A closet full of contradictions - up front: news and opinion from independent minds; civil rights for gays

Humanist, Nov-Dec, 2003 by Sarah J. McCarthy

If Jesus had said it would be easier for a gay guy to sashay through the eye of a needle than to get into heaven, we could understand why social conservatives become unhinged at the thought of gays having constitutional rights. If he had, it would be inscribed over courthouse doors and chiseled in concrete. Anne Coulter would cash in on a bestseller called Deportation. But Jesus didn't say that.

What Jesus said was that it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. But as we know, conservatives have no problem with great wealth.

Jesus never mentioned gays but they make Pat Buchanan crazy. It seems like only yesterday that he declared at the Republican National Convention a culture war against cross dressers. Now Buchanan is calling the Reverend Gene Robinson--the gay bishop-elect in the Episcopal Church--a "flaming fraud" who "dumped his wife" and was "faithless to every vow he ever made." Buchanan advised the bishop's "boyfriend" to "have his eminence fitted with an ankle bracelet that lets you know where the suspect is at all times."

If I didn't know better, I would think Buchanan was a moral relativist. I don't recall him telling Mrs. Gingrich to fit Newt with an ankle bracelet--though he dumped two wives--nor did he call for the boys to pick up their pitchforks and ride after Rush Limbaugh, who dumped two or three wives. Did he advise Nancy Reagan to fit Ronald with an ankle bracelet since he had dumped wife number one along with a child or two? Somehow Buchanan recognized that the shades of gray in these men and their marriages didn't prevent them from being valuable members of society despite their personal problems.

A few years ago a lesbian couple, Brenda and Wanda Henson, purchased farmland in Ovett, Mississippi, and named it Camp Sister Spirit. They were met with threats of violence and a mudslinging onslaught from the Christian right. Buchanan wrote that the women, both Mississippi natives, were "in-your-face lesbians with no claim to be treated as good neighbors." Hey boys, property rights are one thing but this is about lesbians!

Limbaugh, another free marketer and believer in private property rights, proclaimed on his radio show that the purchase of this farm was an "in-your-face assault" on American values. This is "our part of the state," he bellowed.

Adding to the mud pile, syndicated columnist Sam Francis declared that the "real people" of Ovett have a right to defend themselves against the lesbian invaders. Appropriately, the place used to be a pig farm," he wrote and suggested that locals might "burn the whole weird bunch of them back to Castro Street."

For social conservatives, when it comes to gays most other principles go out the window. Senator Rick Santorum (Republican, Pennsylvania), as a follow up to his Magoo-like contention that he couldn't find any right to privacy in the Constitution, recently indulged in more contortionist thinking in his effort to bring the esoterica of Catholic theology into U.S. government, declaring that the key reason for marriage is the production of children, not the union of a loving couple. With adultery, divorce, and child abandonment the clear and obvious threats to traditional heterosexual marriage, Santorum focuses on homosexuals as "a threat to the family." In his bend-over-backwards attempt to justify his disdain for gays, the senator advocates a political philosophy that denies that a right to privacy exists and devalues marital love.

Though all of our constitutional rights, including speech, are limited, Santorum argues that a right to privacy opens the floodgates to include rights to anything: adultery, polygamy, sex with beagles. But, just as speech rights don't include the right to stampede a crowd by yelling fire in a crowded theater, privacy rights don't imply the removal of consent laws or laws protecting a spouse victimized by adultery.

If social conservatives are to convince us that their disdain for gays is based on any degree of rational thought, they need to consider the contradictions in their arguments. Sinners of every stripe--the greedy, the vain, the prideful, the selfish, the sanctimonious, the promiscuous, the dishonest, the gluttonous, and the uncharitable--walk the earth but all have redeeming social value. Few are singled out as categorically unworthy of participation in the mainstream of life: banished from becoming a minister, having a sex life, or even buying a pig farm.

Sarah J. McCarthy lives in Whitehall, Pennsylvania, and is a contributing editor at Liberty magazine.