I Don't Mean to be Judgmental, But ...

The local newspaper carries the venerable advice column Dear Abby, and the first letter in today's column struck a chord, or a nerve.

DEAR ABBY: I am a senior male. I understand I may have some beliefs that others find old-fashioned. However, I consciously try to be tolerant of others’ feelings and beliefs. That said, my problem is with my younger brother, who is a homosexual. I have always tried to ignore that side of his life and, consequently, we have always had a good relationship. He lives in another state, so we only talk on the telephone.

A couple of months ago while we were talking, the subject of sexuality came up, and I told him I find the fact that he is gay “disgusting.” I know it was a poor choice of words. I merely meant to say that I, myself, am and always have been totally heterosexual. I have never had any sexual interest in members of my own sex. I never meant my comment to be judgmental of my brother or anyone else.

I left several messages apologizing for anything I said that he found objectionable. Now, when I try to contact him, he doesn’t answer my phone calls.

Abby, I miss my brother. I truly love him, and I don’t want to lose all contact with him. If you have any advice for me, please give it to me. I’m desperate and can think of nothing I might be able to do to restore our relationship. — FEELS LIKE A FOOL IN WASHINGTON 

Abby was refreshingly unsympathetic, which is in keeping with the Dear Abby brand.  Her mother, the original Abby, was pro-gay before it was cool, and before her sister "Ann Landers" shed her own old-fashioned views on the matter.  In one famous 1972 column, she slyly told an inquirer who asked how to improve their "once-respectable neighborhood" after a gay couple moved in: "You could move."

My take on today's letter takes a wider view.  Bigots of whatever stripe like to see themselves as merely "old-fashioned," unable to understand why others get indignant when they refer to Negroes as monkeys, to women as whores, to gays as a form of bestiality.  Indeed, another syndicated column in today's paper, by an elderly white man, began by declaring that none of his best friends are black, then explaining that he was just being provocative, but jeez, people have gotten so sensitive about race "in the past couple of years."

For me the key to "Feels Like a Fool in Washington"'s letter was this paragraph:

A couple of months ago while we were talking, the subject of sexuality came up, and I told him I find the fact that he is gay “disgusting.” I know it was a poor choice of words. I merely meant to say that I, myself, am and always have been totally heterosexual. I have never had any sexual interest in members of my own sex. I never meant my comment to be judgmental of my brother or anyone else.

I have no doubt that he had been obnoxious to his brother many times before and that he'd been wanting to use the word "disgusting" for decades, so it's not surprising that it finally popped out.  And though he pretends to be remorseful, he proceeds to try to justify himself: "I merely meant to say..."  Sure he did.  There's no reason why his supposed total heterosexuality requires him to be disgusted by his brother's homosexuality, but again, this is what bigots say when they blurt out something reprehensible.  They merely meant to say that as white people, as men, as Christians, as Americans, as whatever, they naturally loathe those outside their granfalloon.  I remember talking with a young gay man who declared that older gay men should not have sex with anyone at all, not even each other, because it was sick and unnatural and disgusting, they should be kept out of sight: he wasn't being judgmental, he meant them no harm, but he just wasn't attracted to them.  I've heard the same line applied to 'stereotypical' gay men.  But "Feels" never meant the word "disgusting" to "be judgmental."

I also doubt very much that the two had "always had a good relationship."  It's a safe bet that his brother had put up with expressions of this man's bigotry for decades, and finally drew a line.  Even now, "Feels" tries to put it all on his brother: there was nothing really wrong with what he said, but his hypersensitive cancel-culture brother "found it objectionable" anyway.  I wouldn't take his phone calls either.  What Sarah Schulman wrote about a conflicted lesbian student applies here too: "I know that her parents do not love and do not support her.  All they care about are themselves.  They do not see her as real.  And for now, she agrees with them."  The brother may have tried to persuade himself that "Feels" loves and cares about him, but it appears that "Feels" finally persuaded him he was wrong.  "Feels" cares only about himself.

Where Do You Draw The Line?

I want to return to the culture-wars, civility, etc. topic from what I think is a slightly different angle.

What I have in mind is a story that recently spread, about Jimmy Latulipe, the white co-owner of a bar in South Carolina who reassured a white hipster musician who might perform there that "he shouldn't worry about playing there because [the owner] is going to keep the 'nigs' out of his place."

“I was dumbstruck and thought I must have misheard him. I incredulously asked him to repeat himself. I believe my exact words were ‘What the F- did you just say??’” [Don] Merckle continued. “And [bandmate] Brian, sure of what he heard, immediately told him that was NOT ok. Jimmy, sensing his error, immediately tried to back pedal. He apologized then added ‘…but you know what I mean.’”

I think that everyone interested in the issue should ask the civility purists they know what Merckle should have done.  Was it uncivil for Merckle and his bandmate to tell the guy that his racism was "NOT ok"?  Should they have simply swallowed their virtue-signaling Social Justice Warrior heresy-hunting, let the guy retract his words, and agreed to play at the Main Street Public House anyway?  With or without the black member of the band. Should they have gotten all snippy and uptight and Politically Correct and insisted on bringing him along for the performance, or should they have chilled out and let Latulipe have his traditional Southern business values?  But noooo, Merckle spread the incident on Facebook.  (Sarcasm alert, please note.)

I'm laying it on pretty thick here, despite my efforts to be restrained, but this is the issue: just how civil am I expected to be to racists and other bigots? Do I have to do business with them, lest I be uncivil?  Must I let them come to a party I give in my home, ignoring the discomfort they may cause to my other guests -- let alone to me?  (Back in the days when I gave regular parties, I sometimes had to tell friends not to bring with them individuals I knew to be bigots.)  Must I vote for them, lest I be a New McCarthyist, punishing them for disagreeing with me?

There's already too damn much of this kind of "civility" around, both in private and public life.  We're taught not to challenge our bigoted older relatives, no matter how foul the opinions they express.  We're not supposed to Make Trouble, not supposed to Upset Anyone at family gatherings -- a consideration that doesn't apply for some reason to the bigots.  (For some time now I've been pointing out that many of the white people who are supposedly too old to have heard that racism is bad in fact grew up during the Civil Rights era, and must have been aware of it.  If they are still racist after the past fifty or sixty years, it's because they like being racist.  Let them see if they can go on liking it when they get in trouble for it.  And what about those, like me but also many many others, who are the same age, lived through the same era and rejected racism?  Age is not an excuse.)  We're taught that religion, sex, and politics are improper topics at genteel gatherings, and never mind that bigots are mysteriously exempt from that prohibition: just shut up, swallow your objections, and hope that they'll either doze off or pass out before long.

In the public sphere, for example, it's extremely bad form to call a racist a racist, a bigot a bigot.  It's not how they see themselves, it's truly hurtful, it's just not who they are, the accusation of racism is one of the worst things anyone can call you in public life so even if it's true it's completely unfair to say it and only a bad person would do so.  Or: so a distinguished surgeon equated homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia, why not just laugh it off because he's really quite a nice bigot, they don't make homophobes like they used to?  Or: in the eyes of  many decent people, same-sex marriage is a religious issue not a civil-rights issue, so they should be allowed to demand that everyone else see it as they do, it stings them to be considered bigots.  Or: so a nice liberal gets mad and spews out a bunch of antigay swill, am I defending the indefensible if someone attacks those who call him a homophobe?  Or: it's tolerable if a reality-TV star indulges in antigay rants because a lot of people believe as he does, but it's not tolerable if the same guy indulges in nostalgia for the days when the Colored were contented in their subordination.

One noteworthy thing here is the way that civility fetishists equivocate, with dazzling facility really, between denying that a bigot is a bigot on the one hand, and conceding on the other that the subject is a bigot but why make a big deal about it?  And if you're going to make excuses for bigots, why not be even-handed and make the corresponding excuses for people who are mad at bigots? But no, our social norms are set up to protect bigots, and to inhibit anyone from expressing disagreement with them, confronting them, opposing them.  I've mentioned before the gay-bashers who, when blocked from beating up their victim by a self-defense group, and unable to get to their car, protested, "Look -- we don't want no trouble."  Ganging up on a solitary faggot wasn't "trouble," but stopping them from doing it, and stopping them from escaping, was.

Yet these distracting tactics have surprising viability even in liberal discourse.  I just reread Molly Ivins's Nothin' But Good Times Ahead (Random House, 1993), and it includes this: "To understand the fears of fundamentalists is to understand their foolishness. But they get precious little understanding, not to mention empathy or sympathy, from those who pride themselves on their compassion" (213f).  There is a tiny point here; I've often noted that the gay and liberal Christians who denounce the supposed "preaching hate" are big haters themselves.  In the rest of that article Ivins engages in some sloppy and ill-founded stereotyping of "fundamentalists" herself; maybe I should devote a post to that.

