Okay, so two dear friends of mine have gotten into a bit of an argument, and I fear that things are a bit snarled up. Maybe we can tease out the strands of thought, here, and see if we might still keep talking to each other in a constructive way.
I’m talking to you, Peter and Cynthia.
Let us start by reminding ourselves that most political bloggers know each other from a shared interest in . . . politics. That is, spirited discussions (I mean “arguments”) about what is proper and helpful in terms of government and public policy.
But we’ve also become friends, so we will tend to discuss our religious beliefs and our family arrangements. In that lagoon, fights break out that make it harder for us to swim together in the open ocean.
We conflate the public sphere with the private sphere too frequently—and we do it at our peril. Let’s leave the warm lagoon waters where they belong, shall we?
First, a First Amendment break: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
* * *
Cynthia Yockey is of the belief that Marcus Bachmann is gay, and closeted. Which I have no way of being sure of. I do know that I’ve known multiple men in my life who were terrific non-conformists about their approach to masculinity, and though straight as arrows, were continually assumed to be gay—even by those who were gay.
We have, thank goodness, moved away from the model of behavior that suggests gays must live in the closet, and must therefore “signal” their orientation through a fog of “confirmed bachelorhood” by being unmacho—or, worse, enforcing a lack of masculinity upon themselves. Yet a lot of these old stereotypes remain, and it’s a shame: gay men are just as maculine as straights, and it’s terrific that they don’t have to pantomime femininity (and usually the worst aspects thereof) just to find each other these days.
And, of course, there is a commonality between the worst sort of queen and the worst sort of shrink: both can be extraordinarily passive-aggressive. That is, I believe, why people assert with such self-assured airs that Marcus Bachmann is gay: he wears his passive-aggressive nature on his sleeve, and it comes across as bitchiness. He’s fey, for sure. Whether he’s really gay, though, is an open question.
Cynthia is right, of course, to be indignant about the type of counseling that purports to “turn gay people straight,” because that approach does lead to suicides, broken marriages, and fatherless/motherless children. It is one thing to provide religious counseling that encourages chastity among gays—and unmarried straights. It is quite another to gamble with people’s lives.
In many cases the antigay shrink-quacks encourage gay people to lie to themselves, start families under false pretenses, and create all kinds of destruction—in an attempt to encourage denial of fundamental truths that would be better faced up to.
So, yes—I would concede Da TechGuy’s argument that Cynthia overstepped a little in her certainty about Marcus Bachmann’s orientation and proclivities. And imputing a desire for minors to someone one has not met is—well, it’s coloring outside the lines.
But certainly for Da TechGuy to start talking about Hell shows that he’s allowed himself to be provoked a bit, too. No one is saying that sin is a good idea. No one is saying that every person has to be paired up, or sexually active, to be happy. But we should be careful not to get personal, here in the Lagoon—particularly when we have an election to win next year.
Yet if Mr. Bachmann has performed the type of “counseling” that leads to lies, suicides, and broken homes—and I haven’t looked into it enough to know for sure whether he has or has not—it would be a wicked thing, indeed.
Not something that should be illegal, perhaps. But wicked.
But let us press on. Da TechGuy, again:
Now Marcus Bachmann, like most Protestants, looks at homosexuality from a different perspective than Catholics. His denomination considers the orientation a sin, while we consider the act a sin.
Well, that’s not quite correct, if we’re talking about conservative evangelicals or fundamentalists. In most cases, they believe that the orientation does not exist. It’s not that you’re gay; it’s just that you think you’re gay, because you fell in with the wrong crowd at a young age, or some such. Among most charismatic Christians, homosexuality is a “perversion,” like a taste for junk food, and if you only have some wholesome, home-cooked dinners, you’ll be able to change your palate.
The result is usually heartbreak.
Most of this tribe sees sexuality as plastic in a way that it simply is not—at least, not for most people. (There are true bisexuals, but they are relatively rare.)
And it’s worth mentioning that DTG—while reminding us of the important fact that Evil, and Satan, do exist—quotes the Screwtape Letters:
It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick.
But I am Roman Catholic. Do I really believe that playing cards will take a person to hell as easily as murder? Do I think a bit of Friday night poker endangers a person’s soul? Do I think it’s a sin for a child to place a playing card so that it makes a loud, rhythmic noise as it runs over the spokes of his bicycle? Of course not!
I’m Roman Catholic in part because I reject the fantasy that is indulged in by too many people who were brought up as I was: the belief that being “Christian” makes one “perfectable” in this life.
We are called to “fight the good fight.” We are not called to beat ourselves up for not yet being perfect. And there is a difference, because sometimes guilt over small sins leads people to be sucked into a vortex of big sins.
And negotiating the sin-minefield is best masterminded from the confessional—not the ballot box.
