More Blooms (or Weeds?) from My Garden: Catholic Mexico Has Marriage Equality, "Progressive" Australia Doesn't — What Gives?; Why the Huge Overlap Between Men's Rights Movement and Libertarian and Atheist Movements?

I keep plucking blooms (Or are they weeds? It's often hard to distinguish) from my garden, and want to offer you a few more today as a little nosegay:

Brittmarie Janson Perez, "Mexican Prelates' Campaign Against Gay Marriage and Adoptions"

On this day of the historic U.S. Supreme Court ruling recognizing a constitutional right to marriage for LGBT citizens, it's very much worth noting that the U.S.'s neighbor to the South, Mexico, legalized marriage equality on 17 June. And so it's entirely fitting on this day that I share with you this outstanding essay that Brittmarie Janson Perez sent me several days ago, commenting on the Mexican ruling and the response of the Mexican Catholic hierarchy to the ruling. 

More Lists of Lists: Progressive Victories, Memorable Tweets, and Crazy GOP Legislation in 2012

And since I'm referring to end-of-year lists of news stories (see what I just posted about underreported stories of 2012), don't miss Think Progress's series in the same vein right now. Entries I've noticed in this series up to now:

Catholic Blog Sites and Homophobic Screeds: Made in Hell

What do you think might be going on when Catholics feel free--no, some Catholics apparently feel obliged--to post statements at Catholic blog sites characterizing entire segments of the human population as unfit to parent because "they" are given to "illegal drug use, sexual promiscuity, suicidal ideations, domestic violence," and are "'prone to spontaneous combustion' temper issues"?

Illinois Bishop Says State Is at War with Catholics

Bishop Daniel Jenky

 

And talk about ratcheting things up (I'm piggy-backing on a remark I just made in my post about Wayne Besen): this HuffPo article, which may be from AP feed (I don't see a source attribution) reports that Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria has just opined that the state of Illinois is "basically at war with the Catholic community."

The Strange Saga of Rev. Dr. George Alan Rekers and His Rent Boy: Exposing the Underbelly of the Ex-Gay Racket

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Mike Huckabee on Gay Adoption as Not Ideal, and the Churches' Need for Enemies

Former Arkansas governor (and Southern Baptist minister) Mike Huckabee told Rosie O’Donnell this week that permitting gay couples to adopt children is not “the ideal.”  This statement comes on the heels of a statement Huckabee made a few days back that equated allowing gay people to adopt with treating children as puppies.

Welcoming the Stranger: Reflections on an Anti-Immigrant Initiative in Arkansas

And as a counterpoint to my posting a moment ago about the Arkansas State Fair, I want to take note of a piece of legislation pending right now in Arkansas. The Arkansas Times noted this week that a group calling itself Secure Arkansas has just succeeded in getting approval for a constitutional amendment to be placed on the 2010 ballot, to prevent undocumented immigrants from receiving public benefits.

One of the leaders of the movement to target undocumented immigrants has been logging into the Arkansas Times blog this week to ask why people are upset about what she sees as an eminently fair proposal to divide the state’s resources among its own citizens. Though she has invited responses to her questions, I haven’t chosen to enter the discussion on that blog.

But I have certainly thought through the issue, and would like to share my reflections with the readers of my own blog. Since attacks on immigrants transcend the boundaries of my state, some of these reflections may be of interest and use to others who are dealing with similar initiatives in other parts of the country. For what it’s worth, here are my thoughts:

First, it’s interesting to note that many of those spearheading this attack on immigrants are the very same folks who, in the previous election, worked hard to place on our ballot an initiative that denied adoption to unmarried couples. Search the list of names of those who signed to place the adoption initiative on the ballot (an initiative widely regarded by political commentators as aimed at the gay community, though it actually outlaws adoption by any unmarried couple), and you’ll find an overlap of names.

The same folks who pushed a gay-bashing initiative on the last ballot are now working hard to target immigrants. In fact, several of those fighting for the anti-immigrant measure have been active in their local communities trying to stir trouble in libraries and schools, with claims that children are being indoctrinated with pro-gay ideas and that libraries are buying books that introduce children to the gay “lifestyle.”

