Manifesting the Human Experience
Even as the heartland state [Kansas] was enshrining bigotry in its constitution [by passing an anti gay-marriage amendment], a bipartisan legislative majority in Connecticut this month approved same-sex civil unions — and, unlike the laws allowing same-sex marriage in Massachusetts and civil unions in Vermont, this one was not in response to a court order.
More important, we continue to see public expressions of what I am calling the Finkelstein Phenomenon: The slow but inexorable societal acknowledgment that gay people are real people living real lives, not an abstraction or a subculture. And many of them are Republicans.
Arthur Finkelstein, for example, is an enormously effective right-wing GOP political operative who revealed recently that in December he took advantage of the groundbreaking and much-maligned Massachusetts law to marry his longtime partner. When asked why, he cited "visitation rights, healthcare benefits and other human relationship contracts."
Finkelstein, in the past, must have conveniently forgotten his own interests when he helped engineer the election of known conservative gay-bashers such as Jesse Helms. He represents–along with Dick Cheney's highly regarded lesbian daughter and the Log Cabin Republicans–yet another example for conservatives of how being gay is much more fundamental than a "lifestyle choice." In fact, it is just another manifestation of the human experience.
[excerpt from "GOP Gays and the 'Finkelstein Phenomenon' ", by Robert Scheer, The Nation, 20 April 2005.]
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I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Friday, 22 April 2005 at 12.42
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As a general rule I avoid voting on the basis of a single issue and encourage others to take a broader view as well. Something as fundamental and as essential to a person's life and chance for happiness, crucial to their fulfullment, as their sexuality, however, makes reasonable grounds for single-issue voting.
So, it never ceases to amaze me when I hear about Log Cabin Republicans and gays in conservative ranks. As long as Republicans perceive harnessing the voting power of fundamentalist Christians and red-state rural people as a key component of their elections victories, gays are sure to be used when they can be useful and blown off the rest of the time.
Some in the conservative movement and GOP ranks insist gay and lesbian relationships are sick. I insist using and casting people aside, as many of those same conservative Republicans seem so willing to do with pro-Republican gays, is really sick.
on Friday, 22 April 2005 at 14.08
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My own evolution has been similiar, I expect, as I've grown to think that "single-issue voting" is perfectly understandable, at least when equal rights for gay people is the question. In my opinion, it's the fundamentalist, people of hate voters who are the ill-advised, single-issue voters.
As a poor analogy, I usually think of sexuality and our need for sex (and human interaction) as akin to our need for food: something that is fundamental and central to our being, in pursuit of which people will go to extraordinary lengths. At the same time, eating and sex are so much a part of existing that in some ways they become unimportant, or should be treated that way. I don't understand how some disapproving people can get quite so exercised about what it is that I choose to eat, or with whom I choose to spend my life.
Likewise, I've never really been able to comprehend "conservative" gay people who feel that there are "more important things" than gay rights (generally things like tax breaks and such). It sounds to me like a starving person refusing food, saying that there are more important things than eating.
on Sunday, 24 April 2005 at 18.43
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Homophobia arises from fear, I suspect, in people who've been taught sexuality is like a powerful genie inside that must be let out only in very carefully and limited circumstanes, or else it's liable to run wild and ruin their life and maybe others' lives.
There is an element of truth to that. In Christian religious terms, adultery, fornication, etc., are considered sins. And in practical terms, our society is chock full of people who lack self-discipline, people who are impulsive, risk takers with poor judgment, not to mention people who are at the same time selfish and very aggressive. Fuel those characteristics, singly or in combination, with the hormones that make a young person's sex drive strong and nearly constant, and you've got the makings of trouble.
What's needed is more and better upbringing, including a clearer, more-rational understanding of sexuality. That requires acknowledgement that in a normal person it's a basic, lifelong drive, similar to the need for food, sleep, etc.
Trying for suppression only causes problems. Scaring people about it only causes problems. Demanding it only ever be engaged in according to the prescription of a particular religion or group of religions is both futile and highly problematic where society as a whole is concerned. Like it or not, getting everyone on the same page has never happened and probably never will.
Why some folks are gay and lesbian, I don't know. Same goes for why people aren't all black or white, or whatever. But the why is neither here nor there. We have to get along and make the world as it is a place we can all live in peacefully and well, which requires being fair. People who intend to be good Christians need to maintain focus on the Golden Rule as much or more than on the "thou shalt nots."
Being fair, in the very fundamental human matter of sexuality, means being OK with others being who they are and how they are, within limits. That means if a gay or lesbian couple moves in across the street, treat them like any other couple, keeping in mind the average, normal heterosexual person doesn't normally evaluate other heterosexuals on the basis of whatever it is the other heterosexuals do in the bedroom. For that matter, unless the other heterosexuals make a display of what they do, who would know? Well, it should be the same with homosexuals.
Another thing feeding the fear factor, I suspect, is the idea of recruiting. I think recruiting does happen at times, but I also suspect that when it does, the one recruited is really bisexual, acting on curiosity, maybe going through a phase. That is to say, it appears to me people can be recruited to behave certain ways, but no amount of recruiting will change a person's basic sexual orientation.
Right now, our country really is flirting with trouble-causing dysfunctionality. Politics and religion are a bad combination and so are politics and sexuality. Mixing and messing around with all three at once is a formula for disaster.