The issue here is "the fears of fundamentalists."  I do understand their fears.  I also know, as Ivins does, that not all fundamentalists are bigots, and that many non-fundamentalists are bigots.  So I don't equate fundamentalism and bigotry.  I criticize fundamentalism when it's relevant to do so, when religion itself is the issue, but I attack bigotry when bigotry is the issue.  And that's considered unfair.  When religious bigots are criticized for their bigotry, they tend to defend themselves by claiming that they're being criticized for being Christians.  Antigay bigots claim that they're being criticized for being heterosexual, racists claim that they're being criticized for being white, male supremacists claim that they're being criticized for having a penis, warmongers claim that they're being attacked for being Americans.  This tactic often works, if only by distracting the critic for a while.  We need not to fall for it.

Yes, bigots do have fears.  Corey Robin wrote in The Reactionary Mind (Oxford, 2011), "Loss—real social loss, of power and position, privilege and prestige—is the mustard seed of conservative innovation" (location 3585 of the Kindle edition)  Their targets also have fears.  Why are the bigots' fears privileged in mainstream discussion?  Because the bigots represent the status quo. Of course opposition to them is upsetting, not just to the Right but to much of the Center, which is why liberals are as hostile to "political correctness" as conservatives are.  It's okay to silence antiracist activists, feminists, gay liberationists, labor activists, etc. -- because they're troublemakers, upsetting the apple cart; it's not okay to silence bigots, because they're the norm.

The trouble is, we also need norms.  Almost nobody wants a totally unstable society, though some pretend they do. What I believe most people want is stability that lets them earn a living, raise  a family, and plan for the future.  This is a stability that has always been denied to large numbers of people, and it's always under attack.  I've always believed (though I could well be wrong) that there is enough wealth in the world to allow that stability to everybody, not just to some; some might end up with more than others, but nobody would or should have less than they need to thrive.  (That belief is what was always touted as the American Dream, right?)  If I am wrong about this, then we need to figure out some way to arrange things so that no one has to go without the necessities, because allowing large numbers of people to live in misery is not a recipe for stability for those who have enough.

So the next question is, how should people of good will and determination counter bigots and celebrants of injustice generally?  It should be clear by now that countering them will distress and infuriate them.  They will deny that they are racists, even as they confirm it in their next sentence, and there are many other people who will defend their right not to be distressed.  This will require a good deal of careful thought and organization, but one of the starting points is certainly that we must reject the claim that we are behaving illegitimately when we speak up against them.  We must continue to challenge them firmly, and organize to constrain them from hurting others.

After that we have to use good judgment, and be ready to discuss options, accepting some, rejecting others.  For many people all over the political spectrum, this takes all the fun out of being woke.  Identifying someone as the opponent is a license to go hogwild.  In this they're the mirror image of the people they're attacking, and they use the same distractive tactics the bigots use: What, you're telling me I shouldn't call those reichtards up and make death threats?  You're saying I shouldn't burn their house down and drive them back in when they try to run out?  You must be secretly on their side; you must think they should just be left alone to spread their hate.  You want them to take over!  I don't hate anybody, I am full of love!

For example, under the article which reported that the Main Street Public House has closed temporarily while things are getting sorted out, someone commented:

Tangent to this incident: There is a Divine Street Publick House located in the same city and it’s catching Hell online for what the Main Street Public House did. They are not affiliated at all. The Red Hen in DC is still catching shit for what the Red Hen in Virginia did to Huckabee.  I just want people to @ the right places to troll.  

Oh well, too bad, but let's partayyyyy, right?  Does anyone else remember how, right after the murder of Trayvon Martin and the arrest of George Zimmerman, Spike Lee posted the phone number of Zimmerman's parents online?  Even if you believe it's okay to take out the terrorists' families, there was a little glitch: Lee posted the wrong number, so somebody else got all the abuse and death threats.  And get this: Lee "got in hot water" and was "cast as a villain" in his elderly victims' lawsuit against him!  Oh, the humanity!  Even though he apologized and paid for the costs of their having to leave their home, he was still made out to be the bad guy, for an honest mistake that anybody could have made!

Lee told Oprah (who else?):

"I don't know what my intention was," Lee told Winfrey. "But angry is not a justification for stupidity.

"There's nothing I can say that can defend what I did. It was stupid."

That was at least better than the usual bogus apologies made by public figures when they've fucked up seriously.  But First, do no harm remains a valid principle, not only for doctors but for activists who want to build a better world.  Lee would have been stupid even if he'd posted accurate contact information for Zimmerman's family.  I think that what the commenter above called trolling -- anonymous attacks by phone, letter, or electronic media -- is cowardly and despicable, as most people realize when they are the target.  Confronting bigots face to face, especially bigots we know personally and/or are related to, is harder, scarier, but it's how change gets made.

The same goes for the people who play the "Why don't we kill fascists now, like we did in World War II?" card.  Leaving aside the fact that Our Boys killed fascists overseas, not here, at home we put innocent citizens in concentration camps because of their ancestry.  It wasn't that the government or many American citizens hated fascism, it was that Japan and Germany had the poor judgment to declare war on us.  I suspect that if that hadn't happened, we and our business community could have continued to co-exist with the Axis for a good long time.  But I don't see how starting an internal war now would solve our problems.  We know how well that worked out a century and a half ago, with no long term resentments and hatreds afterward.

So I hesitate to make specific recommendations about how to stop bigots now.  The Civil Rights movement used large-scale nonviolent means in the fifties and the sixties, with some backup from armed defenders, and were demonized as Communist troublemakers.  They made some gains, which are now being rolled back.  The various Black Nationalist groups took up arms, and ended up largely dead or in jail.  Their long-term effectiveness is still being debated.

Still, I feel pretty confident that people confronting people -- friends and families and co-workers -- which made some progress for gay people in the 70s and after, is a viable approach.  By coming out to those around us (as well as publicly in media) we changed the way Americans and others saw and treated us.  That struggle is far from completed, let alone won, but then no struggle is ever completely won.  As Don Merckle decided, though, white people have to stop letting racism slide.  Everyone needs to stop letting bigotry slide.  Merckle says he was stunned to find that Jimmy Latulipe took for granted he was a fellow racist, simply because he was white.  I find this tremendously naive, and I'm not alone in that (see the comments under the first article).  But the important thing is that he decided to let Latulipe know he'd made the wrong assumption.  Everybody needs to do that when we can, and not let ourselves be intimidated into continuing the collaborative silence that protects and perpetuates bigotry.

Nobody Expects the Politically Correct Inquisition

(I should have written about this a week or two ago, but don't worry -- more of the same kind of material will circulate for as long as Trump is President.  P.S. And I was right: today one of my liberal friends liked a post about Putin defending Trump, which had the added remark: Putin's standing up for "his girlfriend.")

The above cartoon began to circulate after Mike Pence walked out of a football game to make known his displeasure to NFL players taking the knee during the national anthem.  Liberals made much of the fact that the action was planned in advance -- like the players' protests weren't -- and cost the taxpayers perhaps a quarter of a million dollars, which is chump change in the Federal budget.  The same complaint could be made about any president's official visits to disaster sites, or other symbolic gestures, but of course when it's Not Your President or Vice President who's doing it, it's completely different.  The Democratic outrage that ensued was a bit odd, considering how many of these people claim that they regard Pence as a lesser evil that they can deal with when Trump is impeached.  I regarded it all as yet another distraction from the actual purpose of the protests, by making them all about Trump.

But then several people I knew, liberals all, passed along the cartoon above.  It too is far from the worst thing in the world today, but it infuriated me anyway because of the people who thought it was funny.  As with Stephen Colbert's "cock holster" quip, it's not really funny; there's no wit about it, it's just a crude and juvenile homophobic taunt, which means it's not the sort of thing liberals should be spreading.  But evidently they thought it was so hilarious that they had to share it.

Ordinarily I respond to homophobic rhetoric on the Internet with sarcasm -- how nice of woke liberals to show their superiority to Rethuglicans by indulging in homophobic attacks, that sort of thing -- but not this time.  I was direct: it really pisses me off when liberals show how woke they are by indulging in homophobic or misogynist attempts at humor -- which generally fail, as this one does. If you spread crap like this around I don't want to hear any bullshit about how much you care for equality and everybody getting along together. You're not an ally.