And so the first significant question that arises when one looks at the attempt to target yet another marginalized minority group in yet another election is, Why? Why keep targeting one vulnerable group after another—and why keep doing so in the name of Christ? (Another overlap: some of the key leaders in the anti-gay adoption initiative who are now leading the anti-immigrant initiative have also pushed hard to divide the generally gay-supportive Episcopal diocese in Arkansas over issues of inclusivity.)

The best answer I can give to these questions is that these “Christian” groups deliberately trade in hate to bring folks to the polls—to bring them to the polls to vote “right” in each election. In a sense, the specific group being targeted does not matter to them so much as does the utility of that particular group at a particular moment, to assure that conservative voters go to the polls in large numbers and vote for conservative candidates.

Immigrants may be more useful than gays right now because they are in the spotlight nationally with the health care reform initiative. Right-wing operatives are working adroitly around the country to fuel fires of nativist discontent with charges that “we” will all be paying for “them”—for the brown-skinned poor who are not even American citizens—if health care reform passes.

Most of these hard-line right-wing operatives pushing the immigrant-bashing initiative in Arkansas are in the area of the state that has experienced the largest influx of Latino immigrants in the past decade or so—the northwest part of the state, where chicken processing plants and the boom caused by Wal-Mart, whose headquarters are there, have brought large numbers of workers from Mexico and Central America to take jobs no one else is clamoring to take. Jobs for which we need workers. Jobs that these immigrants perform with great skill and a strong work ethic, for the most part.

But nativism is also very strong in that largely white, largely Anglo corner of the state. And immigrant-bashing plays well when folks feel that “their” nation and “their” culture are being overtaken by foreigners.

This initiative is, to my mind, all about urging people to fear, hate, and target. These crusades may use the name of Christ to promote themselves. But they have very little to do with the gospels, in the final analysis. They certainly have nothing at all to do with Matthew 25, with the Jesus who tells us we will be judged at the end of our lives by love, as we are asked whether we made the stranger welcome, visited the sick, clothed the naked, etc.

The second point I’d make, in response to questions about what is reprehensible about the anti-immigrant initiative, is that we don’t build a good society when we build around fear, hate, and abuse of vulnerable minorities. Our energies as a society could be far better used. It would be healthier, and we would create a more vibrant society, if we recognized the valuable contributions that targeted groups like Latino immigrants (yes, including undocumented immigrants) bring to all of us.

And that’s my third point: those being targeted by this initiative provide valuable services to all of us. We all benefit economically and in manifold other ways by their presence among us and by their labor. The jobs they take are generally jobs no one else wants. And they work hard at those jobs, and generally perform them well.

When I drive around the city in the evening, I routinely see crews of workers mending the streets and making improvements on them. These are almost always Latino workers. They work into the dark to make sure that the streets on which I drive every day are kept in good repair.

When ice storms come to the city in winter, as they tend to do with greater frequency in recent years, trees topple and power lines are downed. The men I see working long hours to cut up those trees and remove them from roadways and powerlines are almost always Latino. They work very hard to keep this city functioning in times of crisis. They do work I do not see others rushing to do.

Why target them? Why make them unwelcome?

I understand why, of course. I understand what the groups targeting first gays and then immigrants hope to gain by targeting those vulnerable minority groups around which there is social discontent today.

But I think that what those groups gain in the short term is not worth the long-term cost of this malicious activity. The society we build when we build around hate is never a healthy society. The energies these groups are putting into making others unwelcome could be far better spent building an inclusive, welcoming society that celebrates the differences of others, and the gifts we all receive through those differences.

Spin, Spin, Spin: Disguising Homphobia in an Increasingly Gay-Accepting Culture

Speaking of analyzing how a teaching is being received by a religious body, in order to understand the truth claims of that teaching: it’s fascinating to follow the twists and turns of cultural debates about how to fit gay human beings into social pictures, in light of the recent spate of pro-gay marriage decisions in New England states.

One of my barometers for how such developments are being “received” in my little state is the blog of our statewide free paper Arkansas Times. Though I follow this blog, I hardly ever participate in its discussions, because the discussions have a way of turning, well, bizarre and often nasty, particularly if one is an unwelcome newcomer.

When I taught in North Carolina, one of my students once said to me, “We have a saying in North Carolina. It goes like this: ‘Po’ folks has po’ ways’.” I’ve never forgotten that statement, because it so perfectly sums up a dynamic I’ve met in my own little state—and in many “small” communities I’ve encountered in the course of my life.

