(I owe the link to Alina Stefanescu’s commentary at Totalitarianism Today 2004/12/05.)

For the past couple decades or so, the mainstream of the gay rights movement has been insisting, as emphatically as they can and in every forum that they can find, that sexuality is determined by a more-or-less fixed sexual orientation and that sexual orientations are something innate–that is, either determined by genetics or by developmental factors during pregnancy. I understand how the tendency came about, in the face of bigoted bluster about the Evil Gay Agenda’s plans to recruit children, the deceptiveness and brutality of ex-gay aversion therapy programs, and more. But it’s an understandabe error, on any number of fronts. The cluster of ideas involved has any number of problems; one of the most fundamental is that it just bypasses the real argument. Let’s suppose, for example, that it turns out to be true that chemical effects on brain development in early pregnancy do have a major effect on adult sexuality, and that diet pills and thyroid medications really do make children much more likely to be gay if mothers take them during the first three months of pregnancy. What should we say about the discovery?

If you haven’t already got good grounds for saying that there’s nothing wrong with being gay or lesbian, then this discovery might make you less inclined to say that gay people can choose to be straight, or that the cultural environment you encounter in childhood can decide whether you’ll be gay or straight. But it won’t keep you from saying idiot things such as this (emphasis added):

These analyses support the conclusion that female offspring are more vulnerable to alterations in sexual orientation via exposure to a variety of prescription drugs, and suggest that this vulnerability is greatest during the first trimester.

Or this:

The finding adds to mounting concern over the use of slimming pills by women trying to lose weight. Prof Dornan said: All drugs can cross the placental barrier and, looking back, we weren’t so aware of what was going on inside the womb. Nowadays, the Royal College’s view is that women should not take drugs unless there is a clinical need.

Look, there are good medical reasons to be concerned about how medications taken during pregnancy affect children’s health at birth or later in life. But making your baby vulnerable to catching gay is not one of them. It’s not a birth defect, dummy. If there’s nothing wrong with being gay, then the increased likelihood of having a gay child ought to have no effect whatever on whether or not you decide to take pills in early pregnancy. (If it were discovered that diet pills made your child more vulnerable to having green eyes, would any researcher make comments like these?)

But it’s vital to notice that, even if the inntatist line on sexuality turns out to be true in every single respect, it does nothing to rule out either subtly (and perhaps unwittingly) homophobic comments like these, or stridently bigoted appeals from explicit homophobes. (Imagine Pat Robertson on television urging Christian mothers that taking thyroid medication during pregnancy makes the baby Jesus cry.) The fact is that there is nothing wrong with being gay–if it’s a choice, it’s not a wicked choice; if it’s a culturally cultivated taste, it’s not a pervse taste; and if it’s innate it’s not a congenital disease. But you can only say that if you have independent reasons for saying that there’s nothing wrong with gay romance or gay sexuality, aside from We can’t help it!

Gay liberation is a demand for the justice and respect that are due to rational human beings, whatever might happen to be under our loved ones’ underwear. Quibbling over whether our sexuality is ultimately up to us or not is an interesting scientific question, but it’s a political diversion. We shouldn’t waste our time on peripheral arguments to get homophobes to think of us as tragic accidents instead of depraved sinners; if we want to win, we need to head straight for the real argument, and we have to go all the way.

A new advice column–sure to be syndicated in a newspaper near you soon. Because everything is simpler when you reject the State as such.

Dear Dr. Anarchy: How could a dangerous provision be signed into law without anyone in Congress actually having read it?

Sincerely,
Worried in Washington

Worried: To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.

Politicians are never going to stop being irresponsible. That is their job. I suggest that you dump them.

Yours,
Dr. Anarchy

Dear Dr. Anarchy: My pharmacist is refusing to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception because he’s a sexist prick. What can I do?

Truly,
Bristling in Britain

Bristling: Your pharmacist only has the power to be a slimy control freak because a bunch of politicians–most of them men–have given him exclusive control over whether or not you and your neighbors can get needed medicine–by banning you from buying it over the counter. I suggest that you dump them immediately.

