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The Christian Right in America will have a lot to answer for when they arrive one by one at the Gates of Hell. Evangelicals are giving a bad name to American Christianity. They are particularly vicious in their extremely unchristian persecution of gay people. Their propaganda campaigns would make Goebbels proud. Like the nazis, they specialize in the Big Lie, and tell it over and over and over. The Big Lie they tell about gays and Lesbians is that we are incapable of love. The tragedy is that so many people believe them, give them money, vote for their candidates and ballot initiatives, and so many others don’t speak out in protest.
Gay people have forced Americans to reconsider the closet in the last 30 years. Many Americans remain ambivalent about their countrymen’s right to love whomever they choose, although progress has been made. Gay people live openly nowadays even in the most hostile parts of the US, and there has been incremental progress in tearing down legal discrimination, although sodomy statutes are still on the books in more than 20 states, and only 8 states recognize gay Americans as equal in the eyes of the law (generally speaking). Social acceptance is coming along a little more speedily, although a huge amount of prejudice, stereotyping and just plain meanness still simmers underneath the surface.
The vanguard in preventing gays and Lesbians from claiming their human rights are the Christian evangelicals. Their leaders spread poison whenever and wherever it can, manipulating the democratic political process to try to force a narrow morality on a country that doesn’t share their views. It’s part of their plan to transform the US into a theocratic state. They’re not shy about those hopes.Turn on any Pat Robertson show or read their websites. Go to small towns in the American South and you can already feel what their theocracy would be like. Anyone not subscribing to their worldview feels mightily uncomfortable mighty quickly and either leaves or shuts up. That’s what they hope to spread to the rest of the nation.
It’s a hopeless cause in the end. Americans are the most religious people in the industrialized world, but for all their many faults and hypocrisies, they aren’t as nasty and mean as that loud minority of pharasees in their midst. A polarization is occurring, which is a scary thing, because scapegoating is always a terrible outcome of such situations. But unless the Christian Right stages a coup, they aren’t going to be able control the agenda or much less convince the majority of Americans to look at things their way. They certainly will not be able to force us all to live the way they want us to.
But they can do enormous damage anyway, and their special target more and more has been gay people. It’s one thing to believe homosexuality is a sin: Catholics do, Orthodox Jews do, but they don’t go on such vehement crusades against an unpopular minority. And not all Christians are bigots. There are many, many denominations which are trying to include their gay brothers and sisters in their congregations as people capable of love and worthy of love. The Episcopal Church, several of the Lutheran and Methodist denominations, the Unitarians and the Quakers all come to mind as honest and loving and accepting.
The evangelicals think we’re all sinners and all going to hell if we all don’t accept their particular version of Christianity, but gays are singled out particularly, because we give the lie to their whole construct. As much as they try to deny it, gay people can and do fall in love, build stable relationships, live decent lives, even raise children. They do all these things in spite of general social and legal disapproval, and in the face of bigotry and hatred from certain quarters. Gay people are very much like the early Christians...the more we are persecuted, the more tenacious we become, the more resolute we are to love in our own way.
This drives the Christian Right over the edge. Our existence is bad enough, but to declare it in the light of day and to demand our right to love one another openly pushes them beyond reason. They engage in incessant propaganda campaigns which accuse gays (they’re particularly obsessed with gay men in their sexist focus) of being disease carriers and sex addicts. They deny that love between two men or two women can exist and insist that homosexuality is nothing more than offensive sexual behavior. Among many lies, they spread the untruth that homosexuals are pedophiles intending to prey upon and “recruit” America’s “innocent” youth. They constantly equate homosexuality with incest and bestiality. They claim heterosexuality as the only natural sexuality and that only heterosexuality can be legally and socially accepted in a civilized society. They use electro-shock aversion "therapy" and psychological terror to try to repress the natural homosexual tendencies of people who fall into their dishonest "reparative" programs to change them into heterosexuals. They claim a monopoly on who can love and who can define what love is. It’s an enormously arrogant position to take in a pluralistic society, but they are desperate. Gay people continue to come out, live more and more openly, and American society slowly is becoming more accepting.
The evangelicals favorite weapon to fight this growing inclusion of gay Americans is to abuse the political system, particularly voter initiatives. Why Americans allow referenda on social issues like this is a mystery. There is little social consensus in the US, and to place proposals on the ballot that are socially controversial and divisive is unfair and dangerous. Majority rules is one thing, but allowing the population at large to in effect punish unpopular minorities is an abuse of the democratic system. Even the US Supreme Court (rarely the friend of gay Americans) overturned the results of the Colorado referendum in 1992, declaring it a violation of the Constitution’s guarantee to equal protection.
It’s probably premature for gay Americans to hope that gay marriages will become legal anytime soon. America really hasn't understood yet that it's about love, not sex (that big bugaboo that screws up so much in America...), and that gay people have a right for their love relationships to be considered valid and to be recognized. The initiative in California that passed on March 7 restricted marriage rights to couples consisting of a man and a woman. The Christian Right played a big role in the propaganda campaign on this ballot issue, along with the Catholic Church and the Mormons. They won that battle, and now more than half the states have legislated heterosexual marriage monopolies pre-emptively. So even if a court decides that gay marriages should be legalized, there are barriers being set up to prevent that from happening. Instead of emphasizing laws that punish homosexuals for engaging in sexual behavior, the trend now is to prevent gay people from developing more stable relationships.
America’s greatest failure has been to live up to its ideals of inclusion. It has a long, long history of leaving out huges portions of its population while declaring itself a free land and a just land. Its ideals were commendable, even if their application left something to be desired. But it abolished slavery,and 100 years later it began to tear down the ugly segregation that made 10% of the population second-class citizens. It stopped its ethnic cleansing of its native American population (and now just neglects them), extended the right to vote to women, and discrimination against Jews and immigrant groups has lessened greatly. It struggled with all these issues, blood was spilled, and there was loud opposition to any and all progress. The same is true now for gay and Lesbian Americans. Like in all Western countries, until this century, homosexuality was the “love that dare not speak its name”. Gay Americans were in the forefront in daring to speak it, cautiously in the fifties and sixties, and much more confidently since.Although they are no longer in the forefront internationally in gaining acceptance in their society (most of the West European countries are far more tolerant and inclusive, as is Canada just to the north), it’s because in the US there is a much larger and organized opposition to ANY recognition or inclusion of gay people, and the American tendency toward excessive individualism makes infighting in the gay movement rampant and a uniting for a common purpose difficult. What’s heartening is that gays go right on coming out in spite of the obstacles and the slow progress legally.
Their opponents will never succeed in pushing gays back into the closet, but because of their negative influence, it will be a long time before America can live up to its ideal to be a land of liberty and justice for all, including its gay citizenry. So if we all are going to end up in hell, there will be a special place there for the Christian Right. (March 9, 2000)
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