Gay Watch in Religious News
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Archive for the 'Homophobic zaniness/more LGBTQ issues' Category
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to President Bush: ‘If it’s good for the Baltics and Russia, what about here at home?’
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GLAAD praises the ‘Daily Show with Jon Stewart’
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This is comforting, but not surprising.
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16 extra years in prison for being gay
From Salon:
Kansas’ statutory rape law prohibits “criminal sodomy” (including oral sex) with teenagers younger than 16. If the object of Matthew’s affection had been female, however, Kansas would have afforded him the benefit of its romantically named “Romeo and Juliet” statute, designed precisely for kids like him, kids who have consensual sex with other kids. In Kansas, and in many other states, when two teenagers have heterosexual sex, even the dreaded sodomy, the penalties are relatively mild. If Matthew had had consensual sex with a girl, and the state had prosecuted him at all, the longest sentence they could have given him was 15 months. Instead, because Matthew had sex with another boy, and only because he had sex with another boy, he has spent the past five years in Ellsworth Correctional Facility in central Kansas.
I wonder if the folks who oppose same-sex marriage would say that this “Romeo and Juliet” law isn’t discrimination? After all, gays and straight teens alike are given the much, much harsher punishment if they have sex with their underage same-sex lover. According to the same logic same-sex marriage opponents are so fond of - the logic that says that gays and lesbians have an equal right to marry someone of the opposite sex - this law must not be discriminatory.
See? See? People of different faiths CAN get along!
The New York Times reports that “major leaders of the three faiths - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - are making a rare show of unity to try to stop” a gay pride festival scheduled to take place this August in Jerusalem.
“They are creating a deep and terrible sorrow that is unbearable,” Shlomo Amar, Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi, said yesterday at a news conference in Jerusalem attended by Israel’s two chief rabbis, the patriarchs of the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian churches, and three senior Muslim prayer leaders. “It hurts all of the religions. We are all against it.”
Abdel Aziz Bukhari, a Sufi sheik, added: “We can’t permit anybody to come and make the Holy City dirty. This is very ugly and very nasty to have these people come to Jerusalem.”
Warms my heart. Or maybe my temper. Something’s warmed up, anyway.
Link via Finnigans Wake.
Disgust and Prejudice
Martha Nussbaum has a short-and-excellent essay on disgust in the Chronicle of Higher Education. A sample:
Disgust is distinct from both distaste, a negative reaction motivated by sensory factors, and from a sense of danger, motivated by anticipated harmful consequences. Disgust is not simple distaste because, Rozin has found, the very same smell elicits different disgust reactions depending on the subject’s conception of the object. Subjects sniff decay odor from two different vials, both of which in reality contain the same substance; they are told that one vial contains feces and the other contains cheese. (The real smells are confusable.) Those who think that they are sniffing cheese usually like the smell; those who think they are sniffing feces find it repellent and unpleasant. It is the subject’s conception, rather than the sensory properties of the object, that primarily determines the disgust response.
Nor is disgust the same as perceived danger. Dangerous items (for instance, poisonous mushrooms) are tolerated in the environment, as long as they will not be ingested; disgusting items are not. When danger is removed, the dangerous item will be ingested: Detoxified poisonous mushrooms are acceptable. But disgusting items remain disgusting even when all danger is removed. People refuse to eat sterilized cockroaches; many, Rozin has shown, object even to swallowing a cockroach inside an indigestible plastic capsule.
Nussbaum also relates disgust to bigotry:
Thus throughout history certain disgust properties — sliminess, bad smell, stickiness, decay, foulness — have repeatedly and monotonously been associated with, indeed projected onto, people by reference to whom privileged groups seek to define their superior human status. The stock image of the Jew, in anti-Semitic propaganda, was that of a being with a disgustingly soft and porous body, womanlike in its oozy sliminess, a foul parasite inside the clean German male self. Hitler described the Jew as a maggot in a festering abscess, hidden away inside the apparently clean and healthy body of the nation.
Similar disgusting properties are traditionally associated with women. In more or less all societies, women have been vehicles for the expression of male loathing of the physical and the potentially decaying. Taboos surrounding sex, birth, menstruation — all express the desire to ward off something that is too physical, that partakes too much of the secretions of the body.