A few weeks earlier, Mel Brooks complained in an interview with the BBC that "political correctness is 'the death of comedy'.  He said Blazing Saddles, his Western spoof about a black sheriff in a racist town, could never be made today."  This is bullshit.  Blazing Saddles couldn't have been made just a few years before Brooks made it, not because of "political correctness" but because of the Hollywood Production Code, which was the result of the movie industry appeasing religious (especially Roman Catholic) reactionaries.  (I imagine that it couldn't have been made before the Code was adopted either, because of its flamboyant profanity.)  And even after the Code was replaced with a rating system, Brooks encountered resistance to making and releasing the film.  As I recall from the commentary track on one of the DVD versions, some of the actors Brooks wanted refused to speak the naughty words, and others were understandably uncomfortable about spewing racial slurs on camera.  ("Understandably," because of the well-known tendency of audiences to confuse actors with the roles they play.)

Contrariwise, movies full of racial slurs and profanity are reasonably commonplace today, especially when black filmmakers produce them.  But has Brooks never seen, say, Pulp Fiction, which contains plenty of both?  The racist material in particular seems to be there more simply for the taboo-breaking frisson rather than any dramatic or, as in Blazing Saddles, satirical reason.  I don't believe that "political correctness" is preventing such movies from being made.

Brooks went on to declare piously:

But there is one subject he insists he would not parody.
Referring to World War Two, he said: "I personally would never touch gas chambers or the death of children or Jews at the hands of the Nazis.
"In no way is that at all useable or correct for comedy. It's just in truly bad taste."
However, he says that is the "only thing" he would avoid. "Everything else is OK."

This is passing strange, because one of the sources of Brooks's notoriety was Blazing Saddles' predecessor, The Producers, about a couple of sleazy Broadway impresarios who stage a musical, written by a diehard Nazi, celebrating Hitler.  It's just in truly bad taste.  I've never been able to get through the entire film myself, not because I'm offended but because it's not all that interesting: as in Pulp Fiction, the "humor" comes from the breaking of the taboo.  Brooks has never disowned The Producers, and indeed in his dotage made it into a very successful stage musical.  At any rate, he has his own personal "political correctness," the line he won't cross.

Even more obnoxiously, Brooks tried to exalt comedy, especially his kind of comedy, into a virtually spiritual vocation exempt from criticism.  "Comedy has to walk a thin line, take risks. It's the lecherous little elf whispering in the king's ear, telling the truth about human behaviour."  Numerous critics pointed out that Brooks was wrong about the jester's traditional role here.  I certainly agree that comedy, like art in general, can and should take risks, even if it offends; but those who are offended can and should speak up.  Traditional racist, sexist, homophobic &c. comedy wasn't meant to take risks, quite the opposite: it afflicted the afflicted while comforting the comfortable.  It couldn't have been made if it had done otherwise.  Because of the ambiguity of art and entertainment, many of such comedy's targets turned it around and found some kind of affirmation in it.  But to pretend that Sambo shows, for example, were intended to "tell the truth about human behavior" is dishonest.

I liked Blazing Saddles because it turned its satire on white racists, but I suspect that many whites liked it because they thought it gave them a license to say "nigger."  As, apparently, many white schoolkids do with Huckleberry Finn, or rap.  I'd hope that it couldn't be made today, though, at least in its original form, because it's too uneven.  (That is typical of Brooks's films, except for Young Frankenstein, which had fewer comic peaks and more valleys as time went on.)  I wasn't offended by the fag-joke soundstage number featuring Dom DeLuise later in the film, but I never found it funny either; it takes no chances, it's a reprise of the 30s-style Hollywood fag jokes itemized in Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet.  The closest it comes to edginess is having some of the rugged cowboys saunter off arm-in-arm with the queeny chorus boys, and that's not close enough.  (Heathers, and numerous other later comedies, came closer.  Colbert's "cock holster" line and the Pence/Trump blowjob cartoon fall even shorter.)  I think that Richard Pryor, who co-wrote it, probably deserves more credit for Blazing Saddles's virtues than Brooks does, if only because on his own Brooks never again reached those heights.

The proof of the comedy, and the satire, is in the laughter -- and people disagree on what to laugh at.  I think again of Ellen Willis's satirical definition of "humorless": it's what you are if you don't think rape, big breasts, or sex with little girls is funny -- but you're not humorless if you're not amused by castration, impotence, or vaginas with teeth.  And if an artist fails to produce the results he or she aimed for, he or she needs to be told.  Yes, comedy should take chances, but taking chances often fails, and while I sympathize with comedians who don't want to be told, they need to know when they fail.  I might watch a comedy about Nazis, the gas chambers, and all the other subjects Brooks rejects -- if it was really funny.  It's a question that can't be answered in advance.  Blazing Saddles only proved itself by being made.  As Joanna Russ wrote, "To apply rigid, stupid, narrow, political standards to fiction is bad because the standards are rigid, stupid, and narrow, not because they are political."  Like comedy, it's hard to do, and not many bring it off.  Nothing is sacred, including comedy.

This Time for Sure: A Kinder, Gentler Bigotry

When bullies lose their edge, they often try to save the situation by presenting themselves as reasonable.  I once read about a gang of queerbashers, driven from their victim by a community self-defense group, who found that they couldn't get back to their car, and began negotiating by saying, "Hey man, we don't want no trouble."  Of course they wanted trouble, but only as long as they outnumbered their victim and could do to him whatever they wanted.

In the US, antigay bigotry has lost much of its social legitimacy, and the hard core of bigots, though still quite numerous, no longer can appeal to a general social consensus that homosexuality is abominable and homosexuals should be outcasts.  Some of them are therefore trying a different tack, trying for a superficially reasonable approach.  I happened on such a person in a year-old article at The Atlantic Monthly's website, after reading a eulogy for the late William F. Buckley as an exemplar of the supposedly moderate and sensible right-wing Republican racist/bigot.  I have no use for Buckley, who is seriously overrated as an intellectual, but he's not my topic today.  A sidebar recommended this equally fatuous piece on conservative evangelicals and homosexuality by the same writer, Emma Green.

In a new book, Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, offers a third way: stand up and debate, even on issues that seem to be moving toward an ever-firmer cultural consensus. In some ways, Mohler neatly fits the stereotype of an evangelical leader who has taken up a stand against queerness. He’s white, he’s male, he’s Southern; he makes no apologies for his view that homosexuality is intertwined with sin. But he could also probably ace a Women and Gender Studies seminar. (He even once wrote an essay for The Atlantic on the Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown.) In his book, We Cannot Be Silent, he cites sociologists like Jürgen Habermas and discusses television shows like Modern Family. He explores the difference between gender and sex and transgender and intersex.

It’s a somewhat novel approach to being an evangelical in public life: engaging debates about sexuality on their own terms. As Mohler himself admits, this hasn’t always been the case. “While Christians were secure in a cultural consensus that was negative toward same-sex acts and same-sex relationships, we didn’t have to worry too much about understanding our neighbors,” he said. “We did horribly oversimplify the issue.” Now that norms around LGBT issues are changing, evangelicals can no longer afford that kind of glibness, but it’s tricky to balance civility with steadfastness. Mohler said he’s not “trying to launch Culture War II,” but he also doesn’t want evangelicals to back down on their beliefs. “Christians have not had to demonstrate patience, culturally speaking, in a very long time. The kind of work and witness we’re called to—it could take a very long time to show effects.”

"Fatuous" might be too mild a word.  Green is impressed, or wants her readers to be impressed, because Mohler cites Habermas and TV shows.  But Habermas is trendy among cultural conservatives, and allusions to popular culture are old hat among evangelicals hoping to show they're not hopeless old fogies.  (I see that one of Mohler's earlier books is called He Is Not Silent, which sounds like an allusion to the Presbyterian apologist and controversialist Francis Schaeffer, who had a lot of influence on the Reagan administration.  Schaeffer also referred to popular culture and philososophical heavyweights, usually inaccurately.)  That The Atlantic published an article by him means little, since they have given space before to bigoted cultural reactionaries.  The Atlantic regular Conor Friedersdorf has been hunting for non-bigoted antigay spokespeople for some time now, without success.  Could Mohler "ace a Women and Gender Studies Seminar"?  Going by her own superficial account of sex and gender a few paragraphs later, I don't think Green is qualified to say.  I'm in South Korea right now, but I'll try to get Mohler's book from the library when I return in November.  For now, I'll examine the quotations Green provides from him.

