Box Turtle Bulletin

Social Conservatives on Anti-Gay Discrimination: Incoherent or Just Cowardly?

Gays present mainstream social conservatives with a great dilemma, because they try to hold such contradictory positions. For instance

• They want to oppose laws outlawing anti-gay discrimination by using  the rhetoric of liberty, so they don’t look like obvious anti-gay bigots (we’re talking mainstream so-cons, of course).

And

• They want to avoid the PR disaster of looking like they oppose laws outlawing racial discrimination.

But this trips them up, because to achieve the first goal, they often don’t talk about gays at all. They use code words like religious freedom and freedom of association. But that makes them run afoul of their second goal, as I recently summarized in this graphic:

You can see this conflict in Ryan Anderson of the Heritage Foundation. Now that NOM is nominal force in the culture wars (thanks, Richard Rush!), I pay them less attention and focus it more on Ryan, who represents an influential conservative think tank and edits an intellectual mouthpiece, The Public Discourse.

Ryan has tripped up on this contradiction before, and recently he’s just made it worse. To refresh your memory, Ryan tweeted a while back that “you have no right to have anyone bake you a wedding cake.”

Someone reasonably asked, “Bakeries aren’t able to turn away interracial couples. Why is anti-gay discrimination more acceptable?” And Ryan answered, “racism is wrong. Marriage has nothing to do with keeping the races apart. Marriage is about uniting male and female.”

The problem is that many racists would disagree, and disagree on religious grounds. This forces one to conclude that Ryan is only concerned with freedom for religious beliefs that he approves of, which isn’t religious freedom at all, but a theocracy with Ryan in charge.

Lately, he’s had to alter his message. He wrote a long, long post on 6 steps for moving forward in the battle against our rights; step 2 is “Defend our form of government and our liberties.” He starts with the familiar refrain:

Indeed, a regime of free association, free contracts, free speech, and free exercise of religion should protect citizens’ rights to live according to their beliefs about marriage…

Private actors should be free to make reasonable judgments and distinctions — including reasonable moral judgments and distinctions — in their economic activities. Not every florist need provide wedding arrangements for every ceremony. Not every photographer need capture every first kiss. Competitive markets can best harmonize a range of values that citizens hold. And there is no need for government to try to force every photographer and every florist to participate in every marriage-related event.

Of course, if you take this not as a statement about same-sex marriage in particular, but about policy decisions in general, Ryan has put forth an argument for allowing business to turn away interracial couples.

We know how Ryan would answer that (“racism is wrong!”) and I imagine he might try to get around my accusations of theocracy and selective religious freedom by claiming he can prove racists are wrong while opponents of marriage equality are right, and that the government has no need to protect the wrong’uns. This was the great goal of his What is Marriage? project with Robert George, and of course we know that failed.

Even if it had succeeded, though, Ryan would still have to give up his but racism is wrong! strategy. In the wake of the Hobby Lobby, Ryan wrote that religious freedom must include all religious beliefs, even if they are wrong — even if they are, in his words, “unfounded, flawed, implausible, or downright silly.” He sums up his thoughts by saying:

The right to religious freedom is for everyone, not just for those with the “right” beliefs.

And now he’s back in the awkward position of opposing bans on discriminating against interracial couples. He can’t even claim a compelling public interest for those bans — not when he’s written, “there is no need for government to try to force every photographer and every florist to participate in every marriage-related event.”

He’s playing intellectual whack-a-mole: every time he solves one problem he creates another. He can’t synthesize these views into a coherent whole. They only make sense piecemeal. If I ever got to debate him, I imagine it going like this:

Ryan: No one should be forced to serve someone against their conscience!

Me: So businesses should be able to turn away interracial couples?

Ryan: No, because racism is wrong!

Me: So you only support religious freedom for views you agree with?

Ryan: No! Religious freedom protects even views that are wrong.

Me: So businesses should be able to turn away interracial couples?

Ryan: No, because racism is wrong!

Me: So you only support religious freedom for views you agree with?

Ryan: No! …

And so on, ad infinitum. 

You might be wondering what this has to do with Hobby Lobby. Ryan supports that decision, of course, though it’s come under fire because many scientists have argued the contraceptives Hobby Lobby objected to as abortifacients aren’t abortifacients at all. Ryan obviously wants to avoid arguing on shaky scientific ground, so he has to abandon his but racism is wrong! approach in favor of religious freedom protects even wrong beliefs. 

