by Dan Savage
Don’t get me wrong: It would be nice, of course, if you could get past your hatred and bigotry. Nice, but not necessary.
Do you mind if we touch on the slavery stuff for just another second, Brian?
A viewer of The 700 Club recently put this question to Pat Robertson: “If America was founded as a Christian nation, why did we allow slavery?”
“Like it or not, if you read the Bible, in the Old Testament, slavery was permitted,” Robertson responded. “We have moved in our conception of the value of human beings until we realized that slavery was terribly wrong.” (Pat was half-right: Slavery was permitted—slavery was endorsed—in the Old Testament and the New Testament.)
LGBT Americans aren’t asking Christians to do anything that Christians haven’t done before. Christians are simply being asked to, once again, “move in [their] conception of the value of human beings”—in this instance, human beings who happen to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.
We know you can do it. You’ve done it before, on race and other issues, and millions of American Christians have already moved in their conception of the value of LGBT human beings. We wouldn’t be seeing the polling data or election night returns we’re seeing, without the support of millions of Christian Americans.
But if you can’t move in your conception of our value as human beings, well, we’ll settle for your grudging tolerance. And frankly, Brian, you don’t have much of a choice. Your efforts and the efforts of other conservative Christians to force us back into the closet by breathing new life into the old stigmas and hatreds aren’t working. We’re not going anywhere. Just look at the polls. Just look at the gay and lesbian couples marrying in Washington, Maryland, Maine, and the other six states where same-sex marriage is legal. It’s over, Brian. You’ve already lost. The only question that remains is how much time and money you intend to waste between now and the advent of full civil equality for LGBT people.
You anti-gay bigots will have to adjust, just as anti-Semites, sexists, and racists have had to adjust before you. But, again, you will still be free—completely free—to be privately bigoted. You won’t have to welcome us into your homes or your hearts. But you can no longer demand that the government persecute us and warp our lives to pander to your bigotry, soothe your insecurities, or give your religious beliefs preference over others. Your biases should not, and one day soon they will not, have the force of law.
Your biases will continue to warp lives, Brian, but only yours. You will stew in them and grow to be an embarrassment to your children and grandchildren. Because you are on the wrong side of history.
Or, hey, here’s a better idea: Join us here in the twenty-first century. Come to brunch. Have you seen The Book of Mormon, Brian? I know a couple of guys in the show. I can get you a pair of tickets. You should take the wife.
1 Pat Robertson wants you to believe that we atheists hate Christmastime. Robertson recently said this on his television show: “The Grinch is trying to steal our holiday. It’s been so beautiful, the nation comes together, we sing Christmas carols, we give gifts to each other, we have lighted trees and it’s just a beautiful thing. Atheists don’t like our happiness. They don’t want you to be happy. They want you to be miserable. They’re miserable, so they want you to be miserable. So they want to steal your holiday away from you.” Well, these particular atheists—Terry and D.J. and I—pull out all the stops at Christmas. We have a beautiful tree; we have presents; we have lights. We even have a crèche. We have a sit-down Christmas Eve dinner for some dear friends and their children, and on Christmas Day we host an open house for our neighbors. It’s always a treat to see our friend Zach, a gorgeous porn star and a personal trainer, tossing children into the air while our very Catholic next-door neighbor chats amiably with our friend the professional dominatrix over champagne cocktails and Christmas cookies.
2 “Suppose you were interested in promoting children’s well-being, and in particular, in addressing the problem of fatherlessness,” John Corvino writes in Debating Same-Sex Marriage. “What could you do? You could work on comprehensive sex-education programs, including accurate information about both abstinence and contraception. You could aim at some of the purported root causes, including poverty, lack of educational and employment opportunities, and incarceration policy. You could tighten up divorce laws, given the documented effect of divorce on children’s well-being. You could promote relationship counseling. You could do all of these things, and a hundred more. Or you could do what the National Organization for Marriage does.”