People of restricted means and constricted outlooks often try to restrict and constrict others—sometimes, without even intending to do so. Small, claustrophobic, tight-knit communities have a way of adroitly identifying and weeding out the outsider, the person who asks the uncomfortable question, the one whose very presence makes others uncomfortable, because that presence is interpreted as an implicit challenge to the norms that govern the closely monitored behavior of other community members.

These dynamics are hardly confined to my little state and my little city, but they are definitely at play here. They have much to do with generations of poverty, with economic conditions in which a tiny handful of families control the bulk of the state's wealth, while the rest of us do without. Those conditions tend to make people resentful if anyone experiences a bit of fortune, and scornful of those who go off, get educations, and expect to come home and, well, continue reading, thinking, and talking.

All this as background to my reluctance to weigh into discussions at the Arkansas Times blogs (as with discussions at other blogs, including Catholic ones, in which the community of bloggers seems to be thickly affiliated, with similar worldviews, in a rather small world in which outsiders are received with suspicion): this weekend, there was a fascinating discussion of last Friday’s Washington Post op-ed piece by Eugene Robinson calling on President Obama to be a leader and endorse gay marriage.

What interests me in the response of those who posted about Robinson’s wonderful statement is where we’ve come, in places like Arkansas, with the discussion of how to fit gay people into our lives. Not surprisingly, we haven’t come far. We’re a state that went even more Republican in the last election than it did in 2004. We voted overwhelmingly in the last election to outlaw adoption by unmarried couples, so that we could make a statement about how unwelcome gay people and gay lives are in our state.

We are and will remain backwards in this area, as we are and will remain backwards in just about any area measuring progress and decency, including education, healthcare, protections of the rights of workers, care for infants and newborns (particularly those of single mothers and/or poor mothers), women’s rights, and on. We will enter the 21st century as the 22nd breaks, kicking and screaming against necessary change, spouting bible verses to justify our stupidity and stolidity, as is our wont.

Still, we’re changing—ever so slowly. And it’s that change that fascinates me in discussions like the discussion of Eugene Robinson’s op-ed piece at the Arkansas Times blog this weekend.

What strikes me in particular is the unwillingness of some people who are essentially uncomfortable with gay folks and gay lives to admit that discomfort openly now. This reluctance is, to me, a significant barometer indicator pointing to a growing new consensus in American society, which will eventually make open, unabashed homophobia socially unacceptable. In the same way that overt, unapologetic racism has long since been made socially impermissible in our society . . . .

Of course, the ranters and ravers, the defiant homophobes, are still there, and they still post on blogs like this, with their taunts and leers, their phallic Confederate flags waving proudly in the background of every taunt, oblivious as ever to the fact that their professed disgust with gays may mask a preoccupation pointing to same-sex erotic attraction in their own hearts. Interestingly, too—but not surprisingly—there are also African-American bloggers taking part in such discussions, who oppose both the president and Eugene Robinson (who happens to be African-American), and who are determined to continue resisting gay people and gay rights as long as they possibly can in our state.

One of these bloggers blogged in recently to tell us that American democracy is something like a soup-kitchen line in which groups line up and wait their turn for rights. The implication of the statement was that blacks are now reaching the head of the line and he, for one, as an African American, has no intent of seeing soup doled out to gay folks, who haven’t waited their turn as he has and who are making a big mess for Mr. Obama by expecting to be treated with dignity. Democracy as a big squabble for rights that are too scarce to go around . . . .

But I’m intrigued, in particular, with the comments of several bloggers who think that they have come through biblically based homophobia to the other side, but who cannot and will not endorse gay marriage. And who see no contradiction between their repudiation of homophobia and their resistance to gay marriage.

What’s very clear in the case of these bloggers is that they don’t get it and don’t intend to get it. Getting it would require a revision of their world that they’re not about to undertake. It would require them to let go of their heterosexist male-dominated reading of the scriptures and entertain other viewpoints from other perspectives.

It would require them to admit that maybe, just maybe, they have been wrong about many things they believe, as they cling to what they imagine is a literalist reading of scripture, but is really a projection of their own heterosexist male fantasies onto the bible, so that they select and defend a handful of passages that defend their power and privilege while ignoring the vast majority that point in another direction.

