…If your side includes those currently in control of the government, then your side includes Karen “Abortion=Terrorism” Hughes and Karl “Morally Bankrupt Assberet” Rove. And the–visible, popular, and influential–cheerleaders for your side include Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter, who said that liberals should be spoken to with a baseball bat and that the terrorists should have flown a plane into the NYT offices.

Your side certainly isn’t respectful towards moderates and those with differing beliefs. Not if pro-choice conservatives like my Republican governor can be equated with Bin Laden. Not if the opposition deserves to be beaten senseless or blown up.

I don’t think our various factions are any better at respecting each other or our common enemy, but the Republicans certainly aren’t an example of respecful coalition-building and mature dispute.

So the strategy of vicious hatred towards those of different beliefs doesn’t seem to be so ineffective. In fact, if we want to take control, set agendas, and make inroads on popular culture (if censorship really counts), we should be much more vitriolic and much less tolerant.

Hmmm… let’s follow this concept to a logical continuation:

A pharmacist refuses to hand a customer birth control pills, on religious grounds.

The pharmacist’s bona fide job is to dispense pills, not indulge his/her religious beliefs at another’s expense.

Too bad for the pharmacist, I guess. Maybe he or she could get a job with the priesthood.

(Sorry, Amp. I couldn’t resist.)

It’s not just a question of which laws are on the books, but how market forces act to permit or restrain access to the law depending on one’s class status. I think both Democrats and Republicans fall down in this regard, which is why I am no longer a fan of either. The appearance of “Freedom” often turns out to be “Freedom for those who can afford it.”

As for adoption laws, it’s pretty clear (to me, at any rate) that banning a couple from adopting just because they’re gay is discrimination–at least, until somebody proves gays and lesbians can’t be as good parents as heterosexuals, and somehow I doubt that’ll happen. “You can’t be a parent if you aren’t in a monogamous relationship” doesn’t discriminate against same-sex couples, but it’d still be a really bad law.

I think that leftish parties are going to deliver considerably less net freedom, and rightish parties considerably more…

I suppose you’re right, if “freedom” means that you have no responsibility for anyone but yourself, but that’s not the way I define it.

I’m not even sure you’d be willing to say that “laws discriminating against queers are acceptable but laws discriminating against Jews are not.”?

Laws discriminating against queers may or may not be acceptable; depends on the law. Laws discriminating against Jews are not acceptable (with a very narrow exception for laws not facially intended to discriminate against Jews but which uphold a compelling state interest - the best example I can think of is lame but realistic; a one-horse town could have a rule that the magistrate has to work weekends because it’s a tourist town and lots of cases come in over the weekend; that’s not intended to bar a Jew from the job, but working on Saturday is a bona fide job requirement, so too bad for the Jews.)

The argument I would muster is that laws that discriminate against queers are in their essence laws that penalize a behavior. Behaviors have consequences, and it may be legitimate to discourage or bar a particular set of consequences by being punitive toward a particular behavior. That punitive law may impact queers exclusively, or it may impact them to a greater degree than it does the other members of society; if the state interest is legitimate, however, then I don’t have a problem with the law.

As an example, there are laws against having sex in public parks. There is a legitimate state interest; the parks are for everyone to use, people having sex tends to drive out other uses, ergo, no sex in the parks. In the bad old days, this law impacted queers far more than straights, because queers had fewer places to go; too bad for the queers. This law is valid and I don’t have a problem with it.

Then there are laws against consensual adult homosexual sodomy. These laws go directly against queers, but there is no legitimate state interest; the state is not in the business of upholding a particular sexual framework. So that kind of law is unacceptable; too bad for the prudes.

There are some laws where the ground is muddier. Adoption laws, for instance. We have decided, in our infinite wisdom, to give the state considerable power over the adoptive process. I don’t think that a law that automatically bars a gay couple from adoption is a good law. But, I have no problem with a law that allows adoption personnel to factor parental sexual morality into the equation - call it a no-swingers clause. If that law has disparate impact against homosexuals or heterosexuals, I don’t mind.

With all of that said, I am basically not in agreement with my party on many of the laws that it would like to pass at the state level, and with some of the laws at the federal level. However, I am not a single-issue person. I am more concerned with the overall level of freedom a particular party is going to deliver in the legislative and judicial arena. I think leftish parties are going to deliver considerably less net freedom, and rightish parties considerably more, and so I can live with the negatives on my side of the fence.

