it appears not all Catholic pastoral officials really believe the catechism, when it comes to this issue.  As Eugene McMullen notes at Religion Dispatches today, the Catholic Archbishop for the Military Services Timothy Broglio opposes ending the ban on openly gay soldiers in the American armed forces. 

Chris Weigant: Attach DADT Repeal to Tax-Cut Bill

And here's a clever political proposal: Chris Weigant suggests removing the don't ask, don't tell repeal from the military budget bill and attaching it to the tax-cut deal.

Military DADT Report Undercuts Religious Right Arguments about Religious Freedom

When the religious right loses the military, it has really lost any claim to represent the cultural mainstream.  The attempt to argue that permitting openly gay people to serve in the military will inhibit religious freedom of chaplains is absolutely disingenuous.  It turns on the premise that if chaplains don't have gay folks to single out, target, and bash, they might as well shut down shop--since there's no other sin on which to focus.

Andrew Sullivan on the White Evangelical Exception in American Politics

 

Andrew Sullivan writes yesterday about "the white evangelical exception" in American politics.  As he notes, the latest Pew study about gays in the military shows Americans favoring an end to DADT and its ban on gays in the military by 2-1.  

In the News: Mel Gibson and Waning of Religious Right, Obama Paradox, DADT, Dostoevskian Paranoia of Catholic Leaders

My posting today (and for a few days ahead) may be light, since Steve and I are traveling to North Carolina to visit a friend.  Steve’s birthday arrives this week, and we plan to celebrate it with a friend in Charlotte.  I do hope to find time to keep up with this blog, but am uncertain how much time I’ll have as we drive.

Today, I’d like to note some recent articles that touch on themes about which I’ve blogged here.  I wrote yesterday that, as much as I’d like to agree with Frank Rich that the reaction to Mel Gibson’s latest rants signals that we’ve entered a new era of waning religious right influence, I remain cautious. 

Aaron Belkin on Pentagon DADT Survey: Everything Turns on Leadership

Aaron Belkin at Huffington Post, offering a sane assessment of the Pentagon survey asking troops how they'd feel about showering with a gay soldier (well, the survey leads off all its questions about gays by using the word "homosexual," a word known to bias surveys about gay rights and gay people):

Alternet's Weekly Take-Action Campaign: End DOMA

Alternet has just announced that the top item in its weekly take-action campaign is calling for the end of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Alternet encourages readers each week to take action on behalf of a number of causes the website deems significant.

This week’s top action item is to pressure President Obama to ditch DOMA. As Byard Duncan’s article about this notes, the president’s pre-presidential zeal for abolishing DOMA (a legislative act he himself has characterized as discriminatory) appears to have vanished once he took office.

In June, the administration filed a brief in support of DOMA that sparked widespread protests in the gay community and among those who stand in solidarity with us. Since then, the Obama administration has issued a statement indicating that it continues to see DOMA as discriminatory, though it believes it is obliged to defend this legislative act in court when legal challenges are made against it.

As John Aravosis and Joe Sudbay have repeatedly pointed out on Americablog, the administration could abolish DOMA by executive privilege at any point it wished to do so. It has that right, and it has used such executive privilege to override stipulations of other legislation with which it disagrees. For whatever reason, in the case of DOMA, it has not only chosen not to use this executive privilege, but to defend an act the administration itself characterizes as discriminatory.

And there has been absolutely no action on the part of the administration to begin working with those in Congress who want to see DOMA ended.

Hence Alternet’s take-action campaign to encourage readers to notify the Obama administration that we expect the administration to fulfill its campaign promises to end an act that discriminates against a group of citizens solely on the grounds of sexual orientation. Alternet is encouraging its readers to support an initiative of the Human Rights Campaign to send statements to Congress calling for the end of DOMA.

Meanwhile, it’s encouraging to read that the mayor of Newark, NJ, Cory Booker, is calling on the president to repeal DOMA and end don’t ask, don’t tell (DADT). Booker co-chaired the Obama campaign in New Jersey.

He recently told Advocate reporter Julie Bolcer that he is frustrated by the administration’s foot-dragging in the area of gay rights, and that he encourages “friends of his [i.e., the president’s] or associates of him get into his ear” to call on him to fulfill his promises about DOMA and DADT.

Booker addresses (and is not convinced by) the argument that the new administration has too much on its plate to deal with discrimination against LGBT citizens, and that such discrimination is a low priority on a list in which many other items take precedence. He views indefensible ongoing discrimination against a group of citizens as something that harms the entire nation, and that has to be addressed, if we seek to build a humane society for all:

“But that does not mean that I can’t as a citizen of this country be frustrated, impatient to watch what friends of mine who are gay and lesbian go through on a daily basis. That is such an affront to what we claim to be as a nation, and so having come from a group of Americans that’s been historically discriminated against, there’s no time but now to do certain things,” said Booker, who is African-American.