Yours,
Dr. Anarchy

Dear Dr. Anarchy: We have reached the point where serious lawyers are being paid serious fees by a big company to shut down the PB&J operation of a grocery store. How can we fix a broken patent system?

Sincerely,
Flummoxed in Florida

Flummoxed: Abolish it.

Sincerely,
Dr. Anarchy

Dear Dr. Anarchy: Can this marriage be saved?

Yours,
Hopeful at the Home Journal

Hopeful: No. Marriage can’t be saved. Abolish it.

Yours,
Dr. Anarchy

Next week: Dr. Anarchy answers your tax questions!

Today is World AIDS Day.

I have a beautiful address book a friend gave me in 1966. I literally cannot open it again.

Ever.

It sits on the shelf
with over a hundred names crossed out.

What is there to say?

There are no words.

I’ll never understand why it happened to us.

–Jerry Herman

When we were wasting away and dying every day, so many people thought that it wasn’t their disease, that it wasn’t their problem. But it was. And AIDS is not over. It is still killing women and men every day. We must never forget. It must end. And it must never happen again.

(Link thanks to bean at Alas, a Blog 2004/10/15)

I don’t care about winning same-sex marriage privileges (for feminist reasons that I’ve laid out in comments and in my essay, The Cake is Rotten). But that doesn’t mean that I’m indifferent to electoral fights such as Oregon’s Measure 36, one of the latest rounds in the Religious Right campaign to write homophobia into federal and state constitutions. So I’m pleased as punch to have found (thanks to Alas, a Blog) the four arguments that M. Dennis Moore has managed to get published in the official Oregon voters’ pamphlet–in favor of the measure to ban same-sex marriage.

Yeah, you heard me. In favor. All of them are great, but my favorite by far is his fourth argument, Let’s Vote:

LET’S VOTE!

The recent OCA signature drive for the Divine Sovereignty Life Amendment, if successful, would have given Oregonians the extraordinary opportunity to vote on the existence of God, yes or no. Religious dogma would have been decided democratically by popular vote — essentially creating an official state religion with GOD ALMIGHTY enshrined in the Constitution as

Oregon State Deity!

Although this initiative drive failed, the Christian Coalition has now created a Commandment Amendment to the Constitution! Measure 36 ordains us to

VOTE ON THE THEOLOGICAL BELIEF

of whether churches, synagogues, and temples shalt not be permitted to marry gays and lesbians.

And this election thus establishes the glorious precedent for democratic electioneering on ALL of the

Official Oregon State Dogma!

COMING SOON
TO A THEOLOGY BALLOT NEAR YOU:

• Shall churches, synagogues, and temples be permitted to marry divorced persons (Luke 16:18)? Let’s vote!
• Shall baptism be by sprinkling, pouring, or dipping? Let’s vote!
• Shall the Lord’s Prayer be translated forgive us our debts or forgive us our trespasses? Let’s vote!
• Shall adulterers be stoned to death(Leviticus 20:10)? Let’s vote!
• Shall obnoxious religious-right hypocrites be allowed to marry? Hell no! Let’s vote!
• How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Hey, let’s just vote!

This is democracy! Religious beliefs belong on the ballot, and winning beliefs become public policy in the Constitutional Catechism! Minority adherents, straight and gay, should have the statesmanship to accept that religious freedom does not protect losing beliefs in a theological election.

Your special right to practice your moral beliefs (including marriage) is subject to the whims of popular vote!

It’s not discrimination, it’s electoral theology.

In Oregon, democratic dogma is inspired by initiative and referendum — in the

Holy Marriage
of the
One Official Oregon Church and State!

VOTE FOR OREGON:
State beaches, the bottle bill, land-use planning, and now
THE OREGON DOGMA!

(This information furnished by M. Dennis Moore, God for Oregon Deity-PAC [GOD-PAC], Family Alliance of God.)

Yes, that really will be going out on state letterhead to every voter in Oregon; you can confirm it at the Secretary of State’s website (the arguments he submitted are the first three arguments in favor and the next to last).