3 By “traditional marriage,” Brian Brown and his organization merely mean “opposite-sex marriage.” A marriage can take any form whatsoever and still be seen as “traditional,” at least to NOM, so long as it involves one man and one woman. Take a married straight couple that lives a hardcore Femdom lifestyle (i.e., the husband wears a male chastity belt, spends most of his time in a cage, and submits to sexual torture at the hands of his wife. Maybe his testicles are crushed in a vise when he displeases his wife; maybe she shoves needles through the head of his penis when he really displeases her). That’s a “traditional” marriage, according to NOM, because penis + vagina + wedding = traditional marriage. A couple of lesbians with two or three kids, one partner works, the other stays home. For kicks they sometimes get a babysitter and go to the movies. That’s a radical redefinition of marriage because vagina + vagina + wedding = END OF THE WORLD!
4 From the promotional materials for the 2012 National High School Journalism Convention: “You are already on the Edge. Journalists have always lived on the edge. Deadlines, and the edge of time. Facts, and the edge of truth. Authority, and the edge of free expression. We balance on the edge of legitimate public interest and the interests of those who would rather we not publish.” Forgive me for getting edgy at your “Journalism on the Edge” conference.
5 Brown is referring to some remarks I made about the pope that Peter LaBarbera caught on video and posted to YouTube. Here they are: “The pope recently said that gay marriage is a threat to the survival of the human race. Because once we can get gay married, once gay marriage is legal, everybody’s gonna get gay married. The pope is saying that there’s no such thing as a straight person. There are only people who wish they were gay, and would be gay, but they can’t get married. What the pope is saying is that the only thing that stands between my dick and Brad Pitt’s mouth is a piece of paper…. When the pope says these things, gay writers like me, we blow up on our blogs, we write about it. I don’t understand why straight people don’t get mad. The pope is projecting…. You would think straight people would feel insulted and aggrieved by this argument: The human race is going to go extinct if we can all get gay married! It’s hilarious when you follow [the pope’s argument] to its logical conclusion. What the pope is saying is that once we’re all gay married, we’re going to go extinct in a generation. Once we’re all gay married, we’re going to forget which hole shits babies. We won’t do IVF, we won’t take one for the team and have opposite-sex sex just every once in a while. We’re all going to stand around going, ‘Huh! I don’t know what the problem is—I keep inseminating Terry and nothing!’”
6 My friend and colleague Dominic Holden did a story for The Stranger on donors who contributed large sums of money to fund an anti-gay ballot initiative in Washington State backed in part by NOM. He called these donors and asked them what was so awful about gay partnerships.
“A penis does not belong in someone’s anus,” donor James McFadden told Holden. Esther Mayoh also opposed gay partnership rights because of butt sex: “My main reason is that I don’t want our state to, well, to put it bluntly, I don’t want our state to legalize sodomy,” she said (never mind, Holden pointed out, that sodomy was already legal). He then asked donor Paul Henry point-blank if he thought gay people were gross. “I would say even more than gross,” Henry said. “I think they are major incubators of a lot of the bacteria.” Three years later, when NOM was the leading force to over
turn a marriage equality law in Washington State, Holden heard similar statements when he again called the top individual donors. “Penetration of the rectum is bad for them,” Curtiss Wikstrom, who gave 2,500 dollars, explained.
Holden’s analysis: “A lot of their opposition just came down to the fear of nasty, no-good, dirty gay poop sex. They’re obsessed with poopy, poopy gay sex. And all that poop sex results in gay people being, well, smeared with poop. AND THEY MIGHT TOUCH YOU WITH THEIR POOPY, DISEASE-RIDDEN SKIN. So when they say gay folks are ‘sick, sinful, or perverse’ or that gay parents are unfit to raise kids, what many of them are actually thinking is that gay people are smeared with shit. (Never mind that lots of straight men in ‘traditional marriages’ penetrate their wives’ rectums. But when straight couples do it, that’s not poop sex—that’s love.)”