Notice that Mohler is president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  The Southern Baptist Convention, you may recall, split off from other American Baptists largely over the issue of slavery, which the Southern Baptists supported (as well they should have -- it's a biblical value, like polygamy).  Nor did they especially distinguish themselves on civil rights issues a century later.  I mention this not to harp on the past, but as a reminder that far from being moral leaders, conservative Christians have often been flat wrong, and have actively supported evil.  (Returning to Buckley for a moment, remember his famous definition of a "conservative" as "someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.")  The Southern Baptists have apologized for their previous support for slavery; I'd like to ask Mohler why I shouldn't anticipate another belated apology, to gay and trans people a century or so down the line.  The SBC has shown itself to be anything but a prophetic voice in the wilderness on moral issues.

Green stresses that Mohler is "white, he's male, he's Southern," without ever noticing in her article that it's possible and indeed not uncommon to be white, male, Southern, and gay.  The whole article puts "evangelical Christianity," which Green tends to confuse with Christianity as a whole, in opposition to "queerness," accepting the antigay Christian spin that only secularists are pushing for a change in Christian views of homosexuality (or of sexuality generally).  You'd never guess from Green's account that Christian churches have been debating these issues internally for decades, or that LGBT religious groups have been major parts of the movement since the 1960s.  This also is important, because Mohler and his ilk are not just tilting at secular society, but at a large number of their fellow Christians.  As with slavery and other embarrassments, why should I believe that Mohler is right this time?

The same goes for another of Mohler's complaints:

He laments that American teens are surrounded by a “peer culture more committed to tolerance than any other moral principle,” which highlights another fundamental tension: He believes self-derived morality is not sufficient, and that Christians have a moral obligation to guide the acts of others.

Maybe Americans are too tolerant.  Maybe religious groups that try to control ("guide"!) the lives of others should simply be squashed, as they were in old Europe.  The trouble is that they were squashed by other religious groups who wanted to control the lives of others.  That's why religious freedom and tolerance are founding, core principles of our government and our society.  They're not the only principles we have, but they're important ones.  Mohler should remember that before religious toleration was established, many Christians were as outraged by the idea that people with the wrong beliefs -- Baptists, for example -- should be allowed to run around loose, worshiping as they saw fit, and even proselytizing for their sects, as they later were about black men marrying their white daughters, or homosexuals recruiting their sons.

With that in mind, one realizes that what Mohler and his ilk present as a new problem for Christianity actually goes back to the founding of the United States, and the conflicts that led to the passage of the Bill of Rights.  Ironically but predictably, Green later paraphrases Mohler's concern that "Courts are facing new questions of how to balance LGBT rights with religious freedom," which are not new at all.  I see that a few months before this piece, Green published another piece, "Gay Rights May Come at the Cost of Religious Freedom."  I haven't read it yet, but the title says so much.  Not only the struggle for racial justice in this country but the struggle for religious freedom had its cost in the freedom of bigots to persecute other Christians on religious grounds.  But wait, there's good news:

In Utah, for example, lawmakers passed legislation prohibiting LGBT housing and employment discrimination while allowing certain exemptions for religious groups, the result of a collaboration between LGBT and faith organizations. As more cities and states consider this kind of statute, Utah could serve as a template.

Whatever those "certain exemptions" were in Utah, they are also nothing new in civil rights law generally.  I don't know whether it's Green or Mohler who's outrageously ignorant in this matter -- both, most likely, because statements like this are so common in the discourse -- but it shows just how low the level of debate is among evangelicals and their sympathizers.  "Conservative Christians, so long represented among advisors to presidents, and powerful public voices and those who readily embraced discrimination, might seem unlikely recipients of either compassion or intellectual generosity," Green opines.  Compassion should be extended to all, but you'd better do your homework if you want to be taken seriously on an intellectual level.  Green clearly hasn't, and it doesn't sound like Mohler has either.

But back to Mohler and his concern about "self-derived morality," which he evidently ascribes to youth "peer culture."  That seems to be a contradiction, and as far as I can tell, the "tolerance" Mohler objects to (for others, not for himself) is neither self-derived -- it's exercised in a framework that comes from outside the individual, from peers, from adults (including parents), from teachers and diversity managers in the universities --  or indiscriminately tolerant.  It's especially risible for Mohler and Green to natter on about excessive tolerance when the dominant view of young people nowadays is that they are brutally intolerant of dissent beyond the narrow ambit of their fanatical Political Correctness.  There is evidently more tolerance of various sexual and other life choices than there was a few decades ago, not just of homosexuality and gender-variance, not just heterosexual cohabitation and "hookups," but of divorce, single parenting, and interracial coupling -- again, sore spots for Southern Baptists.

When the article gets down to Mohler's views on sexuality and gender, he seems to have little to offer that is new or deserving of respect.  "'We must admit that Christians have sinned against transgender people and those struggling with such questions by simplistic explanations that do not take into account the deep spiritual and personal anguish of those who are in the struggle,' Mohler writes."  This is a familiar setup to anyone who remembers the Southern Baptists' mealy-mouthed and long overdue apologies for its heritage of racism.  If Mohler really means it, he needs to take an aggressive stance against the virulent falsehoods that evangelicals have spread about LGBT people; but it appears that he's more interested in spreading them farther.

A case in point: Green mentions "Leelah Alcorn, a transgender teen from Ohio who committed suicide this year, citing frustrations with the religious expectations of her parents."  She does not mention gay and trans kids and adults who've been murdered, beaten, thrown out of their homes.  As often as not their assailants got away with it.  I've often asked antigay bigots how they propose to counter bullying and gay-bashing.  They never have anything serious to offer.  The usual evangelical response to anti-bullying initiatives has been to oppose them, claiming that they would encourage homosexuality in some obscure fashion.  Unless Mohler not only distances himself from this stance but denounces it and makes some positive proposals of his own, he's part of the problem.

In what Green calls one of his "moments of tonal derision," Mohler "recommends using the term 'homosexual,' rather than 'gay,' because it 'has the advantage of speaking with sharp particularity to the actual issue at stake.'"  I can't be sure, but I strongly suspect that the "actual issue at stake" is buttsex; I imagine that Mohler likes "homosexual" because it contains the word "sex," and if so, he misunderstands it.  (No A in Gender Studies for Mohler, then, but then many gay people make the very same mistake about the word.)  I'm not greatly concerned about what word Mohler prefers, and I'm not one of those gay people who want to pretend that we don't have sex, we only Love.  But it's good to know where he's coming from.

In his book, Mohler suggests that people who continuously struggle with same-sex attraction should maintain lifelong celibacy, becoming a “eunuch for the kingdom.” That’s a huge personal decision, one that would radically define a person’s life. Even with all his answers, Mohler did not have straightforward advice for how churches should deal with a transgender person who wants to be saved in an evangelical church but has already undergone gender-reassignment surgery. (“Would surgery now be pastorally required or advisable in order to obey Christ? … Pastors and congregations should consider age, context, and even physical and physiological factors when determining a course of action,” he writes.)

Again, there's nothing new here.  Sexual abstinence for queers has been advocated for a century or more -- including some of the invert/Uranian writers -- and it's the official position of the Roman Catholic Church today.  I'll have to read Mohler's book to be certain, but at this remove his use of Matthew 19:12 is derisory, to put it far more kindly than he deserves.  What I mean is this: it's absurd -- no, make that "obscene" -- to tell homosexuals that we must choose celibacy if you're not going to make the same demand of heterosexuals, who have the option of a licit sexual outlet, in marriage.  It's also unbiblical, since in context, Matthew 19:12 is directed to heterosexuals.  Jesus' disciples conclude from Jesus' prohibition of divorce and remarriage, "If such is the case with a man with his wife, it is better not to marry" (19:10, NRSV).  To which Jesus responds by extolling those who become eunuchs for the kingdom.  Heterosexual marriage is not the New Testament ideal.  But it seems from Green's account that Mohler ignores this.

"Continuously struggle with same-sex attraction" is a giveaway; it's the language used by Christian hucksters to color themselves sympathetic to the people they're trying to scam.  What about people who don't struggle with same-sex attraction, but rather embrace and celebrate it as heterosexuals do theirs?  Don't forget, that includes Christians as well as unbelievers.  From Green's account it would seem that Mohler has nothing to say to any of us.  (His waffling on post-op transsexuals is no more helpful.)  If that's the case, he has a long way to go before he can expect to be taken seriously as a discussant on the role of conservative Christians in contemporary society.

But, Green says,

[Mohler] also recognizes—mildly, mildly—that there is wisdom to be drawn from questioning traditional norms of sexuality. Even though he firmly agrees that men and women should embrace the gender identity that matches their sex, "We do understand that a part of that is socially constructed," he said. "And not only that, in a fallen world, there can be exaggerations and corruptions of what it means to be a man and a woman. There are some very brutalistic corruptions of masculinity, and there are some very trivial and hyper-sexualized understandings of the female that the Bible would clearly reject."