Back to the First Amendment; you knew I’d take you back here, right? Here it is again: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
What does that mean? That means that beyond the basic Judeo-Christian creed reflected in the Ten Commandments, people’s home arrangments are their own business.
In the private sphere, I’m a Christian and I want to share that with you.
In the public sphere, I’m merely—and gloriously—a citizen, and it’s no business of mine what your bedroom arrangements are, provided they reflect some kind of middle-class morality, don’t involve crime, and will not “frighten the horses.”
So, while in private I think it’s possible that Marcus Bachmann might be a bit light on his loafers, in public I don’t think it’s any of my beeswax.
Private sphere: prayer, worship. Religious marriage. Fighting sin. Walking with Christ. God.
Public sphere: free markets, civil marriage, a strong middle class. Country.
Live it. Love it. Learn it.
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{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting exchange. Am I wrong to feel in this election that the economy and our national security trumps all?
And if Marcus Bachmann is indeed gay? Then maybe he proves that one can overcome one’s same sex attraction and create a full life with a wife and children.
Who is Cynthia to decide if he’d have been happier with a man?
Why is gay so hard written in stone that nothing can change it?
Well, everyone must suppress some desires to achieve any goals at all. But there are distinctions to be drawn when one is trying to convert people wholesale, and encouraging them to engage in heterosexual partnernerships that may lead to heartbreak for everyone, and draw children into a tragic mess.
Yes, but so does browbeating straight people (or indeed, people who aren’t really attracted to anybody) to act like something more socially acceptable under the assumption that they must be gay or transexual or anything, anything at all, as long as it involves having sex weirdly. Because of course anyone who’s just the slightest bit non-normal in personality must be gay.
Because I really wasn’t interested, dressed as boringly as possible, and only wanted to be left alone, I got nothing but peer pressure, physical beatings, comments of all kinds, guys groping me, friends trying to guilt me, my mother persuading one guy I was secretly in love with him, and not one but many guys becoming persuaded that I was actually some sort of glamorous mysterious woman. And that was just high school. In college, some of this stuff actually got worse. It’s like physics: you can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t even get out of the game. (And yes, not all gay people have wonderful gaydar, either, at least not when they wish to believe that certain people like them who don’t. But fortunately this never became a problem for me, except the one time I tried to discern at a convent and the good sisters assumed I was a lesbian and tried to counsel me about chaste life. Didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, really, since my temptations are many but that ain’t one.)
As a girl, however, you can cultivate a right hook, a kicking leg, and a voice that allows you to scream a lot. Guys tend to get punished for that, whereas girls can dissolve into girlish tears in front of authority figures and easily get out of trouble.
On the bright side, there’s something to be said for everybody being sure you must have a Deep Dark Secret Life Full of Hideous Cthulhuoid Passions, just because they never see you dating anybody. It’s like the old saying: “Smile — it makes everybody wonder what you’re up to.”
The LittleMissAtillaReaders Digest Condensed version: Cynthia, Peter, go to your respective corners, sit down and STFU!
I don’t think that orientation is much a matter of choice. My very best friend is gay, and we’ve known each other since we were four years old. Apart from my growing up in a large family and his being an only child, I can’t think of anything in our experience that might account for it. He stands a bit in loco parentis for my oldest, Brendan, who’s at Marquette in Milwaukee, and he’s a great favorite, too, with my other two kids.
Now, having an Italian mother, from Assisi, and being an only, it was very hard for him to come out to his parents, and dash Luciana’s hopes for grandchildren to dote on. He and I double dated for one of the proms, though he went to a different high school in our hometown than I, so it’s not as though he didn’t make the effort. He just wasn’t attracted to girls. He and his partner have been together for almost 25 years. They like to watch the Packers, cook out, work on their house, dine out and have a beer on the town. It’s all very bourgeois.
Cynthia and I have gone around a bit on the marriage thing. Catholics regard it as a particular kind of sacrament between a man and a woman. Other churches are free to regard it as they like, but that doesn’t change the Catholic definition. The problem comes in when government decides to get involved by saying, oh, you don’t agree with the State’s definition of what marriage is (as often as not decided by courts), so you are bad people who really shouldn’t express your opinions publicly, or you will lose your tax-exempt status. Or, you don’t facilitate adoption to gay couples, so we are shutting you down. Or, your hospitals don’t provide abortion services to women wishing to have abortions, so no funding for you, because it’s terribly inconvenient for them to try to arrange for an abortion at a place a little further down the road.
