The Anti-Gay Blizzard

In the aftermath of the November election, when so-called “moral values” were credited with deciding the presidency, a veritable blizzard of anti-gay legislative initiatives are choking the corridors of almost every state legislature, led by President Bush’s latest clarion call in his State of the Union message for a Constitutional amendment to ban same-sex unions.

It is no secret that Bush’s loud reaffirmation of his commitment to an anti-gay amendment to the U.S. Constitution last week resulted from pro-marriage amendment activists’ threats to undermine his push for Social Security reform if he didn’t.

Republicans and the religious right have discovered there is a lot of political and fundraising capital for them in exploiting this knee-jerk issue, and in a most craven, cruel and self-serving way are willing to vilify and incite mob-like hysteria against an entire class of human beings the vast majority of whom are, by the way, also law abiding citizens who contribute enormously to the strength and vitality of the national fabric in every conceivable way.

As the U.S. courts move methodically to extend the equal rights provisions of the U.S. Constitution to this class of people, political and religious opportunists seek to repeat the worst disgraces of those who used the Bible to defend racial and ethnic hated and segregation against the extension of equal rights through high court rulings in the not-that-distant past. It was the same kind of so-called “activist judges” being vilified by the right today that overthrew the “separate but equal” laws upholding racial segregation in 1954.

The religious right singles out homosexual acts from among many prohibited behaviors in the so-called Holiness Code in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy of the Bible to carry out this ugly crusade. The same chapters also prohibit wearing clothes made from a blend of textiles, tattoos, eating rare meat and shrimp or lobster, cross-breeding livestock and sowing a field with mixed seed while allowing polygamy and declaring that any woman who claims to be raped is lying if no one hears her scream.

While the sayings of Jesus include nothing about the subject, in the letters of Paul it is depraved lust and brazen public behavior, and not a same-sex predisposition or loving relationships that are considered the consequence of sin or alienation from God.

Indeed, the dominant notion of sin in the New Testament, which is defined as “missing the mark” in pursuing the will of God, is not disobedience to the Holiness Code or any other lists of rules, but is the kind of arrogance, pride, hypocrisy and religious self-righteousness described in the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican that blocks true compassion and an ability to reach out in the manner described in the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Down through the centuries, the church has redefined sin as disobedience to its authority to maintain its grip on its followers, becoming the very institutional tyranny that the message of the New Testament stood against. So it is to this day in the realm of the religious right’s willingness to subordinate overarching Biblical themes of compassion, humility and defending the downtrodden to this selective practice of angry and unapologetic prejudice.

It is the dominant sentiment of most major religions that what’s at stake in the world, in reality, is the tension between the disposition to love against the disposition to indifference or hate. It’s really that simple.

But now, seldom has the nation been in a more hateful mood, directed not against a foreign military threat, against perpetrators of genocide, or even against the terrorists of 9/11, but against a whole class of Americans seeking nothing more than equal rights under the law.

Most ironically, those rights include the right to engage in the most moral behavior of all, which is to provide secure and nurturing contexts susceptible to the optimal rearing of the young. It is not these people who threaten the institution of marriage. It is they who may save it, by redefining it as originally intended, as a shared commitment between individuals with a mind to cultivating an environment for the proper health and feeding of the young, especially those abused, neglected and tossed away in the current cultural meltdown of the institution of. marriage. They hold out the promise for a new social safety net for the nation’s abused and neglected.

As it is, marriage is on the rocks today at least in part because our society still condones institutional hatred and bigotry, as such attitudes undermine love, compassion and fidelity.

All that notwithstanding, the issue is the simply the extension of the Constitutional guarantee of equal rights under the law to an unprotected class of people. Nothing more, nothing less.

Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com