I don’t think you can directly analogize gays to Jews in this fashion because they aren’t the same kind of grouping

Well, by that logic, you can’t directly analogize anything to anything else, since by definition analogies compare two things that are not identical.

The question is, do you have any morally relevant reason that supporting a group that proposes anti-semitic laws is not comparable to supporting a group that proposes anti-queer laws?

None of the differences you point out, in any way that I can see, are morally relevant to what I was talking about. None of your differences logically support the conclusion “it’s bad to legally discriminate against Catholics but okay to legally discriminate against queers.” The lack of a central organization doesn’t make discrimination acceptable; the lack of a common body of beliefs doesn’t make discrimination acceptable; etc.. (Note, by the way, that Jews don’t have a central organization nor a universally-shared belief system, unless you’re saying atheist Jews are not Jewish. So by your system of classification, Jews are in some ways more like gays than like Catholics. As RadGeek pointed out).

To your credit, I’m not even sure you’d be willing to say that “laws discriminating against queers are acceptable but laws discriminating against Jews are not.” And yet, if you’re not willing to say such a thing - and to support it with a logical argument - then you have no basis for dismissing my analogy.

I’m not intending to draw my distinction into the broad areas you address. I was attempting to answer a very narrow question - why is the group-type of “gay” different than the group type of (originally) “Jew”. That question itself arose in response to Amp’s contention that “[I'm] absolutely no different from someone who isn’t personally anti-Semitic but is willing to ally himself with a movement that largely supports and proposes laws that discriminate against Jews.” I don’t think you can directly analogize gays to Jews in this fashion because they aren’t the same kind of grouping, and said so, yielding the question about group types.

1. The group (does/does not) have a formal history of existence as a defined group:

Set B has an extensive formal history of existence as a defined group. Set A could aspire to such a history and may achieve it in the future, but does not have it at this point in time.

I’m not entirely sure what Robert means here. The idea that there is a distinct group of people–the gay ones–goes back at least to the late 18th century, and the modern language of homosexuality was firmly in place more than 100 years ago (unfortunately, not in the context we might like; it was used to pick out people falsely believed to have a common psychosexual disorder). That’s at least as good a stretch of history as, say, “Americans” (there weren’t any until 1788) or “Christian fundamentalists” (early 20th century) have. Since sexual orientation, as a notion, has been around, and been an important part of how people talk about themselves for several generations now I don’t see any salient differences between the two. It’s not like “gay” was a neologism we just made up last Thursday.

2. Membership is/is not centrally coordinated:

Membership in set B is expressed in group terms. A person who says “I am a Catholic”? means that they are a member of the organization. Membership in set A is expressed in individual terms. A person who says “I am gay”? is describing their individual self.

I don’t know what you mean here. It’s true that a person who identifies herself as a Catholic is, inter alia, saying something about a formal organization (that she is a member of it). And it’s true that who and who is not a member of that organization is coordinated by a central authority, or by a centralized structure of authority. But that’s certainly not all that she’s doing–she’s also, as you said, stating that, inter alia, she personally adheres to the articles of the Catholic faith, participates in the sacraments of the Church, etc. Which of these two descriptions is the primary function of the statement “I am a Catholic”? Well, I don’t know. I imagine it depends on the context in which it’s uttered. (If you say, “I’m a Catholic, so of course I believe that abortion is wrong,” I imagine that the second function is more important; if you say, “I’m a Catholic, so I need to be at Mass on Sunday and can’t go with you to the picnic” then I imagine that the first function is more important.)

It’s true that a person who says “I am gay” is only saying something of the latter sort, not anything of the former sort–there isn’t any centralized organization to appeal to. But so what? What follows from this? It’s true of Catholics, but that doesn’t extend even to other denominations or religions (there is no central institutional structure for Pentacostals, or Christians, or Muslims, or Jews). Surely the particular bureaucratic details of how the Roman Catholic Church works are not a significant issue here.

3. Membership (does/does not) derive from adherence to a common framework of beliefs and practices:

Set B has a common philosophy. There is some disagreement within the set about the philosophy - debate and dissent, etc. - but all adult members of the group are passingly familiar with the philosophy. Set A does not have a common philosophy.