Kudos to Mayor Booker for seeing a point that the new president seems not to see so clearly--namely, that permitting indefensible prejudice to continue in the legal systems of our society harms not only those targeted by discriminatory regulations, but all of us. And to Alternet for calling for action.

News of the Week: Health Care Reform and Democratic Failure

Tidbits from articles that have caught my eye this week, re: the health care debacle. If the selections below share a common theme beyond commenting on the health care issue, it’s, in my view, the colossal mistake the current administration made when it decided to continue with the cynical, morally vacuous, politically suicidal 1990s-style Clintonian appeasement of the right and slapping down of progressives.

Those of us following the administration’s track record on gay issues saw this happening from the outset. What has happened to the health care debate has not taken us by surprise. When the president refused to lead, to stand unambiguously by the progressive promises he made during his campaign (and the moral imperatives on which those promises were made), we knew trouble was coming.

You don’t appease ravenous mobs howling for blood, who will never be satisfied, even as you cut one sweet deal after another for those pulling the strings of such mobs. And you don’t win the battle with these powerfully connected and highly funded groups by turning your back on your most ardent supporters, those who caught the passion of the message about progressive change and were foolish enough to believe it.

And so to the week’s commentary: here’s Paul Krugman commenting today on Mr. Obama’s inability to continue engaging the passions and energies of those who elected him with high hopes, and his consequent failure in the area of health care reform:

So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.

The question now is how Mr. Obama will deal with the death of his postpartisan dream.

So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.

What, then, should Mr. Obama do? It would certainly help if he gave clearer and more concise explanations of his health care plan. To be fair, he’s gotten much better at that over the past couple of weeks.

What’s still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage — passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.

And Peter Daou writing several days ago at Huffington Post about the failure of the administration to enter health care reform with a clear, unambiguous progressive message, and how that failure has allowed the fringe right once again to frame the discussion:

…[T]he debate over health reform is playing out on the right's terms. The national discourse (if you can call it that) could very well have been about the benefits of a single-payer system, but aside from a sham vote to appease progressives, single-payer is considered anathema in the media and political establishment and instead Democrats are scrambling to respond to a barrage of rightwing talking points.

How to deal with the problem? On health care, the countervailing approach would have been to start from a solid progressive position and negotiate from there. It's still likely that the White House will manage to push through a health care bill - and the media will cheer it as a victory. But because the terms of the debate were ceded early on by Democrats, we will end up with something far weaker than we could and should have.

And Drew Westen at Huffington Post, writing about the waning hopes of Mr. Obama’s supporters in the middle of the Democratic party, who joined progressives in the last election in giving the administration a mandate for change we could believe in:

The American people did not vote for "bipartisan" solutions that split the difference between the failed ideology of the last eight years, which continues to cost thousands of people their jobs and homes every day, and the change the President and the super-majorities they elected in both houses of Congress promised.

And Michael Brenner at Huffington Post, putting the blame for the failure of the administration to push health care reform through squarely on Mr. Obama’s shoulders, because he has ignored the popular mandate for progressive change given to him, while he kowtows to the high and mighty:

It is Barack Obama who is to blame for this. For months, he stayed aloof from the out-of-control Congressional maneuvering based on a strange belief in some kind of bipartisan collective will emerging by osmosis. He never leaned the weight of his person and his office to elements of reform that has been touting as candidate and then President. He deceived the country by pursuing secret talks with the very lobbies who are the heart of disgraceful national health care situation. He entered into deals that were weighted heavily in their selfish interest rather than the national interest. In short, we have gotten from him the antithesis of what we were promised and expected -- in the substance and process of policy both. We have instead a conventionally minded politician overly respectful of the status quo and deferential to those who control and profit from it, A man with no apparent fixed convictions.

Serious health care reform is gone with the wind. It cannot be retrieved. All other domestic issues pale in importance by comparison -- except for the financial crisis. On that front, Obama has behaved exactly as he now has done on the health care front. That is to say, viewing the world from the prejudicial perspective of the high and mighty while neglecting his duty to the citizenry and those who put their trust in him. The question: 'who really is Barack Obama?' is more compelling than ever. The answer looks to be more and more disheartening.

I am appalled, by the way, at the statements of former President Clinton last night that his DADT and DOMA policies are due to the failure of the progressive wing of the Democratic party to support him. This is not how I remember the Clinton administration and the implementation of those policies.

