A thought just occurred to me, so I'll deal with Linker's insight in a minute. There's another mechanism in play here that forms the basis of the disjunct between the "My best friends" defense and the continued hostility toward gays as a group (and no matter Dreher's disclaimer, his position displays what I can only typify as hostility). It is very difficult to apply one's animus toward a group toward individuals who may be part of that group, particularly if they are people you know. It's been a key element of the hate campaign (and I use that term with full appreciation of the implications) waged by the religious right against gays for the past generation: "the homosexuals" are a shadowing, indistinct collection of people with no morals, no scruples, no humanity. It's harder to see your cousin in that light. And it's typical of the "conservative" position that, rather than re-examine their prejudices, they use that as a defense while citing "traditional values" as the core of their animosity toward equality. It's a major blind spot, and as far as I can see, Dreher is as subject to it as anyone else. This is Linker's "money quote" with the inclusion of what I consider a telling sentence at the end that he left out:
Gay-rights supporters typically believe people like me hold to our opposition to gay marriage and so forth because of some animosity towards gays. I know that it's true for a lot of conservatives, but in my case -- and in the case of most people I know who share my views -- it's not an emotional matter. We have gay friends, are comfortable around gay people, and simply don't share that visceral reaction that used to be commonplace in American life, and (regrettably) still is in many quarters. Our position comes out of a deep concern for two things: 1) the moral and sociological importance of maintaining the traditional family as the center of society; and 2) a high view of religious authority.
Again, Dreher is relying on a catch-phrase here: "traditional family." What is this creature? Where did it come from and how did it become a tradition? What he's referring to, of course, is the family as it was when he grew up, established as a norm by Ozzie and Harriet. What he's calling "traditional" is what sociologists refer to as "nuclear" -- mother, father, kids. Truly traditional families often included grandparents, maybe a stray aunt or uncle (unmarried, for reasons I won't investigate here), often living in close proximity to other relatives. (I'm reminded of my mother's family, a fairly close-knit group, complete with bachelor uncle, another uncle who lived just up the road from my grandmother, others who came to visit at least once a week, hordes of cousins who traveled in a pack, the full-dress family complex: that's what I mean by "traditional family.") Dreher's concoction is just that: not a tradition, but a myth.
It also serves to point out how fixated conservatives are on plumbing. Expand your outlook a bit, so that the traditional family is simply two parents and children. Gives you quite a different take, doesn't it? But to conservatives, it's all about sex, in a very mechanistic, dehumanizing sort of way, as evidenced by their chief rationale for preserving "traditional marriage." The procreation argument is laughable, and I'd like to make a clarification that not only has some real meaning, but destroys the rationale: no one needs a marriage license to have children, but it seems that a stable family, with all the social and legal support we can give it, is still the best context in which to raise them. And there is no evidence at all that gay couples are any worse at it than straight ones.
However, it seems that to the social conservative, love is a somewhat mystical state that's only available to a man and a woman who are married (and I guess it's just any man and any woman who happen to visit a chapel in Las Vegas at the right time). It's not something that applies to same-sex couples, who quite obviously and self-evidently -- if you're a social conservative -- are only in it for sex. Strange to me: there are men I've loved, deeply and completely, and you know what? I still love them, even though we no longer maintain close contact. (It's not nostalgia: when we do talk, it's all still there, all the warmth, all the playfulness, all the affection, all the love.) So I think there's maybe something missing from that whole idea, too.
Back to Linker's idea, which actually grows out of the last part of the quote above: he ascribes Dreher's position to his reliance on authority -- and then demolishes that argument as well:
I suspect that Rod's first instinct will be to respond that the issue isn't really homosexuality at all. It's "authority." Rod, after all, believes
that you simply can't discard a teaching on which the Bible -- in both testaments -- and (for Catholics and Orthodox) authoritative church tradition could not be more clear, simply because it doesn't suit contemporary mores.
That sounds like a reasonable view for a serious religious believer. Except for one thing: Rod has shown in his work as a journalist writing about the sex-abuse scandal in (and its cover-up by) the Catholic Church that he's perfectly willing to aggressively challenge religious authorities when he believes them to be acting immorally. Good for him. It shows that he's modern -- that is, he chooses which authorities to obey based on his own subjective judgment. So when Rod obeys the authority of orthodox (in his case, Eastern Orthodox) Christian teaching on homosexuality, he does so because he chooses to obey -- because he makes the subjective judgment that that teaching is true, is right, is worthy of being obeyed.
I'm not going to speculate on Dreher's reasons for choosing to obey that particular teaching, except to note that, as I pointed out above, homophobia is a deeply seated attitude in this country and, although some may find it easier to apply it to anonymous "homosexuals" than to anyone they know personally, it's still at the root of a lot of attitudes, although deeply buried. (I am reminded of some of my own experiences with "liberals" in Chicago, who were perfectly accepting of my sexual orientation on the surface, but couldn't quite hide the fact that they didn't consider my relationships to be "real" ones. And of course, it was the preponderance of those attitudes that made it so much more difficult for me and my boyfriends to establish and maintain solid relationships to start with: we were not only fighting our enemies and everytyhing we'd been taught, we were fighting our friends. I might also point out that some of their sons are complete wreckage -- an effect of the NIMBY syndrome, I suspect. One, at least -- who did have her head on straight -- had the good sense to call me on behalf of her neighbor, who was distraught on discovering that her son was gay -- not because he was gay, she said, but because he hid it from her. I said two things: "He's still your son, he hasn't changed," and "Why does he feel he has to hide it from you?" I don't think that needs additional amplification.)
So Dreher's position on gay rights and the "normalization" of homosexuality in society boils down once again to pick-and-choose Christianity. As Linker makes plain, we have to look a little deeper than a mere appeal to religious authority to find out what's behind it. At least, Dreher should.
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