Set B has a common spiritual culture. Set A does not have a common spiritual culture.

Set B believes in the transmission of membership in the set to descendants. A member of set B with offspring generally attempts to instill the tenets of set B membership into the offspring. Set A members do not attempt to transmit membership to the next generation.

Set B believes in the evangelization of membership to non-members. Set A does not believe in the evangelization of membership.

Sure; this is indeed a point of contrast between Catholics and gay people. But see the discussion below.

4. Membership is/is not defined in behavioral terms:

Membership in set B is defined in nonbehavioral terms. Membership in set A is defined in behavioral terms. A single change in behavior is not generally sufficient to disenroll someone from set B; it is sufficient to disenroll someone from set A.

I think this, actually, has got to be false. It is in direct contradiction, in particular, to the contrasts made under heading 1. Being a Catholic essentially involves facts about your behavior: for example, if you stop believing in God, you are no longer a Catholic; if you convert to Islam you are no longer a Catholic; if you withdraw from all Church sacraments, you are no longer a Catholic. (If you take one common interpretation of canon 1398, then if you have or procure an abortion you are also by that very fact no longer a Catholic.)

So what hinges on this question, anyway? Well, Robert will have to say more about his purposes in giving the list of contrasts before I can say anything definitively–and if what I say here does not represent Robert’s views, then I look forward to being corrected–but one reason that people commonly make a distinction like this is to argue something like: “Look, homophobia is importantly different from common examples of politicized hatred such as racism or misogyny because whether homophobic attitudes are wrong or not, you can avoid homophobia just by not sleeping with members of your own sex.” That is true and it is important, but it’s not a point of difference between Catholicism and homosexuality: Catholics have always been able to escape persecution just by converting to a different denomination or different religion. (I don’t think, incidentally, that any important ethical consequences follow from this distinction. Religious persecution and homophobia are both wrong, and just as wrong as racism and misogyny are. The difference is only important to understanding the differing nature of the oppression, not its oppressiveness.) In this respect, members of persecuted religious groups and gay people are more alike one another than either is like victims of racism or misogyny: we could avoid it, by denying an absolutely essential part of our lives in order to pass and so pacify the bashers. But why in the hell should we have to?

On the other hand, Robert might have wanted to stick with Type 3 differences–even though his (false) claim of the Type 4 differences contradicts it–because of another conventional tack he might try to take: the status of people-who-only-have-sex-with-people-of-the-same-sex as a group is hard to pin down because those people, unlike “Catholics,” don’t necessarily have anything intellectually or culturally in common with one another, and don’t participate in any kind of common formal organization as in the Type 2 contrasts. True; but so what? “Black people” (or even a more restricted grouping such as “African-Americans”) certainly are not defined as a group by adherence to any common beliefs or spiritual culture (they don’t evangelize, and the fact that they transmit membership to their children has nothing to do with their intent in the matter). There is no formal Black organization and no centralized coordination of membership. But no-one could reasonably argue that, for example, Black people in America don’t constitute a single group that have something importantly in common. What they have in common, if nothing else, is how they are (have been) treated. Racism just means making race politically relevant; even though most everything racists say about Black people’s alleged common traits is false, the legacy of racist political power in the United States is such that Black people do have something importantly in common with each other–they were all treated as niggers. In this respect, gay people are more like victims of racism and misogyny than they are like victims of religious persecution: what we have in common is, mainly, that we are all treated like fags and dykes. Our commonalities as a group are defined more by the attitudes and practices of the people around us than by anything positive attribute that we all have on our own. But so what? Why in the world would anyone think that groupings mainly imposed by outside pressures are somehow less real or less politically relevant than groupings that come from commonalities we bring to the table ourselves? Certainly this isn’t true in the case of race; why would it be true in the case of sexuality?

