I have a feeling this is going to turn into a tip-of-the-iceberg kind of post. There are some big questions here, and a lot of mistakes have been made, all of which I may or may not be able to at least touch on.
(This post may be a bit of a ramble, but it's been a couple of days in the making, and I'm not sure that I've managed to gather all the strands together again. There are elements here I know need fuller development. Patience, I beg you.)
First off, it's time to change the rules. It's something I've been advocating for a while, and now I've got some rather more high-profile allies.
The type case is that of Richard Raddon, until recently the director of the Los Angeles Film Festival:
After Raddon's contribution was made public online, Film Independent was swamped with criticism from "No on 8" supporters both inside and outside the organization. Within days, Raddon offered to step down as festival director, but the board, which includes Don Cheadle, Forest Whitaker, Lionsgate President Tom Ortenberg and Fox Searchlight President Peter Rice, gave him a unanimous vote of confidence.
Yet, the anti-Raddon bile continued to bubble in the blogosphere, and according to one Film Independent board member, "No on 8" supporters also berated Raddon personally via phone calls and e-mails. The recriminations ultimately proved too much, and when Raddon offered to resign again, this time the board accepted.
'Profoundly sorry'
In a statement, Raddon said, "I have always held the belief that all people, no matter race, religion or sexual orientation, are entitled to equal rights. As many know, I consider myself a devout and faithful Mormon. I prefer to keep the details around my contribution through my church a private matter. But I am profoundly sorry for the negative attention that my actions have drawn to Film Independent and for the hurt and pain that is being experienced in the GLBT [gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender] community."
I'm with Dan Savage on this one:
[Raddon] goes on to whine about being a "devout and faithful Mormon," and about how his contribution to "Yes on 8" was a "private matter." Uh... no. A donation to a political campaign is a public matter; and civil marriage rights for same-sex couples did not infringe upon the religious freedom of Mormons, devout or otherwise.
Bill Condon, the gay guy who directed of Dreamgirls, attempted to get Raddon's back: "Someone has lost his job and possibly his livelihood because of privately held religious beliefs."
No. No. No. Raddon lost his job due to criticism of his public political actions, not his private religious beliefs, and his public political actions were a part of the public record. If Raddon wanted to go to church and pray his little heart out against same-sex marriage, or proselytize on street corners against gay marriage, or counsel gay men to leave their husbands and marry nice Mormon girls instead, that could be viewed as an expression of his "privately held religious beliefs." Instead he helped fund a political campaign to strip a vulnerable minority group of its civil rights.
Bottom line: if you want your privately held religious beliefs to be private, keep them out of the public arena. This is something that the churches who backed Prop 8 don't seem to get, especially the Mormon church, but the others as well -- I've seen statements from Catholic bishops assailing anti-Prop 8 activists for "assaults" on freedom of religion. (This is, of course, part of the staple stump speech of the Dobson Gang: anything that curtails their ability to deny other people's religious freedom is a blow against their religious freedom.)
Part of the problem here is that the anti-gay right has successfully managed to cast the issue of equal civil rights for gays as a religious issue, not as a civil rights issue. Andrew Sullivan calls attention to this interview with Richard Rodriguez.
Rodriguez is of the opinion that the real threat that conservative churches feel is from feminism, and that the gay movement evokes those fears because it and feminism gained prominence at the same time. I can't dispute that, but I'm not convinced that it's the whole picture, or even a major portion of it.
Monotheistic religions feel threatened by the rise of feminism and the insistence, in many communities, that women take a bigger role in the church. At the same time that women are claiming more responsibility for their religious life, they are also moving out of traditional roles as wife and mother. This is why abortion is so threatening to many religious people -- it represents some rejection of the traditional role of mother.
In such a world, we need to identify the relationship between feminism and homosexuality. These movements began, in some sense, to achieve visibility alongside one another. I know a lot of black churches take offense when gay activists say that the gay movement is somehow analogous to the black civil rights movement. And while there is some relationship between the persecution of gays and the anti-miscegenation laws in the United States, I think the true analogy is to the women's movement. What we represent as gays in America is an alternative to the traditional male-structured society. The possibility that we can form ourselves sexually -- even form our sense of what a sex is -- sets us apart from the traditional roles we were given by our fathers.
I think there's a lot of truth in what Rodriguez says, but I don't agree that this situation can be allowed to stand without challenge. I think black resentment of gays insisting that theirs is a civil rights struggle stems from their feeling of ownership over that whole concept, at least in part. For many blacks, that is a defining part of their history in this country. However, for Rodriguez to say that there is "some relationship" between gay civil rights -- by which I assume he means same-sex marriage bans and anti-miscegenation laws is something of a howler. The point is that in both cases we are talking about guarantees of basic rights for two historically disfavored groups. I'm going to state a baseline here that's probably going to raise some hackles: blacks to not "own" civil rights. They had a struggle to have them acknowledged and guaranteed, but do I need to point out that it was a struggle that involved more than black people? There were a lot of us out there, black and white, straight and gay, Christians, Jews and atheists. Blacks were the focus, but we were fighting for everyone's rights, and we still are. For blacks to refuse to acknowledge that, or to take umbrage at the very idea that there is any similarity, is not something that inclines me to sympathy for their point of view. This is said with full understanding that the black community is no more monolithic than the gay community, but if people are taking a public posture with an implicit claim to represent your community, then it's you who must challenge them, loudly and publicly.