7 Is it fair to label Brian Brown a bigot? “Brian Brown runs a website with a page called ‘SAME-SEX MARRIAGE: Answering the Toughest Questions,’” writes the gay blogger Rob Tisinai. If you oppose gay marriage and someone asks you why do “you want to interfere with love?” Brown and NOM suggest you reply: “Love is a great thing. But marriage isn’t just any kind of love; it’s the special love of husband and wife for each other and their children.”
So “gay and lesbian couples aren’t capable of feeling the same sort of love that straight couples can?” writes Tisinai. “Even more outrageously…we can’t feel the same love for our children that straight couples can?…It’s literally dehumanizing to claim such a thing—to argue that we’re missing some essential component of what makes people human.” If that’s not bigotry, what is?
“Homosexuality is the only ‘sin’ toward which straight people literally cannot be tempted and, not unsurprisingly, homosexuality is the only ‘sin’ listed in the Bible that Christians treat as an absolute sin,” writes John Shore, a progressive evangelical Christian, author, and blogger. “Murder can be heroic or a travesty depending on its context. Lying can be heroic. (‘Do you have any Jews hiding in your attic?’) Most Christians drink. Everyone is at times profoundly greedy. Homosexuality is the only sin for which Christians wholly and consistently reject any and all relative and/or contextual considerations,” such as hot, sweaty gay sex taking place in the context of a loving, committed relationship. “And why do Christians treat this one ‘sin’ so differently than they do virtually all the others? It cannot be because of Biblical ‘reasoning’; it can only be bigotry.”
And here’s what I don’t understand about rabidly anti-gay Christian activists: They don’t like it when you call them “bigots”—and they really don’t like it when you call them “haters”—but they run around claiming that LGBT people are sick and sinful, that we want to “normalize” pedophilia, that our relationships are a threat to the family, the nation, the species, and the planet (and they do make all of those claims), and that those of us who are parents are a threat to our own children. If someone believes all of that…why wouldn’t they hate us? I’d hate me if all or any of that were true.
8 Not all Christians—liberal ones, progressive ones, gay ones, informed ones—believe that the New Testament is anti-gay. “The interpretation of the New Testament passages is of particular importance for determining what most churches actually teach—not just for sloganeering—and gay rights supporters shouldn’t concede that they are ‘anti-gay’ in any sense that we understand that term,” says Matthew Vines. “Here’s why: By far, the most common form of same-sex union in antiquity was pederasty (man/boy relationships), which is the most likely referent in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10; and to the extent that adult same-sex relations were visible in the biblical world, they tended to be viewed as the product of ‘normal’ sexual desire having been overindulged, not of a different sexual orientation. Thus, Paul’s condemnation of ‘homosexuality’ in Romans 1:26–27 is better understood simply as a condemnation of excess passion, of which same-sex relations were a mere symbol—and a symbol that in no sense transfers to modern discourse about LGBT identity. None of the three NT verses have anything to do with people having or expressing a same-sex orientation, so in that core sense, the NT doesn’t contain anti-gay passages at all.” Vines is a gay man who grew up in an evangelical home in Kansas. He took a yearlong leave from Harvard to research homosexuality and the Bible. An hour-long lecture on his research, which Vines delivered at a church in Wichita, Kansas, was uploaded to YouTube (“The Gay Debate: The Bible and Homosexuality”) and quickly went viral. Vines’s upcoming book—tentatively titled The Bible and the Gay Christian—will be published in February 2014.
9 Quick bit of advice for anyone who ever finds himself under attack by Fox News and its viewers: Their anger burns hot but it burns fast. Turn off your computer, go to the movies, and before you know it the gang at Fox is back to the War on Christmas or the New Black Panthers. Then, when it is safe to turn your computer back on, you can count all the e-mail addresses that are from AOL accounts and have a laugh at the olds.
10 As my much-missed friend David Rakoff once said: “Well, of course not Adam and Steve. Never Adam and Steve. It’s Adam and Steven.”
11 Whatever happened to “anything is possible with God”? If an all-powerful God wanted Terry to have a baby, by God, Terry would have a baby.
