I came accorss this in a NYTimes review just now (I was trying to see if Sullivan said anything about marriage and doubt in his ConSoul book, which I haven’t read):

As any number of historians, sociologists and pollsters can tell you, the evangelical Protestants who now exercise a major influence on the Republican Party are an infinitely diverse and contradictory group, and their relationship to these hyperpartisans is extremely ambivalent.

Conservative Christians are fully assimilated into commercial American life and, in a variety of different ways, critical of it. They get divorced as much as anybody else, if not more. They are as consumed by doubts and aware of their weaknesses as anybody else, if not more. They generally share – along with the pope – the belief that reason must be used to nurture faith.

“We acknowledge that there are those who are disposed towards homosexual and polyamorous conduct and relationships, just as there are those who are disposed towards other forms of immoral conduct.”

“Unjust laws degrade human beings.”

“nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it,”

To make a pronouncement so sweepingly grand, think about the degree of certainty you would have to have…that homosexuals are indeed suffering under “illusion”.

Consider just how deeply prejudicial and profoundly irrational it is to assert that a commitment to rebuilding marriage culture starts by singling out loving, committed, gay couples (quite a few of whom are raising kids).

On your last, there are books written about the religious right. One evangelical just wrote a book about their year living with gays in Chicago and reported back, if I remember the details right – it’s supposed to be quite good.

The religious right is not monolith. It’s very important to step outside our “experience of them” and try to understand the differences, perhaps.

We criticize George here, but we ought not to make the mistake of just doing that, of looking where the light is on.

There are others, including this new Dominionist heresy, that appear to be influential. I’m not aware that the Baptist convention has ever really tried to articulate anything on homosexuals, quite of the scope that GGA have.

From the perspective of the mythical gay Frank Schubert, some of the work we do here could be used for other appeals. However, I suspect one would want something particular, if one could get it. For instance, one Baptist minister (black) one said something like, “We believe in a conservative exegesis.” That gives you something to work with, right? It’s a far bit better than, “Go to hell”, i.e. nothing.

Don’t know why you ended up moderated. I guess the great boxturtle in the sky has it in for ya.

But we’re not doing anything. The first thing that needs to be done is to start talking about it, and loudly.

TK: “The battle over gay marriage has almost nothing to do with gay people.
The battle for marriage is just a high-profile battle in a larger war: the war over who will be the voice of “all that is pure and holy”. And the marriage bans are an attempt to assert the authority of conservative Christianity over the culture and its laws.”

I think this is true. Yet, at the same time– and I am just now thinking about it as I write– I think it is, at the same time, a much greater issue, and a really minor one as well, sort of the UnHoly Trinity of what snarkiness would call ass-hattery.

The far greater issue is that of the desire of a certain class of authoritarian personalities to control everything. This may be a deeply rooted biologically based instinct, a combination of the herd instinct and the stay-alive instinct. It might be more psychological– a way to reduce anxiety. Maybe ass-hattery is hardwired into some people, like compassion and generosity seem to be in others. Some people are just jerks. Or maybe the just believe their own publicity. I have no idea. And it doesn’t matter very much, other than it seems to exist on a mass scale.

What matters are the methods. What they seek to do is to assert their authority in all areas of human life. They not only have the right, the have the responsibility and the moral authority. And they will be happy to tell you so. And hey, if they accrue power, money, improved self-esteem, and a few heavenly brownie points in the process, well, all the better.

They accomplish this by convincing people that it is perfectly fine for them to control the most intimate aspects of any individual’s life. And if you can control that– the most intimate parts of life, the parts where you theoretically have the greatest autonomy– you can control anything.

And you don’t actually even need to control it. The mere appearance of control is what Georgie and the Magster are offering. Sodomy laws didn’t make gay sex not happen, didn’t make gay people go away, and accomplished no civil good. But they did make them appear not to exist. Neither of these people are so foolish to believe that banning marriage equality will change gay people meeting, dating, falling in love, having families, and living their lives. I doubt they are even so foolish to truly believe their own rhetoric that giving gay people the name “marriage” is somehow incredibly destructive for heterosexuals if the very facts of gay existence, sex, dating, love, family, Civil Unions, and DP’s and have not already accomplished the destruction.

It’s not just about gay people. The abortion issue is another example, an intrusion into the most intimate and ought-to-be autonomous areas of life, love, and family by the coercive power of the state. The Terry Schiavo case is another example.

The most pernicious place of all that they do this? And I say this as a thorough-going even-atheism-is-asking-the-wrong-question kind of a guy…

They will even presume to try to control the relationship, the dialogue, and the messages between a human being and its god.

So I claimed there was also a lesser issue in this, though as I said, I also think it is really the same issue. What do all of these people have in common? Ted Haggard. Larry Craig. Lonnie Latham. George Rekers. Grant Storms. Jimmy Swaggart. Any number of congressmen who have resigned their positions for attempting– or wanting to– put their junk where it shouldn’t oughta be. A good portion of the RC priesthood. The list of ex-gay Paulky boys and Hechy girls, some of whom are earning a nice living. Diaper Dave. John Ensign. Richard Curtis. Roy Ashburn, now reformed. A list of people that have been featured here, JoeMyGod, ExGW, all the usual places.

They’re not all gay. What they have in common is that they all have something inside of them, something as desperate to get out as an alien in John Hurt’s colon. And they are just as desperate to keep it hidden, preferably IN John Hurt’s colon. To control it, in short. Only some are like The Haggard One or Richard Curtis, desperate to control in others what they cannot control in themselves. (It’s so much easier). All of them want to deflect attention from themselves onto more vulnerable others, people who deserve their punishment and whose schedules are far more available.