The rest of the interview is largely concerned with Rodriguez' explication of his basic idea of why the churches perceive gay rights as a threat, which makes it largely off-point here, but informative as background. The fact remains that the gay movement is, in all its defining characteristics, a civil rights movement, whether it is perceived that way by religious communities or not. One danger I see in Rodriguez' stance, and in the debate as it has been shaped by the religious right, is that we have allowed them to define the whole thing in terms of a religious
worldview, which I don't think can be allowed. This is not, when it comes right down to it, a theological debate. It is a debate about equality under the law in a secular society.
In connection with the "civil rights" designation, I ran across this laudatory post by Chris Crain on this column by Jonathan Rauch. It's largely a recap of the history, and on that score unexceptional, but Crain's "money quote" is one that I question:
The old civil rights model, with its roots in an era when homosexuals were politically friendless pariahs, focuses on such matters as protection from bigoted employers and hate crimes. In truth, for most gay Americans the civic responsibility agenda, with its focus on service to family (marriage), children (mentoring and adoption), and country (the military), is more relevant and important.
With a comparatively sympathetic administration and Congress taking office in Washington, the time has come to pivot away from the culturally defensive pariah agenda -- the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, for instance -- and toward the culturally transformative family agenda. Priority 1, and well ahead of whatever comes second, should be federal recognition of state civil unions.
First off, I wouldn't bank too much on our "friends." The relationship between the gay movement and the Democratic party, which has gotten entirely too cozy, is also, from the Democrats' side, by all indicators a marriage of convenience -- theirs. I don't dispute that there are sincere advocates in the party for our cause -- certainly more than we'll find in the Republican party as it's now constituted -- but they have been so ineffective as to render themselves irrelevant. And aside from the standard conservative position of "go all out for second best," Rauch's take is, I think, a misreading of what's actually going on, and this is a question that seems to have caught both sides of the "national leadership" debate without an answer -- or at best with part of one. HRC and the other national groups have been devoutly wishing that the whole marriage issue would go away, but, as I've pointed out before, it is the issue of the day, and probably the key issue both in practical and symbolic terms. Rauch's solution, however, is no solution: it's an old rule that if you ask for a little, you'll get less.
What's more important here is that his analysis is wrong because he's missed the most important point of this whole debate, which I mentioned above: it's been cast as a religious war, and needs to be taken out of that context and posed as a question of civil rights, with a much broader focus than the national advocacy organizations have: as we've seen in most of the court cases involved, and most clearly in the California decision, marriage is a fundamental right. To allow, first of all, the proposition that there is such a thing as "gay marriage" is a big mistake. The issue is "marriage" as a social institution, not "traditional marriage" or "gay marriage" or any other subset, real or imaginary, of marriage, but "marriage." Period.
(Two footnotes here:
The religious right has been very successful in using religion as a tool in their campaign for political power: Americans have a deep-seated unwillingness to interfere in questions of religious belief, and it's a powerful motivator for the so-called "values voters." And the left has allowed them to frame the debate that way: Yes on 8 was not only supported and funded by religiously motivated groups, but also played that card repeatedly, casting opponents as attacking religion and so-called "religious" values (which, when it comes right down to it, are no more religious than secular). You can see the result of that in calls from the right and the left to get government out of the marriage business and leave it to the churches, when historically marriage has been a religious institution only sporadically.
Hmm. . . . I seem to have forgotten the second.
Ah -- I remembered: one thing to keep in mind about HRC, GLAAD, No on 8, and all the big-time operators is that the cause has become a job. It's no longer a passion. Think about the implications of that when you read stories about Lorri Jean's month-long vacation in the middle of the California campaign.)
When marriage is taken out of a religious context and shown as a basic right, it's a direct counter to the right's program of discrediting the courts, as well as forming an umbrella under which all the other issues -- ENDA, DADT, the whole shebang -- can shelter. It becomes much easier, then, to cast opponents of gay civil rights as opponents of American values.
That might be helpful in implementing this agenda:
Rotten, bigoted aspects of contemporary religion does not mean that all religion is an obstacle and an overall negative component of society. Indeed religious institutions have been at the forefront of so many of our world's social justice battles... Regardless of one's individual beliefs, we must recognize that our enemies today could, with a little love and yes with a lot of push for reform, possibly become our allies tomorrow.
It can be said that leaders like MLK, Tutu or Gandhi were inspired by common humanity and basic decency, not religion. Only those individuals know, but it was the vehicle of religion which they chose to deliver their messages and inspire millions. Regardless of what you think of religion, it is a pillar of society whether we like it or not. No large scale movement can progress without religious voices helping to nurture the movement along with other forces. That's the whole idea of coalition building and community. We must reach out to those who do not subscribe to our way of thinking 100%, but where we can find common ground.
Try finding common ground with this. Yes, the extreme, but in essence the position of the Mormon leadership, the Dobson Gang, the Catholic bishops. The answer is that yes, I would be very, very happy to find a workable compromise, but we're dealing with groups who do not have that word in their vocabulary. The only viable alternative that I can see is to make their position untenable.
OK -- ran out of steam. I may come back to it, or (Hah! A flash of inspiration!) you could add something in the comments.
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