What I remember clearly is a centrist Democrat who played a decisive role in moving the Democratic party to the right when he was president, as he cut one deal after another with corporate interest groups. I remember a man who talked about family values when his own house was not in order in that respect, and who willingly threw gay and lesbian supporters under the bus from the outset of his administration while he spouted rhetoric about family values. I remember his using us as pawns in cynical games designed to appease his Republican detractors and the fringe right.

Mr. Clinton is re-writing history. The problem is not and never has been the unwillingness of progressives to fight for the policies Democratic administrations seek to implement. The problem has been the unwillingness of Democratic leaders, once they are in power, to carry through on their promises to the majority of Americans who lean to the left of what is now the center on one issue after another. The problem is that the Democratic party only woos us when it has made such a mess of things, by its spineless appeasement of the far right, that it wants us to try to clean up its mess.

Which is essentially what President Clinton was asking progressives to do when he addressed the Netroots conference last night, while wagging his finger at the very people he wanted to enlist in the health care reform battle, when he was asked why his administration enacted both DADT and DOMA. To the extent that the Obama administration has adopted the 1990s Clintonian playbook--and it has done so to a woeful extent, in my view--it has undermined its effectiveness by undercutting the moral imperatives it articulated clearly when it campaigned, but on which it now refuses to act.

If Not Now, When? Progressive Change and the Problem Posed by the Democrats

Yesterday, I used Gustav Hofer and Luca Ragazzi’s powerful documentary “Suddenly, Last Summer” to examine dysfunctional political (and ethical) dynamics that can cause a society which has chosen progressive leaders to lurch even further back than it had been before a progressive majority came to power, when those leaders do not decisively move forward with the platform of progressive change they promised when they received a majority of popular votes.

I noted that when a group of ostensibly progressive leaders enjoying a popular mandate for progressive change backsteps on the progressive changes it has promised, it is possible for a society to revert to an even less progressive cultural moment than the one out of which it elected a progressive majority promising change. I noted that the moral vacuity of leaders elected by a clear plurality pointing to progressive change can open the door to a savage resurgence of attacks on democracy and progressive change, which thwart the possibility of even the mildest social reforms for the foreseeable future.

I pointed to a test case that appears to demonstrate these conclusions, on which Hofer and Ragazzi’s film focuses: this is the case of civil unions in Italy. When the center-left government promising civil unions first came to power, strong indicators suggested that, if they moved immediately and decisively to enact what had by then become the norm across western European nations, there would not be a significant backlash against them. In fact, there were strong indicators that a majority of Italian citizens (who had, after all, placed the center-left government in power) wanted this and other progressive changes, and would support them if the government enacted these changes.

And then those elected by a majority, enjoying the support of the majority, reneged on their promises to that majority and found it impossible to do what other nations throughout western Europe had already found relatively simple to accomplish. And because the leaders of the center-left coalition undermined the moral foundations of their agenda of progressive change, their coalition frayed, the political and religious right reasserted itself powerfully, and the country stepped decisively backwards.

Today, I’d like to point to a number of recent articles that suggest (to me, at least) that something similar is very possible in the United States, if the current Democratic federal government continues its appeasement of a right that was decisively defeated in the last election, and continues to ignore its popular mandate for progressive changes in a number of areas.

In a recent analysis of the vacillations of our Democratic leaders on a variety of issues, William Greider argues, “The problem now is the Democrats, not the Republicans.”

Greider focuses on reform of our badly malfunctioning financial institutions as a test case—a significant test case of the future of the current Democratic government, since abundant indicators signal a strong desire of the American public for reform in this area. He notes that the current game-playing of our Democratic leaders around these issues, and their unwillingness to engage the power of the banking industry and Wall Street head on, do not bode well for any of the progressive changes those leaders promised us when we elected them:

The party's ideological intentions are being defined with greater clarity in these new circumstances, and so are the President's. It's still early, but the implications are ominous for other issues. If Democrats are reluctant to disturb the power of other major interests, it seems improbable that fundamental change will occur on healthcare, energy conversion or the restoration of work and wages.

What makes this craven (and immoral) behavior difficult to understand is that the Democratic party now has control of Congress and the White House. As Greider notes,

Congressional Democrats are responding to this epic conflagration with the same risk-avoidance tactics they learned during many years in minority status. In those days, they could always blame right-wing Republicans for blocking their good intentions. But whom do the Dems blame now that they have the White House and fifty-nine votes in the Senate and a seventy-eight-seat majority in the House? Their standard explanation for not doing more is, "We didn't have the votes." So when might we expect Democrats to achieve more? When they have eighty votes in the Senate?