Maybe I’ve just been swimming with the boxturtles for too long, but on observing the virulence and the passion with which these homobigots divorce themselves from reality, if not basic good manners, and pursue their obsession with Teh Gay and attacking gay people…

…the more I am convinced that they do so precisely because the desire to control one’s own behavior and thoughts, or at least deflect attention from the lack of control, makes it very much their business. It very much affects them. Whenever the homobigots go through these long, detailed descriptions of why gay/lesbian sex must be and must be about, you know they have been thinking about it. And thinking about it.

Yeah, I’m basically saying that just about every homobigot is probably a big ‘ol homo, or afraid he/she might be. (Not all. for example, a man who was molested by his uncle might blame all gay people for it, forgetting that his uncle had a wife and kids). At some point, you have to conclude that This Is Too Crazy Even for Crazy. That, and for the smarter or luckier ones, at least, the possibility of accruing power, money, and accolades by working what used to be considered an extreme disadvantage.

I think people like Haggard, Rekers, and Curtis also represent a special case: the moral homo-hatin’-homo. The reason people like these three live the lives they do– dirty, deceitful, disconnected, dangerous, dissonant (I do so love alliteration in the cause of rhetoric) — is precisely because of people who think and act like them.

My take on them is this. I don’t see this as some sort of monumental hypocrisy– though it certainly is that– where they work against ending prejudice against gay people while having a secret gay life of their own. I would take their word for it that they are not gay, if, in the case of these three jokers that were a fact in dispute. No gay person I know leads a life like that, though perhaps some do.

Hypocrisy is too simple. It requires a degree of consciousness that they clearly do not have. As Rochefoucauld said, hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. You cannot pay that homage without knowing what it is that you do.

Curtis’s and Haggard’s lives were definitely about vice. But being gay is neither virtuous nor vicious. Paraphrasing Tevye: “It’s no shame to be gay, but it is no great honor, either.”

Nor do I see this as merely some sort of Freudian reaction formation, where they battle the private part of themselves that they don’t like in the public arena. That is probably true, but way too pat of an answer.

This is what I see here, and I hope that I am making a subtle, but real, distinction. They work against ending the prejudice against gay people because they are moral men. They know exactly how dirty and disgusting gay people are, because each had his very own life as evidence, and who would want to inflict that bit of disgusting, unclean perversity on society. Who would want that for his children? Certainly not a moral man.

Note: I said moral, not conscious, not intelligent, not compassionate, and not responsible– a bit like that moralizing Old Testament God who thinks nothing about sending a flood and wiping out little children who couldn’t sin even if they wanted to, all to prove his point that he is moral and they are not. Mark Twain’s Letters From the Earth is a great exposition of this mind-boggling intellectual and ethical vacuity and vanity on the part of Our Lord and Father, or at least those who justify the harm they inflict on others in his name.

Unlike this OT God, who had at least the grace to recognize the need to atone eventually for his own mistakes, they certainly will not accept any responsibility for the gay world that their attitudes, beliefs, and actions have created– a world a sleazy, anonymous and furtive sexual encounters, punctuated or adorned (depending on your POV) by lying, cheating, adultery, disease, and dirt, where relationships are transitory at best, destructive at worst.

All the old stereotypes, all products of the closet. and all of them true for only a certain class of ‘mo.

Nor will they easily allow us to have the gay world that we wish to have and have created for ourselves where those stereotypes have no place, because that would again require intelligence, compassion, consciousness, and responsibility, which are the moral opposites of moralizing.

I’m getting tired now. I hope I’ve contributed to the discussion.

Does he have a view on abstinence or celibacy? Castration or female “circumcision”? Those are all important considerations too, especially in relation to the form in which he gives reply.

While it *seems* like it is important to have a reply on his philosophy of “sex acts”, as hard as that is to define completely (for ANY philosopher), it’s more productive to focus elsewhere.

For instance, take Tim’s summary, in the event that it is accurate, i.e. like unto “sex out of wedlock”.

Sex out of wedlock is voluntary and being single is a voluntary condition (um, mostly, that is …).

Homosexuals, in his schema, have no voluntary choice about wedlock and are involuntarily categorized by the existence of another “form”, nongays.

Therefore, homosexuals are not similarly situated (to out-of-wedlock) and he’s either made a false analogy or has begged the question, no?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but a pithy summary of his view is that gays can’t qualify for the social-institution of marriage because of their sex acts (nonPIV) and their sex acts are wrong/immoral because other people, nongays, can get married (or does he believe should get married?).

Rather than calling that “Paleo-traditionalism”, we might simply call that “Random Traditionalism” and contrast it with the New Traditionalism.

No reason one can simultaneously “shore up” the “revisionist view” at the same time.

Consider that Mags, et. al. are desperately worried that they will lose at law the ability to say, “If you are going to have a child, you should be wed.” Call it their ideal, their norm, their “sanctity” or even their “sanctimony”.

But they can keep that ideal, right? It applies to gays and nongays alike.

So, coming back to our mythical gay Frank Schubert, you put in for something like, “We’ve raised kids. We’re gay. We’re totally gay, in fact. We think that people should get married if they are going to raise kids. Including gays. Got it? Gays. Kids. Get Married. Good.” Nothing else. Just bald, moral assertion, like the opponents. Send it out for testing. It might well resonate better than the appeal for “protections” and the “benefits package”, etc.

There may be people on our side who are “wired” to dislike formulating these types of appeals, even though there really is NO equation that “gay” = “atheist”.

Timothy said “Despite the efforts of religious anti-gay and atheist gays, you are quite right.”.

You’re in no position to be making that kind of sweeping generalization about atheist gays. I’ve never heard a single atheist gay suggest that “gay=atheist”. You don’t like people making sweeping generalizations about christians, don’t do it to atheist gays.