I’ve noticed that many of these very tolerant people are very intolerant toward my religion. They would say that Catholics are the intolerant ones, but I can assure you that none of my Catholic family, friends or acquaintances is so obsessed with, for example, Presbyterian gay marriages that it ever comes up in conversation, though on occasion we may have a laugh about that moonbat Bishop of Canterbury. People who get apoplectic over whatever Benedict says about any subject whatsoever earnestly consider Krugman’s argument that a space invasion would be just the thing to pull the economy out of the dumps, or listen to their friends talk about the healing properties of stones and magnets, and put their razors in cardboard pyramids to prevent them rusting, and all the other stuff that they decide to believe in . . . like Obama, for instance, or Keynesianism. Some of them, despite their worship of diversity, are outright supporters of eugenics.
On the whole, I think they worry about my unorthodoxy more than I do theirs.
Yes, that’s a problem. My best friend from high school has a son and a daughter with her wife, and I’m utterly indignant at the notion of them being treated differently as a civil matter.
At the same time, religious institutions must be free to follow their consciences in matters that pertain to the male-female sacrament–and, even more importantly, to life issues.
And I’m not sure which crowd accepts me less–my conservative friends or my liberal ones. It’s all case-by-case right now. Person by person, issue by issue.
Do you remember that line from A Room of One’s Own, wherein the character who stands in for Virginia Woolf (who is, largely, her) passes by the library at “Oxbridge,” and sees the sign that says women cannot go into it, and observes something to the effect that I thought how awful it was to be locked out. And then I thought how much worse it would be to be locked in.
So it’s like that.
But if you and I can live with these contradictions every day, people ought to be able to write laws that respect them. Ought to.
Dan, one of the first ways to make government smaller is to stop funding religious proselytizing in the form of adoption agencies and similar enterprises. Government has no business funding them. The religions who want to run these enterprises should make them work in the free market or as charities and not have their hands in the public purse. The fact that religions shut down adoption agencies when their government funding is cut off shows that their claim of not being allowed to practice their religion is a fraud and that their enterprises were scams to get government money. They are free to set any restrictions they want if they operate on free market principles.
I am grateful to Joy for writing this post but don’t quite agree about the public/private divide since nothing about anyone’s sexual orientation is really private. Straight people take their equality for granted and don’t realize how much they use their freedom to talk about their straight relationships to create rapport and build trust. Gays notice because we really don’t get to do that.
Social conservatives make the brand of conservatism incomprehensible to people who really belong in the conservative movement as fiscal conservatives because they use government to impose their religious beliefs on others. This is a death of a thousand cuts for gays because they use their various religions to deny us equality on the rationale that their religion demonizes us. This is a form of slavery because we get no say in this at all. The power of the government is used to force us to obey someone else’s religion. That is a dangerous precedent to set.
Marriage equality for gays is not going to change how each religion defines its marriages. In addition, we already have the Metropolitan Community Church and Reform rabbis to celebrate our marriages. If we need any more gay-friendly religions to perform our marriages, we are a self-reliant minority and will create them.
I have no problem with Government not funding Catholic Charities’ adoption services .. as long as Government ends their monopoly on adoption and stops funding ALL other adoption agencies.
But its a funny way of “shrinking” Government by allowing them to expand their reach into intimate family decisions like who is going to make optimal parents for a child. Certainly, if Catholic Charities is not PC enough, we’ve already seen foster parents being denied further children because the children might be infected with Christian morality. ZOMG think of the horror of such an infection! Random acts of kindness, unrepentant charity! Oh.the.humanity!
There was a time when people just wanted being gay as accepted as just another part of their makeup – like their eye color or their height. Now “gay” is in front of everything else and must also include a certain political dynamic or the person him/herself is not “authentic”
What bovine excrement. The love that dared not speak its name now won’t turn down the screaming histrionics one notch from eleven.
One man/one woman marriage is not forcing religion down anyone’s throat. But hey, let’s dismiss tens of thousands of years of experience, experimentation, biology, science and wisdom to indulge a radical change based on murky and sometimes dubious motives.
Somehow we moved from “gays just want to legally protect relationships with recognized contract – e.g. civil unions ” to “not only are gays to be married and celebrated as exactly the same as straights, but anyone that disagrees should be fired, harassed, and/or have their businesses ruined.”
Good show! That’ll teach ’em.
Ironically, as American mainstream culture has gotten a lot less religious, as Judeo-Christian mores & traditions are dismissed and mocked, our culture has gotten a lot MORE coarse, rude, dangerous and depressing.
Plus a ton more laws and regulations on the books concerning behavior that once was the province of church and family.
Feral people, indeed. The chickens have come to roost most egregiously in the UK. We aren’t far behind.
Ironically? That’s the ultimate consequence.
What Darleen said.
Ayn Rand said something on this matter that has stuck with me. Her position is that a person’s sexual desires reflect his or her self at its very deepest fundamental level. She was writing about the kind of character that will attract one person, and not about gender; specifically, she meant that we are generally attracted to folks whose characters are like unto ours, or who complement ours in some way.