"Mildly, mildly"?  Jesus might have had something to say about that.  However, "Mohler ... believes 'we find wholeness and resolution only in being the man or the woman that God meant us to be, or made us to be.'"

How nice; but how do we know what kind of man or woman God made us to be?  It sounds as if Mohler is ignorant about the Bible, which is a lot more complex about sexuality and gender than today's American Protestants believe.  He could begin by reading Jennifer Wright Knust's Unprotected Texts: The Bible's Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire, published by Harper Collins in 2011.  (He also doesn't know what 'socially constructed" means, though that doesn't distinguish him from most of his opponents.  So much for that A in Gender Studies.)  "Become eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven" is the least of it; even if Jesus only meant it figuratively, the story of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 shows that literal eunuchs could be accepted into the church.  (Think again of Mohler's equivocation about post-op transsexuals.  One might wonder why, in a story so full of miracles, Phillip didn't simply restore the eunuch's testicles.  Jesus said explicitly that his followers would have the power to move mountains.  He himself restored a withered hand and restored the dead to life; reparative healing of a eunuch should be doable.)  Look at Jesus' hostility to biological families, including his own, or his extolling of a young woman who left her household chores to listen to his teaching.  Look at the wildly varying views of marriage the Bible embraces, from brother-sister and first-cousin marriage, polygamy and concubinage, to abstinence and becoming a eunuch for the Kingdom.  Look at the depiction of Yahweh as a violently jealous and abusive husband with performance anxiety.  The Christian scholar James Barr wrote that the trouble with modern fundamentalist teaching about sex is not "pathological prurience" but that it is "childishly naïve in a pre-1914 schoolboy-idealistic manner" (Fundamentalism [Westminster Press, 1977], 331).  It looks to me like Albert Mohler is no exception.

Another example of Mohler's and Green's historical ignorance (or missionary dishonesty) is the claim that Mohler's doing something new.  His approach is really as traditional and familiar as Good Cop / Bad Cop.  Antigay bigots, secular as well as theocratic, have long claimed to be moved not by hatred of Sodomites, but by love and compassion for us.  The same goes for racism: back when Bob Jones University forbade interracial dating and declined to admit African-American students, Bob Jones III (quoted in this post) strenuously denied that he was racist, and claimed that "We love the Negro people. Some of the finest Christians I've ever known were Negroes. In fact, they put me to shame. And I have looked at several Negro Christians and wished to God I could be as Christlike as they are. And among Christian Negroes there is no strife between them and us -- we are brothers in the Lord."  But: " Until we have our redeemed, supernatural bodies in Heaven we're not going to be equal here, and there's no sense in trying to be. Here's what I say. The Negro -- and I'm not, it's not my own feeling -- but a Negro is best when he serves at the table, when he does that, he's doing what he knows how to do best."  The Bad Cop is always there, tazer at the ready, to put you back in your place.

I'm fully in favor of the debate Mohler calls for.  I think I'd enjoy taking him on myself.  But Green's article, and the sampling she gives of Mohler's ideas, remind me of something Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about the notion of a "conversation on race."

One of the problems with the idea that America needs a "Conversation On Race" is that it presumes that "America" has something intelligent to say about race. All you need do is look at how American history is taught in this country to realize that that is basically impossible.

The same, I submit, is true of the conversation Emma Green would like us to have on sexuality and gender: she presumes that America, and conservative Christians like Albert Mohler in particular, has something intelligent to say about those topics. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's impossible, but the wrong people are puffing themselves up and claiming they're qualified to tell the rest of America what is going on, how to think, what to believe, and how to live.  On top of that, they want everyone else to feel sorry for them, because they're in a dwindling minority and don't have the cultural clout they used to have.  They've also embraced the Culture of Therapy, with the idea that dissidents shouldn't be made to feel like outcasts -- though they've never adopted that attitude for others, including dissidents in their own ranks.  Yes, being at odds with the society you live in can be uncomfortable; I know that very well, from personal experience.  But aside from the fact that it's also part of the Christian heritage -- something else Mohler and Green want to forget -- being uncomfortable is not the worst thing that can happen to you.  Nowhere is it written that you (or I) must be comfortable. You cannot, in a free and pluralistic society, demand that your views be accepted uncritically, and others with different views be silenced, just so you won't feel bad.  You don't have to feel bad for being different in the first place, and Christians have always defined their difference as a sign that they had the Truth in the second.  Mohler's goal is the normalization (or rather, re-normalization) of bigotry.  Debate, by all means, but if Mohler wants evangelicals to be taken seriously in the discussion, he clearly has a lot of work to do first.

Mnyeh, Typical

Jews Sans Frontieres has several good new posts up, dealing with accusations of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn and his section of the Labour Party.  It happened that I read these a day after a Facebook friend linked to an article warning of newly increased anti-Semitism. These are important and contain valid information and arguments.  But I noticed something that bothered me here.

If you look at the way the Zionist movement is throwing its weight around in the UK ever since Jeremy Corbyn became leader, it's not an edifying spectacle. I mean it must be causing antisemitism given the unjust and unfounded nature of the allegations. 

And here:

Sadly it also has the effect of making ill-informed people subscribe to the old antisemitism because of course Dave [Rich, author of a book accusing the left of anti-Semitism] and others like him, including now a Home Office Select Committee have decided that Jews and Zionists are the same thing.  All very sad and very irresponsible.

I agree that many, probably most people react to the bad behavior of a few people by ascribing it to all members of the group they associate with the bad actors.  So, for example, I captured this specimen a year ago after the Paris attacks, in comments at another blog:

And yet yesterday evening I found myself thinking “what the f*** is wrong with those people”, and I’d be lying if said I meant just the murdering a*******. I should know better. I DO know better. And yet… I don’t know any muslims. It’s so easy to slip into that lazy, wrongheaded thinking, even when you know better. 

Since it's so easy to slip into that lazy, wrongheaded thinking, I think it's important that everybody be vigilant against it, in themselves and others, and challenge it whenever you encounter it.  It's not something that occurs only far away; it happens all around us.

I disagree with JSF and the commenter, though, that this tendency has anything to do with being ill-informed, or knowing any members of the group being demonized.  For one thing, even scholars fall into it: though they are generally very well-informed, they can't or won't apply the knowledge they have.  And contrariwise, anytime someone hears about some bad behavior and asks themselves "What's wrong with those people?", meaning not the specific perpetrators but their country, their religion, their political party, they need to stop and catch themselves.  You don't need to be informed, beyond the knowledge that no group is completely homogeneous.  You don't need to know any Muslims.  The burden of proof, and it's a heavy one, lies on anyone who claims that They are all alike, They are all responsible.  The variety within groups is always enormous.  (Think of the old Jewish proverb Two Jews, three opinions.)

In particular, if someone is angry about what members of the IDF, or settlers in the Occupied Terroritories, or members of ISIS or al-Qaeda have done, and then decides to beat up (or worse) the Jew or Arab or random brown-skinned person in their neighborhood in revenge, the legal penalty should be heavy, but more important, they should be shunned and generally given a hard time by everyone in their neighborhood.  If such a person tries to justify their violence by pointing to crimes committed against the ocean, the penalty should be even stiffer.  If only because such thinking and behavior lessens the safety of everybody in the vicinity, it needs to be nipped in the bud, killed before it spreads.

P.S. I forgot to mention that in a review of Dave Rich's book that JSF quotes approvingly, the reviewer says:

Clearly, insofar as some remarks are antisemitic they need to be confronted. Conspiracy theories, e.g. that Israel founded Isis or that Jews escaped 9/11, should be dismissed out of hand. 

People keep using this word, I do not think it means what they think it means.  Those aren't "conspiracy theories," they're simple falsehoods.  They may be used in conspiracy theories, but that's not quite the same thing.  But the important thing is that Dave Rich and the constituency he's writing for are conspiracy theorists, accusing the British left of deliberately fomenting anti-Semitism in order to bring down Israel.  As I've pointed out before, conspiracy theories are a thoroughly acceptable feature of mainstream political discourse, as long as they name the "right" conspirators.

But do read JSF's new posts.  Though they are about Britain, the same tactics are being used in the US.