Electoral theology! Mmm, sacrelicious.

Further reading:

• GT 2004/03/10: Traditional marriage”
• GT 2001/08/07: Religious Right wants to write homophobia into the Constitution
• Comments on Civil Rights and Family Values: In Defense of Homosexual (and Heterosexual) Marriage: in which I trash my own argument for gay marriage
• Essay 2001/11/28: The Cake is Rotten: in which I give an extended version of the argument against marriage-privilege

Ampersand at Alas, A Blog points out an important difficulty in debates about gay liberation:

One area of miscommunication in the marriage equality debate is about words like bigot and homophobe. Marriage equality opponents, quite understandably, don’t like being called
bigots and homophobes. They might genuinely have nothing against lesbians and gays; some of them have good friends who are lesbian or gay, and some of them are lesbian or gay themselves.

The problem here, I think, stems from two different definitions of bigotry. Marriage equality opponents think bigot, in this context, means someone who hates lesbians and gays.

Speaking for myself, that’s only one possible meaning of bigot or homophobe. Another meaning, which is how I tend to use those words in the context of the marriage equality debate, is someone who favors an unequal legal status for lesbians and gays. And by that latter definition, it makes perfect sense to describe those who oppose marriage equality as homophobes and bigots.

This is no different from how I view any other issue involving bigotry. To reuse an example, consider someone in the 1960s who favored laws and rules excluding Jews from fancy country clubs. That person may have had many close Jewish friends; perhaps they only favored the exclusions because they valued the club’s longstanding traditions. But regardless of this person’s personal love for Jews, they nonetheless favored one law for gentiles and a different law for Jews, and that made them an anti-Semite.

—Alas, a Blog: How is bigotry defined?

Another way to put it (cribbing from the Marxists) is this: words like homophobic, anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, etc. can be used either in the sense of subjective conditions or in the sense of objective conditions. On the one hand, you might use them to say of some individual person that she or he has a particular set of (negative) attitudes towards other people based on their membership in a particular group; on the other hand you might use them to say of some person or class of people that they are involved in creating, sustaining, and reinforcing material conditions that hurt people who are members of that group.

I think this is an important distinction to make–all too many people today think that racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc. are all about having bad feelings towards people in some group or another; so they seem to think that if they can show that they don’t really have those bad feelings then that’s enough to prove them blameless for the hardships that historically oppressed people face. But it should be obvious that the kind of policies you support and participate in are just as important as your personal overt feelings. (Why should gay people care about the fact that you don’t personally hate them, if you support laws that make them second-class citizens?)

There’s an important caveat to point out here, though, which Ampersand doesn’t draw out. It’s certainly true that objective hostility towards gay people is just as important as a term of analysis and criticism as subjective hostility, and the reflexive urge of many Right-wingers (though certainly not all of them!) to complain about being called bigots or homophobes just misses the point, because it confuses the two ways in which the word is used. But I don’t think that this confusion is entirely the Right-winger’s fault. Part of it is due to unfortunate terminology. Sexism and racism, like imperialism, Communism, republicanism, and so on are terms that obviously can describe either a body of attitudes or beliefs, or an actually-implemented political system. The way we use words ending in -ism is just such that either interpretation might suggest itself, depending on the way in which the word is used. But this is far less obvious in the case of words like bigotry and homophobia. (If a pseudo-psychological term like homophobia isn’t meant to suggest a particular sort of personal attitude towards gay people, then what in the world would be meant to suggest it?)

This isn’t to say that we should ditch the words homophobic or bigot. They’re serviceable words, they work well enough for what they do, and we can make the distinctions we need to make even if it goes against the grain of how the words are constructed. But we should be aware that we are going against the grain, and understand that when discussion is diverted to irrelevant arguments about personal attitudes — the sort of arguments that Ampersand rightly complains of — the language that we’re using to describe people who are anti-gay is partly to blame. (Even if we don’t intend for it to be taken that way: objective conditions are as important as subjective conditions in language, no less than in politics!)