Consider, finally, the central locus of disgust in today’s United States, male loathing of the male homosexual. Female homosexuals may be objects of fear, or moral indignation, or generalized anxiety, but they are less often objects of disgust. Similarly, heterosexual females may feel negative emotions toward the male homosexual — fear, moral indignation, anxiety — but again, they rarely feel emotions of disgust. What inspires disgust is male fear of anal penetration: of breaking down the sacred boundary against stickiness, ooze, and death. The presence of a homosexual male in the neighborhood inspires the thought that a man might himself be contaminated. The very look of such a male is itself contaminating — as we see in the extraordinary debates about showers in the military.
Does disgust, then, contain a wisdom that steers law in the right direction? Surely the moral progress of society can be measured by the degree to which it separates disgust from danger and indignation, basing laws and social rules on substantive harm, rather than on the symbolic relationship an object bears to our anxieties.
I highly recommend reading Jason of Positive Liberty’s post on Nussbaum’s essay:
The disgust that many people feel toward homosexuals may also explain why Biblical injunctions against homosexuality remain a part of fundamentalist Christian discourse today, while the prohibitions against usury, divorce, and swearing are routinely ignored–even despite these others being far more direct and unequivocal than the prohibitions against homosexuality. Usury simply isn’t disgusting.
Jason’s post expands on the analogy between historic prejudice against jews and current prejudice against gays, and he makes a very convincing case. Here’s just a sample, but you really should go read the whole thing:
Don’t get me wrong: Neither the ex-gay movement nor the Jewish conversion movement contained any overt hatred for the groups they sought to influence. Then as now, these movements claim only to love the people they wish to change. They want to help these poor unfortunates, these dear, suffering, fallen brothers.
They know that these people have made a terrible mistake, but they can see the good within all of us. They know that it takes a lot to own up to a colossal mistake–like homosexuality or Judaism–and they so hope that we have the courage to admit it. Above all, they know what’s right for us–and they know that their love is stronger than all of our problems.
It’s fascinating, though, which side has a monopoly on “love,” and which side gets all the “problems.”
I think Nussbaum is mistaken, however, to say that straight male prejudice against gay men is “the central locus of disgust in today’s United States.” I don’t want to play “let’s rank the oppressions.” Nonetheless, a huge portion of the moralizing disgust and shame (Nussbaum links the concepts of disgust and shame in her article) in the US today is directed at fat people. From an article in California Monthly (via Big Fat Blog):
Boero, a Cal graduate student in medical sociology, studies the messages conveyed by the health profession and the media about obesity. She claims that labeling obesity an “epidemic” is unleashing a new wave of blame and guilt toward fat people, and notes that obesity rates are higher among groups that already experience other forms of discrimination, including the poor and African-Americans.
“The focus has been on how to make fat people thin, not how to make fat people healthy,” she says. Studies by the Cooper Institute in Houston have shown that fat people who exercise regularly perform better on treadmill-fitness tests than thin people who don’t. But we automatically assume fat people are unhealthy, says Boero. “We also automatically assume that thin people are healthy. Health is the new moralism, the way to know people’s worth.”
In fact, although Nussbaum herself doesn’t say anything about anti-fat bigotry, I think her article may nonetheless be the best analysis of anti-fat bigotry I’ve read in years.
Links, links, links, and still more links
I wish I had time to make a post of each of these links, but alas… So here they are. Sorry if this post seems a bit abrupt; it’s not because I think the topics under discussion aren’t important.
- Excellent article in the Columbia Journalism Review about how badly news media covers class issues, and in particular, poor people.
- Daddy, Poppa and Me defends a webpage on “Nazi Anti-Jewish Speech vs. Religioius Right Anti-Gay Speech.” My favorite bit:
But if the Nazis have become such a caricature of evil that nothing they did or said can ever be compared to anything anyone else does or says now or in the future, then the phrase
“Never again!”
becomes a useless and trite historical cliche having no force or power to stop hate before it becomes something violent. Do I believe that the FRC has the possibility to become a ‘regime’ that would slaughter my ‘kind’? No, I would be the last to make such a prediction.
Do I believe the rhetoric of hate and demonization that the FRC uses has the possibility to increase violence and legislative attacks against my family? Yes, most defininitely.
- An article about “honour killings” in Istanbul, the practice of murdering girls and women for having sex, for being suspected of having sex, or even for being raped. The good news is, there is something of a backlash against the practice.
- In “Ideas which look sensible but aren’t,” Daniel Davies explains why it’s not a good idea to lend aid money only to countries with decent human rights records.
- Jon Stewart’s commencement address at William & Mary College.
- The Fifty Minute Hour has a sickening post about how rape-shield laws are not being enforced in one California case.