Moderation

The worst thing about Donald Trump is the same as the worst thing about the late Fred Phelps: he's so obnoxious that other extremists can use him to seem moderate and reasonable by comparison.  So, for example, Senator Lindsey Graham has just denounced Trump as a "race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot" who "doesn't represent my party."  Now, any observer of the American political scene knows that race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigots are the backbone of the GOP, which deliberately wooed them away from the Democrats during the Nixon administration.  Just to limit myself to Graham, in 2010 the New York Times called him "this year's maverick," which is corporate media code for a frothing, shamelessly warmongering bigot that the paper wants, for some reason, to cultivate.  So, of course, my Right Wing Acquaintance No. 1 linked to Graham's denunciation of Trump, adding, "Trump is, indeed, a fascist."  RWA1 likes people like Trump and Phelps, for the same reason: he can use them to present himself as a reasonable, moderate person.

The second worst thing about Trump is that he's a safe target for liberal Democrats, who are flooding the Intertoobz with abuse of him.  As my new meme, above, suggests, this no doubt makes them feel better, but has no useful effect that I can see.  Admittedly, it's hard to know what would have a useful effect.  But I saw one enlightened soul refer to Trump as a "retard" the other day, thereby showing his vast moral and intellectual superiority to Trump and his supporters; a fair amount of the anti-Trump stuff does help drag down the level of discourse in our nation, as if it weren't already low enough.

Here's a better reaction to Trump, from an interview with the leftist Anglo-Pakistani writer Tariq Ali on Democracy Now! this morning.  Amy Goodman asked him what he thought of the move in Parliament to ban Donald Trump from England.  Ali replied:

And I, myself—Amy, I have to say that, you know, I’m not in favor of banning people, because once you start banning people from the right who are mouthing extreme-right rubbish, this then leads to similar bans against progressive people, people on the left accused of being terrorists, etc. It’s better to debate these people out rather than to ban them. That’s my opinion.

Mine too.  It's funny to imagine Trump hoist on his own petard, but liberals never seem to remember that the repressive actions they favor will eventually be used against them.

Only I Get to Decide Which Criticisms of Me Are Valid

To a great extent I agree with this meme; it makes an important point.  But even as I clicked "Like," I heard once again that snarky voice in the back of my mind saying, "Oh, yeah?"

Rather than try to tell other minorities what they should do, I'll start with the one of which I'm a member.  I don't trust gay people to decide what is homophobic, or what is antigay bigotry.  Many gay people are themselves homophobic; if they can't spot it in themselves, they probably won't be able to spot it reliably in heterosexuals.  And they don't.

There are two phases to the question, it seems to me.  First we need to know what we're talking about when we talk about homophobia.  Merriam Webster's definition is revealing:

irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals

I've already discussed the odd conflation of "aversion" and "discrimination."

But I once had a revealing exchange about all this online.  I wrote that if you are uncomfortable seeing two men kissing, but not a man and a woman kissing, that is homophobia.  It didn't seem like a particularly controversial statement to me -- that discomfort is an irrational aversion, no? -- but other gay people disagreed with me vehemently.  Their argument was that if you aren't throwing rocks at a gay person, you aren't homophobic.  It also seemed that they were hesitant to label someone a homophobe merely for wanting to vomit at the sight of two boys kissing, because homophobes are, like, monsters -- demons, even.  That's odd when you consider how much fuss there has been among my people over language like "That's so gay," which doesn't constitute overt violence either.  But then, many gay people have at least claimed to be disgusted by public displays of affection between people of the same sex.  They would commonly try to mask their own homophobia by claiming to be just as disgusted by heterosexual PDAs.  The only disgust at PDAs I've ever observed among my fellow Homo-Americans, however, is disgust in gay men at lesbian PDAs.

I've known a fair number of people who were initially shocked (irrational aversion) or repulsed (ditto) by the idea of homosexuality, or the sight of same-sex couples kissing (or even holding hands), but who got over it -- without therapy.  Their original reactions were born of ignorance and socialization, and these faded away when they got to know gay people, and their repugnance faded.  Even if one wanted to call this homophobia an illness, like most illnesses it can pass without treatment.  Some people, true, cling to their revulsion; that's a lifestyle choice.  It can be judged morally, though a sensible person will also recognize that clinging can become a reflex that isn't turned off easily.

Many, perhaps most gay people regard as homophobic any criticism of born-gay theories of sexual orientation.  Anyone who doubts that homosexuality is innate will be accused of believing that being gay is a "choice" and of siding with the bigots.  This is problematic given the absence of sound scientific evidence for, or a coherent concept underlying for those theories; but as with the medical model in general, the conclusion comes first and the evidence later, if ever.  And the born-gay faith is compatible with considerable internalized homophobia.  (Would anyone choose a lifestyle that caused them to be hated, despised, persecuted ...?)

Having said that, I notice that "Gentiles don't get to decide what is anti-Semitic" is conspicuously absent from the meme.  I suspect that many if not most American Jews would agree that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, unless the critic is a Jew, in which case he or she is a self-hating Jew. Should this be allowed to stand?  I know that the acquaintance who posted the meme on Facebook is critical of Israel, as am I, and would dismiss the contention and the accusation.  But this can't stand, on the meme's simplistic terms. 

"Non-patriots don't get to decide what is anti-American" is also absent from the list.  So is "Non-Christians don't get to decide what is anti-Christian," along with "Non-Catholics don't get to decide what is anti-Catholic," and even "Non-fundamentalists don't get to decide what violates religious freedom."  What complicates the problem -- and also indicates the way out of it -- is that not all members of any of these groups agree, about much of anything.  There is a wide range of attitudes to homosexuality and antigay bigotry among gay people, for example; many critics of Israel are Jewish; many critics of the Vatican and the Catholic hierarchy are Catholic; feminists take a wide range of stances; and so on.  It's easy, and all too common, to dismiss the dissenters as willing victims of false consciousness, but that won't work: who gets to decide who has authentic consciousness?

But too much good work on women's issues has been done by men, good work on gay issues has been done by heterosexuals, good work on race has been done by white people, and so on, to limit discussion to the simplistic level of this meme.   Beyond that level, what matters is the quality of the arguments a person makes.  By that standard, much of the discourse of oppression by the oppressed groups doesn't measure up, and it's not news that majorities in such groups are often hostile to the arguments made by the more thoughtful among them/us.  Which doesn't mean that academics and other intellectuals should automatically have the last word either; nor can an outsider dismiss the complaints of the oppressed by pointing to one or two among them who support the oppressor.  You have to acquaint yourself with the range of opinions in any group, and then think about them.  That's a lot harder, but it's what has to be done if anyone's going to learn anything.

The Medicalization of Bigotry

While writing another post I went into a digression that seems worth pursuing, so I decided to give it a post of its own.

I was writing about various kinds of discrimination, and not for the first time it occurred to me that there's a problem with the word "homophobia."  Merriam Webster's definition is revealing:

irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals

"Irrational fear" and "discrimination" are two different concepts, though they often overlap in practice: a person might discriminate because of an irrational fear of those she discriminates against, but there are other reasons too.  Irrational fear and aversion might, it seems to me, arise when a society maintains certain social divisions, and the aversion might be more of a reaction to the breaching of those divisions than to the specific instance.  So, for example, there is no innate revulsion against eating pork, but if you've grown up in a society where pork is forbidden, you might very well be disgusted by the thought of eating it, or by people who eat it.  There's no innate revulsion against political parties, or against athletic teams, but people learn to invest intense emotion in these rivalries, and to despise their opponents.  As with other forms, it doesn't really make sense to call an attitude a disease when it's a sanctioned majority position in a society.  It's a sign of how people have confused the two that Webster found it desirable to conflate them in a single definition.

"Homophobia" was invented out of whole cloth in the 1960s by a psychologist named George Weinberg.  I see from this 2012 article that he wants it to be put in "the index of mental disorders," though he still evidently has no evidence that it is one.  Anecdotes about abusive attitudes and behavior do not constitute such evidence.  Indeed, what constitutes a mental disorder has never been settled among mental health professionals.  Why would Weinberg want to confuse bigotry, which merits moral condemnation, with a mental disorder, which ought to be regarded with compassion and given treatment to cure it?  I think he wants to have the best -- or perhaps the worst -- of both worlds, treating illness as a moral failing which can respectably be regarded with repugnance.  That's a familiar pattern in itself: it used to be the normal (though not universal) attitude among mental health professionals toward homosexuals: revulsion and fake compassion.  We need to get rid of that pattern, not switch targets.

Weinberg presumably also wants his profession to have authority to deal with social problems, as opposed to the law or the Church -- again, the same pattern Foucault identified in the medical profession as it dealt with sexuality and other matters in the nineteenth century.  Without any evidence at all save the kind of lurid case histories Weinberg offered at HuffPost, doctors claimed that they understood the true nature of (for example) homosexuality, and should be authorized to determine its treatment, though they had none to offer.