These bloggers claim to be hung up on the word “marriage.” They claim to have come around to the validity of civil unions. But marriage is off-limits. That would require churches to buy into gay marriage, and churches can’t do that and be faithful to the bible.

Though other bloggers have patiently explained to these men that marriage has always been a civil ceremony in our society, as well as a religious one, and nothing in any gay-marriage law compels churches to perform or recognize a gay marriage, the anti-gay marriage bloggers won’t get the point through their heads. And though other bloggers have pointed out to them the numerous ways in which civil unions are not at all equal to marriage, they still resist.

We can’t have gay marriage, because we can’t let go of the bible, which clearly condemns homosexuality and mandates one-man, one-woman marriage for life.

These bloggers can’t get the point, because they don’t want to get the point. And they don’t want to get the point because the point is not marriage or civil unions at all: it’s willingness to accept real-life gay human beings into their social networks and families and churches, as equals—as human beings—and not as despised others. It's willingness to change their world so that small worlds become large worlds, unwelcoming communities welcome places.

That’s the real sticking point. The claim of those who, until recently, opposed all gay rights, that they now accept gay civil unions while they resist gay marriage, is really all about wanting a world in which gay people just aren't there—and, if there, are out of sight and out of mind. Those now claiming to support gay civil unions while rejecting gay marriage are seeking new socially acceptable ways to cling to regressive anti-gay views, while refusing to come to terms with the homophobia in which those views are embedded.

Update on Arkansas Anti-Gay Adoption Signatory Database: Threats from Family Council of Arkansas

An update to my posting yesterday (here) about the database that Know Thy Neighbor has placed online--names of those who signed a petition to place an anti-gay adoption act on the ballot in Arkansas during our last statewide election.

Our statewide free paper Arkansas Times is now reporting (here) that the Family Council of Arkansas, which sponsored this bill that has made it much harder for adoptive children in Arkansas to find homes, is protesting. Family Council wants to block the public's access to this database of names, and is (dishonestly) suggesting that Know Thy Neighbor may have broken unspecified laws in placing the database online.

These names are, of course, a matter of public record. No laws have been broken in placing them online. Family Council is well aware of that, and its talk of laws that may possibly have been broken is disingenuous. Family Council also threatens to have the legislature pass a law that prohibits the public from access to the names of signatories to any petitions to place acts on the ballot.

A reminder, by the way, that Family Council of Arkansas is an umbrella of Focus on the Family. This group and its activities in Arkansas are part of a well-orchestrated nationwide campaign of the political and religious right to use gay human beings as cannon fodder in political battles designed to garner Republican votes. This is a cynical game that counts on ill-informed and prejudiced people in states like Arkansas to vote "right" when the rainbow flag is waved in front of them.

Interestingly enough, one of the threads of discussion that has emerged at Arkansas Times about this petition centers on the claim of some signatories that they didn't really intend to sign the act, or didn't sign it, though their name is right there on the list for the world to see. One reason that laws protect public disclosure of the names of signatories to such petitions public is precisely to permit the public to verify that people actually did sign the petitions, and that no hanky-panky has gone on in getting a petition onto the ballot. It is strangely inconsistent to argue both that many names on such a petition are incorrect signatures, and that the public should not have access to the names.

The discussion of this matter on the Arkansas Times blog is fascinating and full of such ludicrous inconsistencies and lapses in logic. A strong contingent of folks posting want to depict those who signed the anti-gay adoption petition as victims.

Though their intent was to victimize gay citizens (and though they've ended up victimizing children in need of foster and adoptive homes), they're the victims all of a sudden. They didn't know what they were signing. Some mean person made them do it. Their church told them to do it. They just wanted to see democracy in action, to give everyone a chance to vote on this petition.

Please. It is absurd and not morally admirable to try to disclaim responsibility for our ugly acts only when they've come to light. A huge percentage of those supporting this gay-bashing bill are bible-believing Christians. Have they never read the gospel passage in which Jesus tells his followers that what they whisper in the dark will one day be shouted from the rooftops?

Why the shame, the disclaimers, and the dissembling? I had thought that the point of the moral crusade against gay brothers and sisters was precisely to be defiantly proud of one's fidelity to the scriptures, and of one's countercultural stance. And I had thought that those who take these defiant countercultural but oh-so-moral stands were also defiantly happy to pay a price for taking the moral high road.

