Are Gay Rights Right? By Roger J. Magnuson (Multnomah, 1990, 149 pp.)
by Dr. Ralph Blair
In the summer of 1933, Dorothy L. Sayers asked her editor at The Sunday Times: “What do you like done with books that are really awful? Do you like them just ignored? Or slated? Or passed over with some such mention as: ‘This is a thriller about a financier shot in the library’?” Of the 2,000 books published annually by the $2-billion religious press business, many are really awful. Since some can do much more damage than a shot in the library of a bad thriller, the worst among these must be reviewed and warned against. Are Gay Rights Right? Is one such dangerously awful book. The author is a prominent trial lawyer and a religious fundamentalist.
Even before the Contents page, Magnuson cites Pascal’s saying: “Those who indulge in perversion tell those who are living normal lives that it is they who are deviated from what is natural.” But Pascal adds: “Language is relative … we need a fixed point by which to judge”. What is this lawyer’s starting point? He claims it’s “traditional morality”, the Bible, and “reality”. But as language is relative, so, too, is interpretation of tradition, morality, the Bible and “reality”. Pascal observed: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction”. That’s illustrated by ages of religiously motivated intolerance and violence, including a tradition-bound religious rejection and crucifixion of a shockingly “perverse” Messiah and a tradition-bound religious opposition to a decidedly unorthodox “antinomian” Apostle who proclaimed Him. Religious bullying of lesbians and gay men is in the same long line of “traditional morality”.
Magnuson negates gay rights and neglects Christian responsibilities. A book filled with inflammatory stereotypes and misinformation is no expression of The Golden Rule. He claims, for example, that the “ ‘homosexualization’ of America [has its] final expression, … its natural conclusion [in] the push to legalize sex with children”. His evidence: the North American Man/Boy Love Association, an anomaly with an inflated name that, far from leading the lesbian/gay movement, is usually unwelcome there. (The New York Times reports that in the 1990 New York City gay/lesbian parade of 200,000 marchers, there was a contingent of only 6 men from NAMBLA.) In the middle of yet another of his “boy lover” alarms, he quotes a lesbian’s address at Harvard as though she endorsed sex between men and boys. She didn’t even mention it. He cites “one of the foremost psychoanalysts of this century” – Magnuson’s exaggeration – as saying that “all psychoanalytic theories assume that homosexuality is psychopathologic”. But, what did Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, say? Magnuson fails to note Freud’s statement that, homosexuality “cannot be classified as an illness”. Magnuson repeats the Right-wing rhetoric that the revisions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual were forced by gay political power. But the revisions were DSM-wide, not just on homosexuality, and all were made on the basis of the same two-fold scientific criterion. Magnuson wants to define homosexuals “by what they do (sodomy)” instead of by the scientific classification of sexual orientation. Of course he does. Orientation means intrinsic and immutable psychosexuality. That would qualify homosexuals for the same legal protection Magnuson says he supports with reference to “unchangeable characteristics based on biology (sex, race), historical accident (national origin), or belief system (religion).” It’s his insistence that homosexuals can change that, he says, disqualifies them from minority status for civil rights. But since he believes one may be born-again (and might denounce his faith?) he already supports civil rights in changeable categories. Saying homosexuality is “not innate or immutable”, he cites a psychiatrist for support. But he fails to remind readers that the psychiatrist’s full statement applied to homosexuals and heterosexuals. For “escape from homosexuality”, Magnuson recommends the “ex-gay” Exodus ministry (the founders of which are now a same-sex couple and testify that nobody escaped homosexuality through Exodus) and Homosexuals Anonymous, which Magnuson mistakenly calls a “secular group” – it’s a Seventh-day Adventist group – and he fails to warn that the HA founder was fired for having sexual relations with young men coming to him to escape from homosexuality.
With an ignorance or indifference that salts the wounds of discrimination, he argues that “people do not routinely discriminate against homosexuals”. As proof he offers the careers of Rock Hudson, Liberace and Boy George! Among his other outrageous statements: “Most homosexuals have had some experience with … sadomasochism, group orgies, bondage, or transvestism. … one-fifth of all homosexuals admitted to having sexual contact, or at least masturbating, with animals.” (Yet no random sample of homosexuals is possible.) “Homosexuality is essentially antifamily. It encourages promiscuous sexuality, a self-centered morality, and socially irresponsible behavior.” “Homosexuals … seek orgasmic satisfaction from simulated sexual behavior.” “The homosexual has all the rights a heterosexual does.” These statements may remind one of segregationists’ warnings against racial “mongrelization”, appeals to Bible verses to support slavery, and papal decrees against sex with Jews and Protestants.
How can a Christian write such a book? How can Christians buy into such a book? A new study in the evangelical Journal of Psychology and Christianity, in concurrence with earlier research, confirms that, “a negative relationship exists between fundamentalism/orthodoxy and cognitive complexity”. This chronic inability to learn from complex psychosexual research that challenges their needful bias combines with literalistic non-contextual Bible interpretation and rigid cultural moralisms to produce a mindset capable of both writing and believing such a book.
To paraphrase Sayers: This is a book about homosexuals bashed by a fundamentalist who hasn’t spent enough time in the library.