She did not intend this to apply to heterosexual-vs.-homosexual attraction, but it might be applicable anyway. It would agree with what we observe, that our attractions seems to come from very deep within us, and that we cannot voluntarily alter them with the same ease that we can turn lights on and off at the switch. Furthermore, any program which could succeed in altering a person’s desires in this regard (not only in orientation, but in matters like “sex addiction” and such) must necessarily work at the deepest levels of a person’s character, meaning that the whole person must be rebuilt from the ground up.
Complicating this is the fact that psychology and psychiatry are at about the level of development that medicine was at when blood-letting was the most common medical treatment in use. Any program which has an alteration of sexual interest as its goal is likely to be experimental.
Add to this the fact that anyone on earth claiming to know the cause of sexual orientation is blowing smoke, I am of the firm opinion that therapy to alter one’s sexual orientation is very unwise.
As a libertarian I have no right to make this choice on behalf of other people, and so my government should not have this power. Consequently, and obviously, this means that the government should by no means have the power to force such therapy onto unwilling people. Conversely, and less obviously, it also means that the government should not have the power to deny such treatment to those who seek it (however foolish we may think this seeking to be).
Catholic Charities may have centralized their work at their current headquarters in 1905, but they have been
at work here since the beginning of our nation. And working in Europe and wherever Catholics are found for thousands of years.
Receiving ANY taxpayer money is a very recent occurrence–probably no sooner than the 1990s (when certain restrictions were lifted). Before that,
and even mostly now, the entire burden for these services were borne by Catholics, both in terms of the funding and the volunteer labor to
make it all work. Hundreds of thousands of American Catholics have donated a substantial part of their lives for ZERO monetary compensation. And a substantial
part of their income–often at a substantial loss of their own standard of living. That’s one of the reasons that politicians sought out these agencies to begin with, because they truly deliver 90 cents worth of services to those that need them, out of every Dollar coming in. Federal programs require $5, $7, $15 to put a $buck in someone’s pocket. And the fact that Catholic Charities was the only one doing what they do for so long before any one else stepped up.
So go ahead and piss on all of the good people that did so much for so many years. And then ask the head of the taxpayer-funded adoption agency–who is making six figures for a ride in their agency-supplied Escalade–maybe when they are on the way to the airport for an agency-paid trip to the Bahamas for some conference at a five star resort. I’m sure they will offer the ride graciously. After their agency-paid security roughs you up, of course.
Well, the fact is, if the religious exemptions don’t work, then gay marriage can’t work. Because without the contributions of Christian charities–including, and often led by, Roman Catholic ones–we wouldn’t have decent institutions of higher learning in this country. Nor scientific research. Nor soup kitchens, adoption agencies, or high-quality K-12 education for the poor.
I have no problem with asking a devout Christian to sign a marrige certificate, if that happens to be part of his/her job description as a county clerk. But what I’m not willing to see is 1) forced sex education that promotes homosexuality before high school; 2) a system that compels private providers of wedding services to, say, make cakes for gay couples (my devoutly Christian cousin does it, but it musn’t be forced); or 3) adoption agencies being harrassed if they don’t provide these services to gay folks.
And anything we do that rips at the fabric of faith-based services to the poor is also something we cannot afford–particularly in these times.
If the word “marriage” opens the door to an attack on traditional religions, then to hell with it.
And that is why this can only be handled at the state level–we have to see if laws can be written that are tort-proof and yet fair to everyone.
I completely agree with you that same-sex marriage shouldn’t be used to destroy religious freedom and faith-based services. However, that seems to be the goal of a lot of same-sex marriage activists. There was a lot of ugliness towards supporters of Prop 8, including people being hounded from their jobs, activists storming a Mormon church, and the creation of an online database to target people who had donated in support of Prop 8. There was a considerable effort to intimidate and punish anyone not supporting same-sex marriage. I don’t recall seeing these activists ever called on their behavior or express any kind or regret.
I fear that faith-based charities will face the same treatment as the Boy Scouts of America has received in recent years.
“However, that seems to be the goal of a lot of same-sex marriage activists. ”
Including Ms Yockey, whether she admits it or not.
“If the word “marriage” opens the door to an attack on traditional religions, then to hell with it.”
Miss Attila, the problem is that a huge chunk of the “gay activist” community isn’t interested in marriage for anything else. They want their revenge on the institutions and beliefs they blame for everything wrong with their lives… and they are going to get it.
“And that is why this can only be handled at the state level–we have to see if laws can be written that are tort-proof and yet fair to everyone.”
We also need to address that pesky “Full Faith and Credit Clause”… and why the state act of New York in granting a marriage license falls under it and yet the state act of Texas in granting me a CHL does not.