The argument that I've done something ugly because my church told me to do so, and I now regret the ugliness because it's been made public: that argument is just pitiful. People who victimize others seek to claim victim status for themselves, when they've been exposed, with very ill grace.

Subverting Family Values: The Arkansas Anti-Gay Adoption Initiative in Retrospect

Yesterday, the organization Know Thy Neighbor put online (here) the names of 84,000 citizens of my home state who signed the petition to place on our last statewide ballot an initiated act to ban adoption by unmarried couples in Arkansas. I’ve blogged in the past (here) about a similar database that Know Thy Neighbor has placed online for Florida. Though some of those who sign these anti-gay petitions object when their names are made public, the names in these databases are a matter of public record.

I’ve also blogged about the anti-gay adoption initiative in Arkansas (here and here). As my postings on this initiative note, though it prohibits all unmarried couples in Arkansas from adopting, its target is clearly gay citizens. It was one among several such initiatives that the religious and political right floated in the last election to bring out the faithful and assure that they would vote “right.”

As my postings also note, the Arkansas initiative was particularly mean-spirited, because, in the hope of stirring animosity against gay citizens and bolstering Republican votes, it actually penalizes children who need foster and adoptive homes. We are a state in which there is a dearth of adoptive homes and a surplus of children needing such homes. The ultimate effect of the anti-gay adoption initiative in Arkansas is to make it harder for children to be placed in foster and adoptive homes.

With the pretense of promoting family values, the religious right is making it difficult for many children in Arkansas to have any experience of family at all in their formative years. It is also assaulting families that, for all kinds of reasons, are headed by two adults (of the opposite or same sex) who are not married. The law my state passed in the last election makes it impossible for a grandparent who is living with someone else without benefit of marriage to adopt his or her own grandchild.

These are points underscored in a press release that Know Thy Neighbor issued as it placed the names of petition signers online (here). Tom Lang of Know Thy Neighbor states,

“. . . [T]he Arkansas Family Council . . . used the welfare of children, the most vulnerable in our society, those in foster care and in need of adoption, in order to prove their claim that loving gay couples should not be adoptive or foster parents,” alleges Lang. “If you have a problem with me, if my sexual orientation is such a threat to you that you feel the need to take action against me, then come on, go after me. But don’t use children as fodder for your agenda. What sort of cowards would do that?”

And so I search the database this morning, and what do I find? A cousin of mine who is a Baptist minister signed the petition. So did his wife. So did the wife of that cousin’s brother, also a Baptist minister. My brother’s business partner (who is also his sister-in-law) signed the petition.

When members of one’s own family sign such a petition, it is personal. These family members obviously think that, should Steve and I wish to adopt a child, we would not be fit to parent that child—as they themselves are fit.

These family members clearly do not think that Steve and I are family—not in the same way in which they are family.

That message is not, of course, new to me. It’s one that has been consistent on the rare occasions in recent years when I have had to endure time with these family members who treat me as non-family, as a lesser human being.

The last two gatherings that have found us all together have been a wedding and a funeral—their mother’s remarriage following the death of my uncle, my father’s brother; and the funeral of my aunt, my father’s sister. At the wedding, someone called for a family photograph.

Steve and I were sitting in a church pew beside my aunt when this call went out. My cousins beckoned me, my aunt and uncle, and other cousins and their spouses to join them for the picture. Knowing how they feel about him (how could he not know? Treacly Southern hugs and beaming smiles can only go so far to disguise strong disdain), Steve remained seated as I joined the family.

At which point, my soft-spoken, gentle, never combative aunt, the matriarch of the family, whose voice would normally count, said, “I think Steve should be in the picture. He’s family.”

Everyone heard her, but it was as if the walls, and not a person, had spoken. My cousins went right on with the family photo session, with all spouses included except Steve. Certainly not Steve. This was a church, after all, a sanctuary for family values. It was a church pastored by one of the cousins, for Christ’s sake. A First Baptist Church.

How could a gay spouse be included in a picture like this, in a family such as this? We smiled for the camera, cooed at each other and said goodbye, and headed to our separate homes. What my cousins felt as the gathering ended, I can't say. I can certainly attest to what I felt, though: relief. Escape. Liberation. A determination never to spend any time with these family members in the future, if I can avoid it.

