Another FGB Entry

I doesn't look like I'll be doing a regular Friday Gay Blogging column this weekend. Expect more individual posts like this one. (The "Race and Marriage" post may happen eventually -- I'm too much under the gun right now to focus on it, and by the time I get to it, it's likely to be old news, except that I don't think it's an issue that is ever going to be old news, although one can hope. Maybe.)

Andrew Sullivan offers (without comment) this opinion from Dale Carpenter. Carpenter seems to me to be off base here, possibly from not really looking at things closely. This, for example:

Nevertheless, I am uncomfortable with pickets directed at specific places of worship like the Mormon church in Los Angeles. It's too easy for such protests to degenerate into the kinds of ugly religious intolerance this country has long endured. Mormons, in particular, have historically suffered rank prejudice and even violence. Epithets and taunts directed at individuals are especially abhorrent. Individual Mormons (and blacks and others) bravely and publicly opposed Prop 8. Even those who supported Prop 8 are not all anti-gay bigots, though I saw plenty of anti-gay bigotry when I was in California last week. As I've repeatedly argued, there are genuine concerns about making a change like this to an important social institution. Those concerns are misplaced and overwrought, but they are not necessarily bigoted.

Here's my advice to righteously furious gay-marriage supporters: Stop the focus on the Mormon Church. Stop it now. We just lost a ballot fight in which we were falsely but effectively portrayed as attacking religion. So now some of us attack a religion? People were warned that churches would lose their tax-exempt status, which was untrue. So now we have (frivolous) calls for the Mormon Church to lose its tax-exempt status? It's rather selective indignation, anyway, since lots of demographic groups gave us Prop 8 in different ways — some with money and others with votes. I understand the frustration, but this particular expression of it is wrong and counter-productive.

OK -- so Carpenter doesn't think we should direct protests at the people who falsely maligned us in order to further their political ends. I'm chalking that up to his personal discomfort. What I don't see is that we were portrayed as attacking religion, except maybe by implication -- he doesn't point to any specific instances, except the "churches losing their tax-exempt status" mantra, which has been going on for years in every conceivable context. There's some sketchy reasoning going on here that doesn't quite hang together. Are we attacking religion, as Carpenter claims? Well, the right will say so, no matter what we do, but according to him they've already said it, so what's the difference? I think anyone whose mind isn't made up on this -- whicih is the people we're trying to reach -- will see this as appropriate retaliation against a group that unfairly (and possibly illegally) targeted our civil rights, and on that score, the more information that comes to light, the less sympathy I think anyone will have for them. This is not a spur-of-the moment, horrified reaction -- this is part of a long-standing, ongoing campaign on the part of the Mormon Church to deny gay citizens their rightful place in the fabric of this country. The LDS Church's involvement is part of a deliberate attempt to write religious doctrine into the law.

I'm going to pull this video up again, because Dan Savage said it right:



No matter what Carpenter says, and I have no reason to think he's accurate about the possible repercussions here, you can't come out and instruct -- not "urge" as Carpenter said, but "instruct" -- your followers to work against a minority and then hide behind your church to get out of taking responsibility for it.

Carpenter's "alternative" is, sadly, almost too predictable:

If a more intense physical expression of anger and frustration is needed, why not have sit-ins at marriage-license bureaus in California? It could be modeled on the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in the 1960s. The demonstrations would be targeted at government buildings — rather than at churches. And after all, it's government policy we're legitimately protesting, not religious doctrine. Let people get arrested as they sing "We Shall Overcome." The protesters themselves — gay and straight, single and married, black and white, Mormon and Catholic, Republicans and Democrats, moms and dads raising kids — would suffer and accept the legal consequences of their acts. Rather than instilling fear and resentment in others, rather than dividing people on religious and racial lines, they would literally be putting their own bodies on the line for the good of their relationships, their families, their friends, and for a just cause whose time has come. We've had enough of lawyers, courts, focus groups, and media handlers. Let peaceful protesters by the thousands be dragged away just because they want to marry. It would be good old-fashioned civil disobedience, an American protest tradition.

What he's recommending is that we let the religious forces that demolished our right to marriage get off scot free and victimize ourselvs some more. (There's also the fact that the protests that he recommends are already in process -- see my previous post on today's activities.) This is well within the parameters of the standard conservative response to the whole civil rights struggle: be patient, don't rock the boat, don't cause controversy, and let the ones who are out to get you have their way, because eventually some old white straight guy will reward you for being virtuous.

When he gets around to it.

(In Carpenter's defense, some of the information I'm pulling into this commentary came to light after he posted his comments, although I can't say that it would have changed his mind about anything: his position has been pretty consistent.)