Greider concludes, “Democrats are the party of safe incumbents, weak convictions.” He agrees with Julia Gordon, a lawyer with the Center for Responsible Lending who has called for major reforms in the finance sector, when she states, "We have reached the moment to ask ourselves Rabbi Hillel's question: if not now, when?" As Greider maintains, “If not now, when? That question ought to haunt the Democratic Party and President Obama, who has been missing in action himself on key issues.”

Greider thinks that, in the last analysis, any progressive changes in the nation and its institutions under the current administration will have to be spearheaded not by the White House or Congress, but by progressive “people at large who are more distant from power.” As he notes, “The Democratic Party ignores its left-liberal-progressive base with some regularity because it knows it can. Politicians understand they will suffer no consequences afterward.”

Consequently, it is important that progressive groups form “many ‘independent formations’ free to ignore Washington's insider routines and mobilized by citizens on behalf of their own convictions, their common-sense ideas of what needs to be accomplished.” Only in this way can the “moral awakening” that needs to undergird a platform of effective and long-lasting progressive change in our culture today take place—a point Greider explains at length in his book Come Home, America (Rodale, 2009).

Chris Bowers is equally incisive and equally clear-eyed in his analysis of where the obstruction iis arising with the agenda of progressive change we thought we were getting when we elected our current leaders. In a recent article at Alternet, he uses healthcare reform as his litmus test for the current government’s commitment to the agenda of progressive change it has promised us. And like Bowers, he comes to the conclusion that it’s the Democrats, not the Republicans, who are now the problem:

Stop telling me how bad Republicans are--we don't need a single one to pass the public option. In fact, not only do we not need any Republicans, but a public option can become a reality even if nine Senate Democrats, and 39 House Democrats, defect. This should be a slam dunk.

As Bowers notes in an article he posted recently at the Open Left site, to which the Alternet article links,

The bottom line is this: if we can't get our most popular major agenda item, during the peak in Democratic popularity, when we need only 50 Senate votes, and on the issue where we have given our strongest lobbying and activist efforts, then we aren't going to pass meaningful progressive legislation on anything else.

And I’m afraid he’s right: we are seeing now the start of a process by which the entire platform of progressive change we thought we had chosen by electing our current leaders—from reform in the financial sector to provision of healthcare for all citizens—is going to be blocked. And not by those whom many of us expected to try to block these reforms, the enervated, defeated Republican minority.

But by Democrats, by “progressives,” by those who have promised us hope, change, a renewal of American ideals and American democracy . . . . In my view, one of the clearest indicators of where our current administration is now headed (and that “where” will, I believe, turn out to be much like where the center-left government of Italy ended up when it played immoral games re: civil unions for gay citizens) is what we see going on with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT).

Remember that policy? The one brought to us not by a Republican administration but by a “progressive” Democratic one, by President Clinton, when he caved in at the very beginning of his administration to groups resisting gay servicemen and servicewomen in the military and so undermined the moral foundations of his entire platform of progressive change? The one that takes only the stroke of a presidential pen to abolish now? The one under which one fine soldier after another has now been booted out of the military—many of these soldiers we can hardly afford to lose, because some of them have more competence in languages like Arabic than anyone left in the service?

As an editorial in the New York Times calling for the abolition of this discriminatory ban notes, both many members of the military and the public at large are much more receptive now to the service of openly gay citizens in the military than at any time in the past. A USA Today/Gallup poll whose results were released at the end of last month shows a whopping 69% of Americans in favor of ending DADT.

The current administration will pay no political price if it ends DADT today. And yet what is the administration doing? Despite President Obama’s promises on the campaign trail that he would end DADT quickly, despite his repeated statements that DADT is discriminatory and cannot be defended, the administration now indicates that ending DADT is not a priority.

And like the center-left government in Italy which promised civil unions and suddenly found that civil unions were not a priority and the whole matter needed further “study” once they came to power, the administration is calling for further study of DADT. And trying to boot to Congress (which is showing signs of similar spinelessness about this issue) a decision that can be resolved by executive privilege—by the stroke of a pen.

It was precisely such behavior that caused the demise of the center-left government in Italy in 2008, and the demolition of that government’s entire platform of progressive change. It was precisely such morally indefensible behavior that opened the door for the resurgence of the right in Italy, and the return of the entire nation to an even less progressive stance than the one out of which it had emerged when it chose the center-left coalition.

And it may well be this behavior vis-à-vis DADT on the part of the White House and Congress that sends the whole house of cards tumbling here, and paves the way for the rise of an even more draconian right-wing politics than we have seen in a long time in this country. We thought we were getting leadership and change when we elected our current government. What we seem to have ended up with instead are jellyfish who have nary a moral sinew throughout their whole amorphous bodies.