And now here are their names on this list, for God and all to see.

What does one do with such a testimony to the real family values of some family members? What does one do when one’s own commitment to family and to the way of Christian discipleship is completely at odds with the way in which other family members choose to interpret family and to read the bible?

Recent media articles are noting that increasing support for gay marriage around the U.S. will result in divisions in the churches. To those of us who are gay, this is not news at all.

We've been living with the divisions for some time now. We've been on the outside looking in—in church families and families of origin—for some years now. We live the divisions. They already run through our own families and our lives, through our very psyches.

And because of them, we often run the other way, when a “family” gathering is announced, or when someone invites us to be part of their church “family.” We've learned long ago that the word “family” can be used to mean the opposite of what that word means traditionally.

In traditional usage, the term “family” means inclusion, welcome, the place you know you will always be taken in no matter who you are or what you've done. In the mouths of many contemporary Christians, though, the word is a weapon, designed to hurt, to demean, to exclude family members who happen to be born gay or lesbian. Family is anything but the place where you know you'll always be taken in, if you're gay or lesbian.

Entire churches have constructed their identity around an ethic of exclusion of those of us who are gay, and they have done so while claiming to promote family values. While professing absolute fidelity to “traditional” notions of family, they have chipped away at the real, essential meaning of family in their own family circle and in their churches to such an extent that no one but a fool would imagine that these families and these churches are all about family.

No. They're about its opposite. They're about assuring that many people who need the solace and shelter of family will not find it when they need it. And to their shame, these promoters of family values have added to that list children without homes and families of their own, in the state of Arkansas.

Frank Cocozzelli and Maggie Gallagher: The Voice(s) of American Catholicism

Frank Cocozzelli has an interesting essay entitled “Who Speaks for American Catholics?” at Talk to Action’s website (here). Cocozzelli notes the wide diversity of viewpoints of American Catholics on social and political issues, including issues with connections to Catholic moral teaching. As he notes, American Catholics frequently disagree with each other (and with official church teaching) on issues such as stem-cell research, abortion, and gay and lesbian rights.

Many of us find the political and moral positions of our brothers and sisters of the Catholic right morally repugnant precisely because of our commitment to Catholic moral teaching about economic and social justice and war and peace. As Cocozzelli rightly notes, “A strong case can be made that these icons of the Catholic Right are using abortion and LGBT rights as wedge issues primarily to elect laissez-faire economic conservatives.”

It’s interesting to read Maggie Gallagher’s latest contention that “Catholics”—by implication, all Catholics—will be penalized if the United States fully recognizes the human rights of gay and lesbian citizens, including the right to marry. Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan nominated Gallagher for one of his Malkin awards for the following statement (here):

After gay marriage, the most religiously committed Americans will be effectively marginalized as a public force—because they cannot act or support the idea that gay unions are marriages. Such people will, if we lose the marriage debate, be treated the way we treat bigots who oppose interracial marriage. Imagine: All it will take to make, say, a judicial nominee unconfirmable will be to establish that they are indeed Catholic.

I suspect Gallagher is fully aware that, in her interpretation of what Catholic moral teaching requires vis-à-vis her gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, she is already in the minority, and will soon be defending a position considered marginal and indefensible by the large majority of American Catholics. As I’ve noted on this blog, results of a Gallup poll released on 30 March indicate (here) that a majority of American Catholics (54%) do not believe homosexual relations are immoral, whereas only 45% of American citizens overall hold this position. The Gallup poll demonstrates that, even after several decades of sustained assault by the religious and political right, which has sought to force Catholics to walk lockstep with its political and moral positions, Catholics are to the left of other Americans on most moral and political issues.

I thought of these data recently when I watched Maggie Gallagher and Joe Solmonese of the Human Rights Campaign debate gay marriage on MSNBC’s “Hard Ball” program (here). Here, too, Gallagher speaks blithely of “the” Catholic position on gay issues, as if there is no disagreement at all among American Catholics about gay marriage and the morality of gay lives.