So that leaves Ryan and “principled” social conservatives in a bad spot. They want to oppose protections for LGBT folk, they want to sound like advocates of freedom rather than anti-gay bigots, and they want to support civil rights for blacks and other select minorities. But they can’t have it all, and it’s our job to let people know it. It’s hard to know whether they’re sincere in all these positions or just politicking; whether they’re incoherent or just too cowardly to be consistent. Either way, their arguments simply knock each other down.

In the next few days I’ll look at the other planks of Ryan’s plan for pulling back our rights.  Spoiler alert: They don’t impress.

When the Arguments of the Best and the Brightest are Mediocre and Dim

Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation is one of the most active, best funded, and intellectually respectable opponents of marriage equality.

Of course, that’s a very low bar. To see just how poor his arguments are, look at the reasoning from this anti-gay wunderkind, as he tries to show why opposition to same-sex marriage is nothing like opposition to interracial marriage:

Bans on interracial marriage and Jim Crow laws, by contrast, were aspects of a much larger insidious movement that denied the fundamental equality and dignity of all human beings and forcibly segregated citizens. When these interracial marriage bans first arose in the American colonies, they were inconsistent not only with the common law inherited from England, but also with the customs of prior world history, which had not banned interracial marriage. These bans were based not on reason, but on prejudiced ideas about race that emerged in the modern period and that refused to regard all human beings as equal. This led to revisionist, unreasonable conclusions about marriage policy. Thinking that marriage has anything at all to do with race is unreasonable, and as a historical matter, few great thinkers ever suggested that it did. 

Well, thanks, Ryan, because except for that historical bit (and maybe not even that), you’ve managed to demonstrate that these bans are exactly parallel. You’ve made it so easy to adapt your statement to this:

Bans on same-sex marriage are aspects of a much larger insidious movement that denied the fundamental equality and dignity of all human beings and forcibly segregated citizens into two groups: those who can marry their committed life-long partners and those who cannot.  These bans are based not on reason, but on prejudiced ideas about gays and lesbians that refuse to regard all human beings as equal. This has led to unreasonable conclusions about marriage policy. Thinking that marriage must be segregated by gender is unreasonable.

Now, Ryan may object that his reasons for opposing same-sex marriage aren’t dehumanizing. After all, he might say, I co-wrote a whole book against same-sex marriage without ever calling gays icky. Mmmm…perhaps. But that book is based on a view of sexuality and morality that does thoroughly dehumanize gay people and our relationships, and is in fact so convoluted that its proponents have literally had to address the question of — and I’m not making this up! — whether it’s immoral to chew sugarless gum (the answer is maybe — page 317).

But all that’s irrelevant, because no bans came about because of voters’ nuanced understanding of the convoluted intricacies of Catholic natural law theory. No, these bans happened because voters were told that gays are selfish, defective, immoral dangers to children whose lives are built around lust, never love. That’s why the bans exist, and that, Ryan, is why your reasoning leads to the opposite of your conclusion.

This might not daunt Ryan, though, because he would spy the last sentence in my adaptation (“Thinking that marriage must be segregated by gender is unreasonable”), leap on it with a victorious cry, and proclaim:

In the name of equality, same-sex marriage seeks to codify gender discrimination!

Yes, he really believes that supporters of marriage equality are the segregationists.

Those aren’t his words up there in bold, but they are (verbatim) a position he has quoted and promoted. By this reasoning, laws allowing you to marry a spouse of the same race seek to codify racial discrimination. And laws that allow you to marry a spouse of the same religion? They codify religious discrimination. In reality, of course, it ought to be clear that laws allowing the government to dictate the gender of your spouse are the laws that codify gender discrimination.

I doubt Ryan will ever see that, though, and homophobia is the reason why. I don’t think homophobia requires frothing expressions of hatred. Mere disapproval is enough as long as that sentiment robs you of the ability to think rationally about homosexuality. We call it a phobia because it’s a psychological problem. We call it a psychological problem because it’s hard to understand why otherwise intelligent people make such ludicrous errors of logic. Such as…well, such as not recognizing your arguments achieve the opposite of what you intend, or that allowing people to choose the gender of their spouse is the same as legally-mandated gender discrimination.

Actually, it’s not quite right to say Ryan is irrational because he’s homophobic. That’s tautological, like a doctor saying you’ve got a rash because you have dermatitis. Frankly, I don’t know why Ryan is homophobic, why his ability to reason disappears when he thinks about homosexuality. I just know that it does. If the leadership of our opposition is passing from a rabid Brian Brown of NOM to a gentle and reasonable Ryan Anderson of the Heritage Foundation, and if this is an example of a reasonable Ryan Anderson, then I think we have little to fear.