On the Moral Right to Exclude

I have been thinking about a remark Nathaniel Frank makes in a discussion of his new book about don’t ask, don’t tell—Unfriendly Fire—at HuffPo a few days ago (here).

Frank notes that a military sociologist and close friend of Sam Nunn, Charles Moskos, played a crucial role in formulating the ban against openly gay men and women in the military. Though Moskos and his cronies fabricated a spurious “unit cohesion” theory to justify the ban (that is, having openly gay folks in the military would undermine the solidarity of military units), when Frank interviewed Moskos for his book, Moskos told him that he had no interest in his own bogus sociological theory.

Instead, underlying his determination to keep openly gay folks out of the military was his belief that straight folks have a moral right to exclude gays. As Frank states, “For Moskos, the last serious defender of ‘don't ask, don't tell,’ the ban was about the ‘moral right’ of straight people not to be forced into intimate quarters with gays.”

The phrase is striking. It speaks volumes. It says more than Moskos may have wanted to reveal about the mental universe from which homophobia, with all its measures designed to exclude, diminish, and hide from sight those who are gay, proceeds: some straight people think they have a moral right to exclude gays from contact with them.

I’ve long suspected that this is the case, of course. I’ve just never heard anyone let the cat out of the bag. I’ve never heard anyone admit frankly that this belief underlies the actions of many of my fellow citizens and fellow members of the body of Christ as they create barriers to my inclusion and that of millions of other brothers and sisters . A moral right to exclude . . . .

Is there such a right, I wonder? Many private clubs long excluded people of color, Jews, and women. But legal challenges to these clubs have resulted in a prevailing opinion in most Western societies that these exclusions represent forms of discrimination that are legally and ethically insupportable in a democratic society. People may prefer to exclude. They may actually set up mechanisms to exclude from their association those they scorn.

But they cannot justify such exclusion on moral grounds. The reluctance with which people admit their real motives as they exclude others is an indicator that, in their heart of hearts, they know that their choice to exclude is not morally defensible. The tentativeness with which people speak freely of their prejudices testifies to their recognition that prejudices which demean and diminish others are shameful, penchants to savage others that are seldom brought forth into the light of day because those nursing these penchants know full well that they are ugly.

And so a moral right to exclude gay folks: what this says to me is that in one discrete area of cultural (and ecclesial life) today, people still cling to the belief that exclusion is morally justifiable—indeed, that it may be morally imperative. Gay human beings represent a special category of human beings. I belong to a category of human beings for which mechanisms of exclusion are not merely necessary, but morally warranted. Exclusion of gay human beings is ethically legitimate, noble behavior. Cultural and ecclesial crusades to effect such exclusion may take comfort in the fact that they are grounded in moral right, in sound moral imperatives.

But I don’t think so, frankly. I don’t think that the drive to identify any group of human beings, gay or otherwise, as a polluting subset of the body politic, can ever be ethically justified. I recognize that this drive is part and parcel of social existence throughout history. All cultures throughout history have needed to find some group within the culture—some group they can relegate to subcultural status—whom they can identify as a polluting presence, and can then expel to give the body politic the sense that it is clean and upright.

For those cultures that profess to be Christian, however, such denigrating and excluding impulses rest in uneasy tension with the Christian gospels. Everything we read in those gospels portrays Jesus as one intent on bringing in, on abolishing lines that make some human beings privileged insiders and others despised outsiders. All that we read about Jesus shows him particularly concerned with those excluded and denigrated by the "righteous" mainstream.

The impulse—the moral right—to exclude gay human beings cannot root itself in the gospels, or in Jesus. That impulse moves against the fundamental significance of the gospels and of the life of Jesus. It moves against Jesus’s central insights about morality, which totally ignore sexual questions and concentrate instead on right relationship, on treating others as we would see ourselves treated. On love.

In the moral universe of the gospels, my salvation depends on you so completely that by excluding you, I risk damnation. When Jesus describes the drama of final judgment, he points to you and to me. He asks how I treated you during our lifetimes. You were in prison. Did I visit you? You were hungry and without clothes. Did I bring you food and shelter? Did I welcome you when you were without a place?

No, read against the backdrop of the gospels and of Christian morality, Moskos’s “moral right” is unimaginable. Still, I’m glad he spoke about it. It’s time for those who continue waving the battle flag emblazoned with that moral right—and for those who do so in the name of Christ, in particular—to bring their “moral right” to the table, plop it down for God and all of us to see, and let us talk freely about it.

And to read the gospels together as we do so.