In fact, in this debate, Gallagher speaks as if the decision of Archbishop Sean O’Malley of Boston to close Catholic Charities in Boston in 2006 when that organization was required to place adoptive children in gay-headed households represents “the” Catholic position on such matters. And yet when the Boston archdiocese announced its intention to seek an exemption from this requirement in February 2006, 8 of the 42 members of the Catholic Charities board resigned in protest, noting that they considered it morally right for Catholic Charities to welcome gay parents (here).

Even as she speaks as though there is a unitary, dogmatically binding Catholic position on issues like gay adoption or gay marriage, Maggie Gallagher must know full well that there is a variety of Catholic viewpoints on these issues. And she has to know, as well, that this diversity exists for sound reasons, because a number of important moral principles are at play in the evaluation of these issues, and those principles can and do yield different moral outcomes as Catholics struggle to apply them.

Maggie Gallagher also has to know that the recent Gallup poll cited above explodes her claim to represent “the”—the right, the only possible—Catholic moral position on homosexuality. I can understand her political reasons for wishing to mislead the public into thinking that she represents the only thinkable Catholic position on gay issues. At the same time, I find that misrepresentation of the facts disingenuous and morally distasteful.

As a fellow Catholic, I would be much happier if Ms. Gallagher sought to ground what she says about the morality of gay people and gay lives in the truth. If a position is morally sound, it does not need lies to bolster it, and does not need to rely on cheap political tricks to compel people to assent to it.

Rollback of Rights for Gay Americans: The Game Plan

What happened in Arkansas with initiated act 1 is getting well-deserved national attention. Today’s New York Times has an op-ed piece by Dan Savage commenting on the legislation (www.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/opinion/12savage.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink).

Savage notes that this new legislation prohibiting the placement of youth in foster or adoptive homes headed by unmarried couples is “ominous.” It is ominous, as he notes, because it means that Arkansas children needing such placement—of whom there is a large number—will now find it harder to be placed. Even a family member cannot now adopt another family member (e.g., a grandchild, niece, nephew, etc.) if that family member heads a household as part of an unmarried couple, gay or straight.

This legislation is ominous as well for other reasons. Savage notes:

Social conservatives are threatening to roll out Arkansas-style adoption bans in other states . . . . Most ominous, once “pro-family” groups start arguing that gay couples are unfit to raise children we might adopt, how long before they argue that we’re unfit to raise those we’ve already adopted? . . . The loss in California last week was heartbreaking. But what may be coming next is terrifying.

Yes. That’s the plan. As someone living in Arkansas, which just went redder in this election than in 2004, I know that Dan Savage is speaking the gospel truth here. The game plan now is to roll back every civil right possible for gay citizens anywhere in the nation. I hear it all around me, every time I log onto the blog of our statewide free paper Arkansas Times.

The Republican party has succeeded in turning itself into a minority party of a tiny core of red states in the South and West (many of them, including mine, the least educated in the nation). Those states, and the party as a whole, are smarting from defeat. They’re looking for blood.

And because neoconservatism does not generate new ideas but recycles old ones as long as they appear to work, the game plan now is to harness the discontent of the red core of the nation and spread that discontent as far and as wide as possible, working on people’s primal fears. Turning back gay marriage is key to this plan.

But it’s a much broader plan that that. As I’ve been noting all week, the real game plan of a religious and political right emboldened by what has just happened in California, Arizona, Arkansas, and Florida (and simultaneously angry at national-level defeat) is to strip gay citizens and couples of every right possible, anywhere that this may be effected.

In the inimitable language of one chasv, a devout Christian and regular contributor to the Arkansas Times blog whom I’ve quoted before, “We don't hate homos we just want them to disapear. We don't want to see 'em anywhere” (www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/11/oped_act_1_antifamily.aspx#comments).

Gay people remain useful, you see. Gay lives, gay faces, gay blood, gay love, gay human beings: we remain useful as tools in a power struggle that goes far beyond any of us. And we will continue to be used in that struggle precisely as long as the religious and political right see a return on their investment in the politics of hate.

We cannot stop this dynamic, unilaterally. We who are gay do not have that kind of power in this nation. Indeed, the name of the game is a continual cruel taunt by the religious and political right to keep assuring us that we are not as powerful as we think: that we do not have the autonomy or control over our own lives (or acceptance and welcome) that we believe we have.

We would make a critical tactical mistake now if we turned to our liberal fellow citizens for assistance—that is, for the kind of assistance that will definitively challenge the lies and cold-hearted persecution of the religious-political right. Liberals do not intend to help. And it’s time we realized this, we gay Americans.