What Stuart A. Kirk, Tomi Gomory and David Cohen wrote in Mad Science (Transaction, 2013) about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders fits Weinberg's methods as well.

DSM offers behavioral diagnostic criteria as if they confirm the existence of a valid disorder, when the criteria merely describe what is claimed a priori to be an illness. Descriptive diagnosis is a tautology that distracts observers from recognizing that DSM offers no indicators that establish the validity of any psychiatric illness, although they may typically point to distresses, worries, or misbehaviors [166].

Weinberg doesn't even mention treatment of homophobes in his 2012 screed; it doesn't seem to be a concern of his.  I expect he knows that homophobia can no more be "treated" than homosexuality can; maybe it's inborn?  If not, where did it come from?  But the important thing is that in inventing "homophobia," Weinberg is working on the same principles that had made "homosexuality" a mental illness too.

This is is why, though I'll use "homophobia" loosely to refer to a gut-level emotional reaction to gay people or homosexuality, I prefer to call it antigay bigotry.  I think it's better to make forthright moral judgments, when that is what one wants to do, than to hide behind pseudo-scientific terminology in hopes of seeming more objective, or unbiased.  Curiously, though, it seems that many people who are quite comfortable judging others for "homophobia" are uneasy about calling a bigot a bigot.  I think such discomfort is most likely to arise when someone generally considered liberal reveals him or herself to be a bigot, as opposed to ignorant dirty Bible thumpers.  (Not always, of course.)

This, I think, is what the philosopher Walter Kaufmann called "decidophobia" in Without Guilt and Justice (Wyden, 1973).  He wasn't pretending to diagnose an illness; like me, he used "phobia" loosely to refer to a pattern of feeling, a nervousness about making fateful decisions and judgments and taking responsibility for them.  Among the patterns he identified was "moral rationalism," the belief that morality can be decided by reason, mechanically, rather than by human reflection and judgment.  "Homophobia" as a pseudo-medical term is a prime example of moral rationalism, especially when people use it as an epithet, judging while pretending not to.

The Rejection of Shame

I'm still reading Claudia Roth Pierpont's Roth Unbound, advancing chronologically through Philip Roth's career.  For some reason she skipped the long story "On the Air," which appeared in issue 10 of the paperback-magazine New American Review, back in 1970; I know I still have that issue around here somewhere.  It has almost never been reprinted, apparently because Roth himself hates it.  But it fits so neatly into that period, which includes several intentionally provocative works, from Portnoy to the Nixon satire Our Gang. And incidentally, one of the more amazing bits in Roth Unbound is a page-and-a-half excerpt from Nixon's White House Tapes, most of which I read before I realized that it was not a quotation from Our Gang but the real thing:

NIXON: Roth is of course a Jew
HALDEMAN: Oh yes ... He's brilliant in a sick way [73].

Anyway, I'm now reading Pierpont's discussion of Roth's middle period, initiated by The Ghost Writer in 1979.  This is the novel where the protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman, meets a young woman who might or might not be Anne Frank, if Frank had survived Bergen-Belsen and immigrated to the US.  Roth was interested in her status as a sort of Jewish saint, had been wondering for years about her appeal.  As Pierpont explains it:

For all the tears that have been shed for Anne Frank, has her book really taught anybody anything?

The question may seem naive.  But Nathan, in the voice of his imaginary Anne, comes to an answer about the lessons of the book that accords, perhaps unsurprisingly, with Roth's defense of his stories years earlier.  The Diary has touched so many people -- and here Roth says "aloud" the most hazardous thing he felt he had to say -- because there was nothing notably Jewish about this mostly secular, Dickens-reading, European family who just happened to be Jews.  "A harmless Chankukah song" once a year, a few Hebrew words, a few candles, a few presents; there was hardly more to it than that.  They were in no way foreign, strange, or embarrassing -- and look what happened to them.  They were entirely charming, in fact, especially, of course, Anne.  And look what happened to her.  What did it take to provoke what happened?  "It took nothing -- that was the horror.  And that was the truth.  And that was the power of her book."  As Roth had once replied to the rabbis, it is impossible to control anti-Semitism through exemplary behavior, accomplishments, or charm.  Because anti-Semitism originates not in the Jew but in the anti-Semites.  Repression, pretension, "putting on a good face": all useless.  Anne's diary offered a double lesson, really.  For Gentiles, a lesson in common humanity, the nightmare made real because of how familiar Anne and her family seemed.  And for Jews, the fact that this familiarity had not done a thing to save them [118].

The stories Roth had to defend years earlier were in his first book, Goodbye Columbus, which had outraged many Jewish readers and spokesmen for (as they thought) airing Jewish dirty laundry where the Gentiles could see it.  At least once he was asked, "Mr. Roth, would you write the same stories you've written if you were living in Nazi Germany?" (14).  Roth was not living in Nazi Germany, of course.  His take on Anne Frank was in part an answer to that very stupid question.  For one thing, German Jews were among the most assimilated in Europe; all their efforts to minimize their differences made them no less vulnerable.  Hasidim who stood out were demonized in ways that often sound familiar from antigay propaganda now, but assimilated Jews were demonized as a Fifth Column, a secret menace pretending to be normal while burrowing away at the foundations of Western Civilization.  As Pierpont puts it, anti-Semitism (or any kind of bigotry, really) originates not in the Jew but in the anti-Semite.  I've argued before that trying to appease bigots by conforming to predominant gender norms is just as futile, for the same reason: flamboyant "stereotypical" queers will outrage many people, but others will be just as outraged by non-stereotypical queers who pretend to be normal.  This doesn't mean that all gay people or Jews should strive to be visible, only that it's useless to rationalize conformity as a remedy for bigotry.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a fine piece yesterday that (among other things) addressed the same point for African-Americans.

When W.E.B. Du Bois, in 1897, claimed that the "first and greatest" step toward addressing "the Negro Problem," lay in correcting the "immorality, crime and laziness among the Negroes themselves" he was wrong. No amount of morality could have prevented the overthrow of Wilmington by white supremacists—the only coup in American history—a year later. When Booker T. Washington urged blacks to use "every iota of influence that we possess" to "get rid of the criminal and loafing element of our people," he was wrong. When Marcus Garvey claimed that "the greatest stumbling block in the way of progress in the race has invariably come from within the race itself," he was dead wrong. When Malcolm X claimed that "the white man is too intelligent to let someone else come and gain control of the economy of his community,” and asserted that black people "will let anybody come in and take control of the economy of your community," he was wrong. He knew the game was rigged. He did not know how much.

In his book The Condemnation of Blackness, the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad notes that a few years after Du Bois made his proclamations he was shocked to find himself cited by unreformed white supremacists.

Besides, many of the black people who were lynched in Du Bois' day were in fact responsible, disciplined, and successful: that was why the mobs targeted them.  (Again, like Jews -- stereotyped as rich -- and gay men -- ditto.)

That isn't to deny, of course, that many black people are irresponsible -- Coates addresses that elsewhere in the piece -- or that many gay people are.  But so are many white people, and many straights.  Whites may complain about low-class white trash, but they don't see the misconduct of other whites as invalidating their own privilege, and they certainly don't expect to be judged by it.  The same goes for straights versus gays, or Gentiles versus Jews, or Christians versus Muslims, or men versus women ... any such division, really.

In another book I read recently, What Is English and Why Should We Care? (Oxford, 2013), Tim Machan says that colonialists preferred that "natives" speak broken English, which could be despised as a symptom of laziness and/or inferior intellect, rather than fluent standard English, which caused the rulers anxiety on numerous levels.  This double bind persists, I think, in whites' contempt for poor blacks (or other Others -- it also applied to European immigrants a hundred years ago) combined with hatred of those who succeed in whites' domains.  This accounts for the racist hatred of Barack Obama, as can be seen in the memes which depict him as an African witch doctor or other "primitive" caricature.  But it can also be seen in white liberal middle-class caricatures of inbred rednecks and ignorant fundamentalists.  The Other is a mirror in which we try very hard not to see ourselves.

The Least of These

Today a friend and I had dinner at a local restaurant.  Since it's semester break and between holidays, the town is quiet, and there weren't many other people present, so I noticed a group of people sitting nearby.  They were two men and two women, all in their late 20s, and a baby about a year old. The adults were college types, possibly young professionals.  I noticed that the men were holding and playing with the baby, and I supposed they were two heterosexual couples out for the evening.