(N.B.: I actually reject the definition, stipulated at the beginning of this discussion, of “gay” as meaning “a person who only has sex with members of the same gender”. In fact, exclusive sexual contact with members of the same gender is neither necessary nor sufficient for being gay: for one, you can be gay and a virgin; for two, you can be gay and closeted and have heterosexual sexual contact; for three, for the same reasons, you could be heterosexual and due to unusual circumstances end up only having sexual contact with members of the same sex. Further, I think it’s actually a mistake to define bisexual people out of being “gay”; certainly, as a bisexual man, I am treated like a faggot by homophobes regardless of the fact that I also am sexually and romantically attracted to women. But I’ve set that aside here; I don’t think that much important hinges on the differences between “gay men and lesbians” as a class and “men and women who only have sexual contact with members of the same gender” as a class, and this was a stipulative definition that Robert agreed to, not something that he insisted on, anyway.)

The set of people who “[have] sexual contact exclusively with people of their own gender”, let’s call A.

The set of people who define themselves as Catholic, let’s call B.

Set B has a common philosophy. There is some disagreement within the set about the philosophy - debate and dissent, etc. - but all adult members of the group are passingly familiar with the philosophy. Set A does not have a common philosophy.

Set B has a common spiritual culture. Set A does not have a common spiritual culture.

Set B believes in the transmission of membership in the set to descendants. A member of set B with offspring generally attempts to instill the tenets of set B membership into the offspring. Set A members do not attempt to transmit membership to the next generation.

Set B believes in the evangelization of membership to non-members. Set A does not believe in the evangelization of membership.

Set B has an extensive formal history of existence as a defined group. Set A could aspire to such a history and may achieve it in the future, but does not have it at this point in time.

Membership in set B is defined in nonbehavioral terms. Membership in set A is defined in behavioral terms. A single change in behavior is not generally sufficient to disenroll someone from set B; it is sufficient to disenroll someone from set A.

Membership in set B is expressed in group terms. A person who says “I am a Catholic” means that they are a member of the organization. Membership in set A is expressed in individual terms. A person who says “I am gay” is describing their individual self.

There are other substantive differences, but this is already long enough.

In short, members of set B are part of an actual existing structure. Members of set A are being grouped discursively, for purposes of description and taxonomy, but are not actually part of an entity larger than themselves.

And that’s why I’d say that gays are not members of a group in the same sense that Catholics are a member of a group.

Mousehounde:

Someone who has sexual contact exclusively with people of their own gender

That’ll do nicely. I wasn’t trying to be a dick; I didn’t want to make an assumption about your definition and then end up with a side argument about how the definition I was using showed my intention of putting gays into camps where they’d be forced to endure last-second abortions while being served Jesus-shaped cookies, or something.

Let’s use Catholics rather than Jews, since I am one, so any offense I generate can be deflected with the “I am allowed to offend myself” shield.

Crap. I gotta go start the kids’ school. I will continue answering your question later this morning.

Okay, it isn’t as excitingly gory as shouting the alarm for the law to save innocents from “ten minute” psycho-killer-whore-mommies, but it would prove your sincerity, as opposed to proving your fondness for sensationalistic b.s. disguised as a call for “unity.” The more your model is based upon red herrings and upon a punitive approach to sex and motherhood, the less reason any feminist has to take your pledges of goodwill sincerely.

What is a Jew?

Is it someone who self-identifies as Jewish? Is it someone with Jewish parents? How about an atheist with Jewish parents? What if the Jewish parents were Jewish by conversion, rather than birth? What about a Jew who has converted to Catholicism? What about a born Catholic whose parents were both Jewish before converting to Catholicism? What about a born Christian who converts to Judaism? What about a convert to Judaism who is recognized as a Jew by reform congregations, but not by orthodox congregations?

* * *

Anyhow, if it would make you any happier, you can change my analogy to “reform Jews” or “wiccans” or “protestants” and I think it still works the same. (Well, you’d have to change the word “anti-semitism” to something appropriate, but you know what I mean.)

But thanks for conceding that there is a real difference between our movements in terms of who is proposing (and, sometimes, passing) anti-queer legislation.

Let us say that for this particular question “why you think “gays” as a group are different from “Jews” as a group” I would define “gays” as Someone who has sexual contact exclusively with people of their own gender .Will that make it easier? Or am I setting myself up for another round of 5 questions?

What’s the definition of being a homosexual? (There are about a thousand other questions to ask besides those first five.) I don’t need you to write a thousand answers, a few should suffice.

(Not meaning to be rhetorical - it matters very much what you say.)

The group “gays” are people who are homosexual. I am not sure how else to define it. How do you define the group “gays”? Am I missing something?