The
recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, to strike down State
legislation outlawing same-sex marriage, was met with a spate of calls for
resistance from politicians, clergymen, and civil servants—and produced a
flurry of expressions of defiance and anti-gay sentiment from a number of florists,
bakers, and hardware-store owners, most of them small—in some ways very small—businessmen.
Much
of this little controversy is based on an exaggerated sense of Us (good guys)
versus Them (bad guys), something that appears to be evolutionary-instinctive,
and in my experience correlates with the level of academic achievement: the
less educated the person, the more rigid and narrow the identification with Us, and the more
suspicion of, and hostility to, Them.
The
fact that these people raise the false issue of “freedom of expression” shows their irrationality:
Their expressions of hatred and bigotry, the insulting labels like “abomination,” “deviant,” and “pervert” and “faggot” empower and encourage violence (even murder), marginalization, and denial of civil rights. If these expressions are not a threat to all civil rights, including the right to life itself, then how can the mere identification and condemnation of that hatred and bigotry be a threat to freedom of speech?
Their expressions of hatred and bigotry, the insulting labels like “abomination,” “deviant,” and “pervert” and “faggot” empower and encourage violence (even murder), marginalization, and denial of civil rights. If these expressions are not a threat to all civil rights, including the right to life itself, then how can the mere identification and condemnation of that hatred and bigotry be a threat to freedom of speech?
The
so-called threat to “freedom of religion” is equally specious. Those
who claim that their freedom of religion is threatened have one of two bases.
First, the more confused think that if the civil rights of GLBT people are
respected, then somehow, as if by magic, the “religious” rights of
heterosexuals will disappear. This is patently absurd: no heterosexual
marriages will fall apart as a result of a same-sex marriage, not even if the
gay couple moves into the same neighborhood. The marriage of a same-sex couple
will not invalidate Christian “Holy Matrimony” for anyone, anywhere. (Nor will serving a gay customer cause heterosexual
customers to be denied service.) This is the Chicken Little syndrome: In a
traditional popular fable, Chicken Little ran around screaming that the sky was
falling; he psychologically contaminated the entire community without being
able to point to a single event. Maybe this was the inspiration for
Chick-fil-A.
The
second group of “religious” objectors fears prosecution and fines and
possibly even jail terms as a result of refusing service to GLBT. This
fundamentalist Christian fear of prosecution/persecution is undoubtedly
reinforced by the traditional stories, lovingly retold, of the persecution of the primitive Christians
under the Roman Empire, and of the early Protestants by the Roman Catholic
Church. So these people, who would persecute or even kill GLBT people, cast themselves
(!) as the martyrs.
Today,
their fears are apparently based on the penalties for the violation of the
civil-rights legislation of the 1960's and '70's, which itself violated some
fundamentalist Christians' belief in white supremacy. In case you don't believe me, here are some examples of
racist theology: The Southern Baptist Convention, a large Christian
denomination, was created on the eve of the American Civil War specifically in
order to defend, biblically, the enslavement of Africans; and for more than a
century after the war, it defended white supremacy and the oppression of
African Americans. The Ku Klux Klan (which has many sympathizers to this day)
is a perfect example of the religious belief in white supremacy and racial oppression,
just as the Black Muslim belief that Allah created the Black Race (good guys), whereas
Satan created the white race (bad guys, demons), is a perfect example of the
contrary theology.
If
the protection of GLBT people violates the religious freedom of fundamentalist
Christians, then the civil-rights legislation of the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations clearly violated white-supremacist religious freedom. And yet obedience
to civil-rights legislation was enforced, through the courts and even through
the deployment of the National Guard and the United States Marshals. But as far
as I know at this time, only a handful of States have legislation that prescribes penalties
for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Certainly no such
national legislation exists. So the threat of persecution—so deeply feared, so
widely proclaimed by fundamentalist Christians—is illusory, a delusion.
It
will be difficult to root out the prejudice and hatred, mainly because their
roots are so irrational and confused, so unrelated to any specific factual
evidence. Our best hope is to continue the struggle with the passing of time and
the coming of a new generation.
[ The original version of the article
appeared as my comment to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cj-prince/why-i-support-no-gays-all_b_7710334.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592 ]