We are the unacknowledged stepchildren of American liberalism. Whenever liberals speak of rights, they place brackets around gay Americans. We are an embarrassment, the weakest link in the chain of liberal politics. We have the potential to present a challenge to the new administration’s platform from the outset, and liberals do not want that challenge. It does not matter if we have no choice except to present the challenge, because we are the challenge, the despised minority that did not find a place set at the table of the new America on election day. Simply by existing we constitute a reminder of the nation's continued unwillingness to set the table for all.

Read all the advice for the new president now pouring forth on liberal news sites and liberal blogs. Look at the list of agenda items. And as you do so, remember that a group of American citizens—a minority group, albeit, but a group of citizens and human beings—has just had its rights taken away by a slim majority in the state of California.

Liberals have rightly been shouting for some time now about the intrusion on the right to privacy under the Bush administration, about the removal of the right to due process before one is imprisoned when one is suspected of terrorism. But notice how faint, how few and far between, those liberal shouts are now that the popular vote of one state removed the rights of gay citizens, in a heartbeat.

Look at the lists of agenda items being proposed for Mr. Obama by liberal bloggers and liberal journalists. See if you can find there any mention of gay citizens and gay rights. I almost never do.

It’s as if we don’t exist. It’s as if we are invisible. And we need to remain invisible, in the view of many liberal individualists. We portend trouble, since there is a price to pay in supporting us: and this is a price liberal individualists have not been willing to pay in the past, and are not willing to pay today.

It’s the price of solidarity. It’s the price of caring more about the rights of groups of people, about human rights, than about the rights of the individual. It’s about a transfer of emphasis from my rights to human rights.

But therein also lies the hope gay Americans and our allies should continue to hold onto, as we battle for change. We have the ability—if we wish and if we choose—to form stronger bonds with other groups seeking protection and extension of human rights at this point in American history. We can and must (if we wish to succeed) show that our struggle for human rights is part of a much broader struggle for human rights rooted in the foundational documents of the nation, one that has been going on in other minority communities for generations.

As well as in many faith communities who, as we do, resist the distortion of authentic religious commitment by the religious and political right. The LGBT community needs to continue building its alliance with those people of faith who are among those most committed in the nation to challenging the theocratic aspirations of the religious right and political groups using the religious right to consolidate their power.

We must do this if we do not want to find ourselves, in the new America of Barack Obama, the invisible people told not merely by the most ignorant among us, but by liberal elites as well, “We don't hate homos we just want them to disapear. We don't want to see 'em anywhere.” We must engage in broad alliance-building based on human rights and the concept of solidarity, if we want to be successful in fighting what will now become a broad-based effort of many political and religious activists to turn back any and every right of gay citizens anyplace in the nation.

Listen to what Albert Mohler, president of the powerful Southern Baptist Convention, has just told Time correspondent Michael A. Lindenberger
(www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1857980-2,00.html):

On the Evangelical side, Mohler told TIME that religious conservatives see the threat from the gay rights' agenda as much broader than just an affront to traditional notions of marriage. "Full normalization of homosexuality would eventually mean the end to all morals legislation of any kind," he says, echoing the line of reasoning made famous by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in his dissent in the high court's 2003 decision striking down state laws that made gay sex a crime.

Gay people are useful: gay lives, gay bodies, gay blood, gay love. In the draconian political end-game being played by those Americans who will not give up their theocratic aspirations as long as there is an ounce of traction in those aspirations, we are a useful shorthand symbol of all that will go wrong if anyone anywhere is allowed an autonomy theocrats do not intend for American citizens. We are the slippery-slope argument embodied: open the door to them, and who knows what chaos will ensue.

It does no good to complain of the obvious cruelty of this use of gay human beings as cannon fodder, or of the misuse of religion to gain political power. Ultimately, what we have to is seek allies everywhere who understand the language of human rights and solidarity, and work with them to marginalize those who seek to marginalize us.

For the sake of the nation, it is not gay citizens who should be driven from sight: it is those who want to make the Constitution null and void who need to be decisively marginalized. It is those who misuse religious language and religious symbols to undermine the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that need to be placed on the defensive, if we hope to build a brighter future.