12 A child needs a mother and a father, according to NOM, so gay marriage must be banned. But how does banning gay marriage provide children with mothers and fathers? Terry and I became parents long before gay marriage became legal in Washington State. John Corvino has fun with this argument in his book: Banning gay marriage will not prompt lesbian mothers to leave their same-sex partners and marry their sperm donors. And, as Corvino points out, if children need mothers and fathers, why isn’t NOM campaigning against single parenthood? Or working to make it illegal for straight married couples to divorce after they’ve had children? If children “do best with their own married biological parents,” as NOM argues, “what would follow? To put it bluntly, what would follow is that gay and lesbian couples should not kidnap children from their married biological parents. Back on Planet Earth, where gay men and lesbians are not involved in a mass-kidnapping scheme, it’s less clear what would follow. Same-sex marriage never—and I mean never—takes children away from competent biological parents who want them.”
13 And, really, why isn’t NOM—which gets its money from the Catholic Church—trying to ban divorce? Because that would touch on the rights of 95 percent of voters who happen to be straight. And while no one likes to think about getting divorced, most people can imagine what it must be like to be in a situation where they might want to avail themselves of the right to divorce. Few straight voters have ever imagined marrying someone of the same sex. And if all you have to do to be a “good” Christian—if all you have to do to be right with God and the pope and Brian Brown—is vote to deny others (same-sex couples) something you will never need (a license to marry someone of the same sex), why not vote against marriage rights for same-sex couples? That vote allows shallow people to demonstrate their “moral superiority” (and their lack of empathy) without requiring them to make a personal sacrifice. Like Bristol Palin, a straight person can go on having premarital sex and babies out of wedlock while considering herself a good Christian—so long as she opposes gay marriage. You wonder how Christ would feel about straight Christians setting the bar so low for themselves.
14 As of this writing, the Supreme Court has taken up two cases challenging bans on gay marriage. Even if we lose there, as NOM predicts we will (the same NOM that predicted we would lose in Washington, Maryland, Maine, and Minnesota), we will eventually prevail. E. J. Graff, a scholar and writer on issues of social justice and human rights, reminded readers in a posting on the Supreme Court cases on The American Prospect blog of this: “The Court will not and cannot invalidate existing marriages between same-sex couples. Those have been upheld by courts and legislatures, and accepted by citizens. Nine states have decided to marry same-sex couples. That will remain.
Four states voted on the side of marriage equality just over a month ago. Citizens of three of those states voted to let same-sex couples marry while one, Minnesota, voted against a gay-marriage ban. It wasn’t ‘far-left, activist courts’ championing same-sex marriage. Those were activist voters. And the nine justices noticed. They know which way the wind is blowing. The justices might not like to admit it, but they know not to get far out ahead of—or behind—the prevailing politics. Within the next two years, several more states will join the marriage-equality column. Minnesota, Rhode Island, Delaware, Oregon, Illinois, and New Jersey all look very good. Every state we win influences the country and the states around it.”
15 According to the commenters on YouTube and at The New York Times, I won the debate. A lot of people gave the win to Brown, of course, particularly his friends in the religious right. But at least one person in Brown’s camp thought I had won: my ol’ buddy Peter LaBarbera. Peter declared me the winner during an episode of Americans for Truth Radio Hour. (I challenge anyone to get through an entire hour of that.) I won the debate, Peter and his guest, Pastor John Kirkwood, agreed, before it had even begun. Here’s a taste:
KIRKWOOD: So [Brian Brown] shows up at the house. The moderator is a New York Times, the head of the belief column in The New York Times, who happens to be an agnostic! An agnostic, although he played the Jew card, he said, “I’m Jewish,” at one point to try and disagree with Brian on the Bible and it made no sense but he wasn’t called on it. So here’s an agnostic from The New York Times as the moderator. He didn’t do a bad…he didn’t do a bad job. But basically the way it starts is like a Dan Savage infomercial. I mean you have this NOM-guy show up, right? Mr. Tough Talk. He shows up with a bottle of wine! Hands Dan Savage a bottle of wine! Dan Savage treats him to this famous chef who lives down the street from him, makes this incredible meal.