UPDATEAnd Pinko Feminist Hellcat has another post on this case, aptly titled “Just when you think the OC rape defense couldn’t get any worse…”
- Death and Disease in Iraq. At least for now, war has made things even worse.
- Kuwaiti women react with caution to move on political rights.
- A useful Women’s Enews article describes and contrasts the Kerry and Bush health plans.
- In Pakistan, Those Who Cry Rape Face Jail.
Up to 80 percent of the 2,000 women now in Pakistani jails are facing charges related to the Hudood Ordinances, according to Rizvi. Many of the cases involve women being charged with adultery after they have allegedly been raped. Another case involves a woman seeking a divorce who has then been accused of adultery. While few are ever tried and convicted, the stigma and the ordeal can color the rest of their lives.
“These laws promote injustice and are un-Islamic, denying women the rights given to them in the Koran, and discriminating against the weakest sections of society; women and minorities,” Rizvi says. “It is a flawed legislation that can’t be fixed. Its drafting is flawed. Its motive is flawed.” [...]
Under the Hudood, punishment of a man for rape must be preceded by his own confession or the testimony of four males of upstanding character who witnessed the act of penetration. Women and non-Muslim witnesses are considered worthless.
- A good article by rape researcher Mary Koss discusses what existing research has shown us, and suggests directions for future research.
A few things I’ve read today
- A victory for the pro-lifers today: The Senate Approves Ban on Abortion Procedure. Enjoy your victory while it lasts, is my advice to the right. Once I was very worried about this, but that was when I was assuming that O’Conner was going to retire from the Supreme Court during Bush’s first term. With O’Conner staying on the Court, however, it’s very likely that the Court is going to find this ban unconstitutional.
- Proof that not all conservatives are anti-gay: There’s a good Andrew Sullivan essay in the Wall Street Journal, criticizing other conservatives for their anti-gay attitudes.
So what is it? What exactly is the post-Lawrence conservative social policy toward homosexuals? Amazingly, the current answer is entirely a negative one. The majority of social conservatives oppose gay marriage; they oppose gay citizens serving their country in the military; they oppose gay citizens raising children; they oppose protecting gay citizens from workplace discrimination; they oppose including gays in hate-crime legislation, while including every other victimized group; they oppose civil unions; they oppose domestic partnerships; they oppose . . . well, they oppose, for the most part, every single practical measure that brings gay citizens into the mainstream of American life.
This is simply bizarre. Can you think of any other legal, noncriminal minority in society toward which social conservatives have nothing but a negative social policy? What other group in society do conservatives believe should be kept outside integrating social institutions? On what other issue do conservatives favor separatism over integration? We know, in short, what conservatives are against in this matter. But what exactly are they for?
- But then again… for a laugh, check out this response to Sullivan by David Frum, also in the WSJ. Frum argues that conservatives have no choice but to oppose gay marriage laws. Why? Because if gays can marry, the goverment will be forced to set up halfway-marriage laws, which heterosexuals will want access to, which will reduce heterosexual marraige. Why will halfway-marriage laws be necessary? Because conservatives will oppose full gay-marriage laws.
In other words - if we cut out the fuzzy middle of this logic chain, and look only at the start and end - conservatives have no choice but to oppose gay marriage laws because conservatives will oppose gay marriage laws. Oy.
- A few days ago, I mentioned the Terri Schiavo case. Today, Jeb Bush has signed a new law which will cause Schiavo to be kept alive via a tube feeder.
- Jasperboi, a non-op (I think - it’s not really my business, of course) FtM transsexual (I think) feminist - muses on the kinds of men that different parts of our society will allow/expect him to be, and also on the difficulties men can have on finding a place in feminism. Interesting stuff.
- From back in June, a very good post on Procrastination, arguing that arranged marriages have been overrated.
- Two interesting Times articles on childbearing and poverty. First, a case of a woman charged with child endangerment after her two children were murdered while she was at her job. She wasn’t able to find a baby-sitter, and she couldn’t risk being fired, so she left her two kids, ages 8 and 2, at home. While she was out, someone deliberately set her apartment on fire, killing the children. Now she’s been charged with child endangerment.
This underscores the desparate need for universal, free child-care. There’s no reason anyone should be faced with this sort of “leave your kids alone or lose your job and watch the kids starve” choice. To then charge the woman with a crime is disgusting.
Second, a new study finds that chlidren’s behavior improves as their family’s income goes up.
- Over on Body and Soul, why I’m probably voting for Kucinich in the primary.
- A really interesting essay, Free Mickey!, on an 1970s satire of Mickey Mouse that Disney attempted to sue into oblivionland.
