“How Homosexuals Fight” by Lynn Vincent; “…And How to Fight Back” by Roy Maynard; “Tossing the Last Taboo: Psychologists hail the benefits of pederasty” by Gene Edward Veith; “Who is a Widow?” by Marvin Olasky, World, April 10, 1999
by Dr. Ralph Blair
An ability to see from another perspective is as crucial in humor as in loving others as ourselves. Vincent begins an essay for this Religious Right newsmagazine by not only failing to get the innocent, self-mocking and thought-provoking humor of a slogan on the wall of a gay/lesbian newspaper office but by rigging it as evidence that “the homosexual ethos depends on an abandonment of truth.” There’s then a failure to understand others’ – including “enemies’” – needs for love and understanding as well as for socioeconomic stability. Vincent’s upset that a Gallup poll finds that 50 percent of Americans say homosexuality is “acceptable.” A gay man’s response is joyful relief: “We’re on the verge of people understanding us.” Vincent’s is alarm, taking this as the verge of losing the culture war. A turning point for understanding gay people is turned into a call to arms against them.
Either ignorant of the analogies or refusing to see them, Vincent insists that the quest for civil rights for lesbians and gay men “bears little resemblance to the struggle of blacks and suffragists, whose eventual liberation benefited society at large.” Though World was not around in those earlier fights, its predecessor publications in segregationism and fundamentalism were as rabidly anti-integrationist and anti-suffragist then as World is anti-gay today. The National Editor of World is Bob Jones IV, great-grandson of the segregationist, anti-suffragist, anti-Catholic founder of Bob Jones University. He’s a graduate of Notre Dame. BJU now accepts black students but forbids interracial dating and marriage. Times and culture change, and so do the culture wars. But there are always reactionaries.
“How [do] homosexuals fight?” According to Vincent there’s a plot to “undermine the moral authority of homophobic churches, … turning the public against the church.” But doesn’t the anti-gay Right fight by overstating and overstepping the moral authority of homophobic churches and by trying to turn the public against homosexuals? Vincent expresses surprise that “homosexual marchers and their supporters appeared stunningly normal [in contrast to Fred Phelps’ “God Hates Fags” picketers]. They were an all-American crowd: white, black, Latino, young, old, even toddlers … . Nowhere in sight were the drag queens, dog collars and other staple depravities.” Rather than recognizing normal homosexual demographics, Vincent projects a ploy.
Maynard advises “how to fight back” against civil rights for people who are gay and lesbian. He sees the defeat of a Columbus, Ohio domestic partnership proposal as a “blueprint for social conservatives.” He admits that the city’s cost would have been “modest” for providing “live-in ‘domestic partners’ of city employees (of either the same sex or the opposite sex)” with health benefits. But he warns that, in words from a local gay periodical, passage would have given homosexuals “a chance to feel what it’s like to have their families acknowledged and valued like other families.” Caring for the welfare of others as much as for one’s own is evidently too radical for Right-wingers “coming together to pursue the purpose of God.” So much for visiting Christ among the sick.
According to Maynard’s strategy, “working together for God” must be camouflaged in “secular arguments to a secular audience.” The rule: ” ‘Don’t use Christian words and Christian arguments. … We’ve got to learn to communicate our positions without citing chapter and verse – because once you bring in the Bible, you turn a large number of people off, people who might otherwise support you.’” His secret is sneak and stealth. He then says anti-gay forces should call attention to the “sneak[y and] stealthy way” supporters of gays and lesbians conduct their efforts and on the unpopularity of people seen as “offensive.”
Misreading a publication of the American Psychological Association, Veith warns World readers that the psychology elite are “openly sanctioning sex between children and adults.” Not true. A psychologists’ review of over half a hundred studies merely showed that consequences of intergenerational same-sex genital behavior are not always as bad as is popularly assumed, negative reaction by others is what largely contributes to the trauma, and 42 percent of male college students who engaged in such activity as boys report the experience was positive. None of these findings pushes pedophilia. And they’re not new. In the 1930s, child neuropsychiatrist Lauretta Bender (of Bender Gestalt Test fame) made the same observations. But they are at odds with the public’s intuition and Veith jumps on that for his anti-gay agenda. He repeatedly mistakes the American Psychological Association for the American Psychiatric Association, erroneously concludes that “child molesting turns its victims toward homosexuality,” and understates the size of the homosexual population which he takes to be distinct from the Christian population.
Olasky prefaces his editorial with the Levitical command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Unless your neighbor is gay? He cites a Pasadena, Texas ministry as his authority for why “young men who become homosexuals” do so. It’s that old stuff about “an absent father, a domineering mother, and early sexual encounters with a pederast.” While all this endorses the Religious Right’s dominant husband/submissive wife advocacy and demonizes gay men as predators, it’s all been discredited by psychosocial and clinical research of which he seems blissfully unaware. Does he really think he’d find greater numbers of gay sons in inner cities where absent fathers and in-charge mothers and grandmothers are found in greater numbers?