But gradually I noticed that the men never handed the baby to the women: they handed him back and forth between them, bouncing him and cuddling him, and though I couldn't make out most of what they were saying, they were both talking about him and his crotchets in a familiar manner. The women commented occasionally but didn't seem to be contributing stories of their own about his sleeping habits, diaper usage, how often he ate, or the like.  Gradually it dawned on me that while they were two couples, they weren't heterosexual couples: rather, they were a gay male and a gay female couple, and the baby was the son (adopted, I presume) of the two men.  When they finished their meal and got up to leave, the baby stayed with the men; the women didn't even hold him for a moment.  The men carried him out to their car, strapped him into his car seat, and drove away.  The women went off to their own car.

This wasn't the first time I've seen gay parents in the field, so to speak, but it's still a relative novelty in Bloomington.  It inspired a complex mix of feelings, but I think foremost in my mind was protectiveness.

I think one reason I've been so inactive lately is that I've been trying to decide whether or not to write about the fuss over the Duck Dynasty "patriarch" Phil Robertson.  I imagine most of my American readers know the background by now, but I do get some traffic from overseas, and it's possible that those readers might not have heard.  The controversy was summed ably by the blogger Ampersand at Alas, a Blog:

Phil Robertson, a long-bearded dude from a hugely successful A&E reality show makes racist and homophobic comments during a GQ interview, leading to objections from various lefties and lefty organizations, which A&E responded to by “suspending” Robertson (although the suspension may be “just for show“), which led to various right-wingers objecting to left-wing totalitarianism and blah blah blah you get the gist of it.

Ampersand went on to sum up the issues involved quite well, saying most of what I thought about the "kerfluffle" (the word I'd have used for it), so I'll just refer interested readers to that post.  Or to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote two excellent posts focusing mostly on Robertson's warped perspective on American race history, without slighting what he had to say about homos.  And, as Americans who pay attention to things also probably know, A&E lifted the suspension on Friday, which can hardly have surprised anyone.

I think the main reason I couldn't bring myself to write about all this was that I was horribly depressed by the Floodgates of Stupid opening once again.  On most sides.  Rod Dreher began grinding out warnings that Christians were being persecuted by Teh Gey, just as he had so often predicted; I stopped reading after the first two or three.  I would not have minded so much the gibbering of the Christian Right, complaining that Robertson was being persecuted just for bearing witness to the teachings of the Bible.  I had some fun pointing out that Robertson and his supporters are clearly Cafeteria Christians who ignore Biblical teachings that don't interest them, such as the apostle Paul's declaration that long hair on a man is shameful.  The Robertson men are walking, talking, embodiments of shame, going against nature according to Paul, who spoke with divine authority.  The conservative Christians I mentioned this to ignored it, thus showing how devoted they are to Scripture.  No surprise there.

The responses of most liberals, gay and straight, were just as dispiriting.  Many of them spoke piously of the sanctity of contract: Robertson had entered into a solemn binding agreement with A&E, and he'd broken it by saying things they didn't like, so he had no right to complain.  Such people didn't have much to say when I asked them if this meant that they were okay with employers controlling every aspect of employees' lives?  The First Amendment protects citizens' free speech from government interference, however inadequately, but big corporations are at least as big a threat to civil liberties as big government.  Did these people think it was okay for MSNBC to fire Phil Donohue for being too skeptical of the Bush Administration's rush to war in Iraq?  I mean, he was an employee too.  Again, there wasn't much response to this question.  As usual, the reaction was mainly partisan: only people on Our Side, whichever side that happened to be, have the right to say controversial or offensive things.

My Right-Wing Acquaintance Number One did not disappoint: he was furiously indignant about Robertson's suspension.  Like numerous rightwingers, he thought that Robertson shouldn't be penalized (or, apparently, even criticized) for saying what many sincere people believe about homosexuality, and after all, that's what the church teaches.  Another of his Facebook friends asked him what he thought about Robertson's comments about contented darkies in old Looziana, and he admitted he hadn't read that far.  After checking, he answered sullenly that not many churches support racism anymore, which was a charming non sequitur.  True, even Bob Jones University has fallen from its former fierce Bible-based defense of racial separation, but a good many American whites still subscribe to the belief that Jim Crow wasn't that bad, that Southern whites viewed their black servants as family, and that now that Those People have their rights, racism just isn't a problem anymore.  Robertson was surely talking for about as many people in his remarks on race as he was in his hysterical condemnation of buttsex.  I didn't think to ask how many churches have to teach a particular doctrine before it becomes exempt from public criticism; I wish I had.  RWA1 went on to link to a post in defense of Robertson's bigotry by Camille Paglia, whom he called a "righteous broad", and he claimed that the attack on Robertson's statements was motivated by an outbreak of class hatred.  This from a man who declares that American culture is going down the toilet because of commercial culture, which would surely include Duck Dynasty's white trash aesthetic!  It's also instructive to compare RWA1's reaction to Robertson to his condemnation of the Westboro Baptist Church; as I've pointed out before, WBC mainly functions as an extreme, compared to which other bigots can declare themselves moderate.  And though RWA1 defended the right-wing doctor Ben Carson, who said similarly stupid and bigoted things about homosexuality, he was silent when the liberal actor Alec Baldwin got into trouble for using homophobic epithets.  As I said, partisanship is obviously the deciding factor.

All this confirms my general sense of the inadequacy of American political / cultural discourse, which is nothing new but is still depressing when my nose gets rubbed in it.  (I reached a similar point a little over a year ago, during the 2012 election campaign, for the same reason.)  I don't think this is anything new, as I've said before, but I still believe that it can and must change.  I kept thinking I should write about it, but it seemed like too big a subject, and yet for just that reason I couldn't seem to motivate myself to write about anything else.  For one thing, I often have the feeling that I'm repeating myself, taking on the same cluster of topics over and over again, just because they become prominent, over and over again, in what passes for the national conversation.  Or maybe just the parts of the national conversation that I see.  I haven't started yet another post on The Modern Concept Of Sexual Orientation and Gender Binary for the same reason: I've written plenty about it before, and don't really have anything new to add.

But seeing those two dads and their son in the restaurant made me think of something else, which makes me think I should call this post "Why We Fight."  In the last analysis I'm not all that offended by Robertson's remarks about queers; they're predictable and tired, and they don't, by themselves, do me any harm.  And I've often griped about liberals' overwrought reaction to offensive speech -- Oh, how can you say such awful things!? -- which I see as self-stroking, self-displaying, self-righteous outrage not very different from that of the bigots.  It certainly does nothing to foster dialogue or debate with those who differ from us; but as I've also observed, most people anywhere on the political spectrum aren't really interested in debate or dialogue.  It can't be because they've tried it and they're tired of it: those I observe have never engaged in dialogue or debate that I know of.  I've done it much more than most people, for all the good it does.

What has concerned me since the 1960s, when I first began delving into these issues -- the Civil Rights and antiwar movements at first, then the gay movement and feminism -- is that other people should not be hurt.  I don't want to be hurt either, but I've suffered relatively little.  And once I could speak up, it seemed important to do so, so that other people could be emboldened and feel less alone.  Just standing together isn't enough -- I think of Stephen Vizinczey's remark about the anti-Semite who "wouldn’t look for a Jew to fight, only for a Jew to mob" (The Rules of Chaos [McCall, 1970], 208).  Alas, most liberals aren't looking for fundamentalists or bigots to fight, only for one they can mob.  Even in a controlled, structured situation, they can't carry on a discussion.  This doesn't distinguish them from their right-wing counterparts, of course; that's the trouble.  Both groups can throw up prefabricated, predigested opinions on their Facebook timelines, but if they're challenged about the content or the ideas they can only retreat to abuse and self-pity.

And yet I can't withdraw from the struggle.  There are plenty of people who would feel fully justified in taking that little boy away from his fathers.  Such things have happened before.  They will happen again.  I don't know where Phil Robertson would stand on an issue like that.  Instead of throwing hissyfits about how awful he is, someone should ask him, in public.  If he wants to be grossed out by the idea of two men having sex, that's his right, but I want to know what he proposes to advocate about public policy.  The same goes for opponents of same-sex marriage when they pretend that they don't object to gay couples, they just want to reserve the sacrament of marriage for one man and one woman.  The same thing goes for someone like Pope Francis, who talks a nice non-judgmental line about gays, but I want to know what that means in practice.  Would a male or female couple with a child be welcome in his Church, or its facilities?  I don't think this is that hard; finding out that it apparently is too difficult for the reality-based to handle is what depresses me.