Stamp of approval
Carlin, David R. Jr.
Of several minds: David R. Carlin, Jr. STAMP OF APPROVAL LEGISLATING GAY RIGHTS IN THE CORNER of the world in which I live and move and have my being, a nearby city council recently...
...Some tolerance, this...
...DAVID R. CARUN, JR...
...but laws don't get passed in a social vacuum, and they take much of their public meaning from the social context in which they are enacted...
...Now, I realize I've disqualified myself as an authority on tolerance by virtue of my admissions above, but it nonetheless strikes me as intolerant to brand people as immoral because they continue to hold beliefs regarding the wrongness of homosexuality which had been held by their civilization from time out of mind...
...For to oppose is to create a prima facie case against yourself as intolerant and homophobic...
...Given this context, to enact gay rights legislation is tantamount to endorsing the rationale given for it...
...Ultimately, I fear, the gay rights movement is promoting a theory of "morality" which undermines the very concept of morality — hence undermines all human rights, since these are grounded in morality...
...The discovery of homophobia, whatever its merits from a psychological point of view, was a brilliant stroke politically...
...So I may as well confess right off to being an intolerant homophobe, even though that puts me in the unsavory company of Jerry Falwell, Cardinal O'Connor, St...
...with the result that today, if a person is not sufficiently au courant and continues to believe that the pre1970 consensus gentium on the subject may have contained more wisdom than the fashionable beliefs of the moment, he or she is to be stigmatized as a bigot...
...If we scratch your otherwise liberal surface, shall we find that deep down you're anti-black and anti-Semitic as well, not to mention your probable male chauvinism...
...The gay rights movement has pushed for gay rights legislation on the grounds that homosexual conduct is just as morally legitimate as is heterosexual conduct...
...Your hostility toward homosexuals is a displaced form of hostility toward your own repressed homosexual impulses...
...There may be nothing in the statute that says this...
...instead "morality" is only a fancy name for the set of rules ensuring minimum social order...
...Ten or fifteen years ago, as a phase of the sexual revolution, the notion got around that homosexual conduct is morally okay...
...Commonweal: 664...
...But if you don't, I suspect it takes rather more courage to be publicly opposed to gay rights legislation...
...I suppose it does — at least if you live around the corner from the bishop and bump into him two or three times a week at the neighborhood milk store...
...So even though some of my best friends are gay, mark me down as one who is extremely dubious about the merits of gay rights legislation...
...Since intolerant people generally deny they're intolerant (this is the "Some of my best friends are Jews" phenomenon) and homophobes always deny they're homophobic, obviously I can't get off the hook by declaring that my reservations about gay rights legislation are liberalrational in motive...
...If there is such a thing as morality, then it is concerned with some or all of the following: the inner life, the quest for perfection, love of neighbor, the life of virtue, one's best self, the higher law, etc...
...Threatened with a diagnosis of homophobia, cultured liberals, whatever their personal reservations, are little prepared to challenge the gay rights idea...
...And if you're homophobic, well, we all know what that means, don't we...
...and all conduct which is not directly and tangibly injurious is morally permissible...
...The chief argument in favor of the moral permissibility of homosexual conduct is that this conduct inflicts no direct and tangible harm on anyone...
...The trouble with this theory of morality, to put it briefly, is that it has precious little to do with morality...
...STAMP OF APPROVAL LEGISLATING GAY RIGHTS IN THE CORNER of the world in which I live and move and have my being, a nearby city council recently considered a gay rights ordinance, finally rejecting it by a single vote after much public controversy...
...and being prejudiced or discriminatory toward homosexuals is no more justifiable than being prejudiced or discriminatory toward Jews or blacks or women...
...If it has to do only with not injuring others in a direct and tangible manner, then there is no such thing as morality...
...But there's another and even larger issue...
...It effectively silences all public as well as much private opposition to homosexuality, except for that coming from the psychologically naive (who have no idea what hilarious things they're revealing about the secret regions of their psyches when they proclaim homosexual behavior to be "sick" or "immoral"), or from the professionally committed, such as Catholic bishops and Southern Baptist preachers...
...Paul (who got positively rabid on the subject in the first chapter of Romans), and Dante (who, though somewhat reluctantly, it seems, put Brunetto Latini in hell...
...just as, forty or fifty years ago, fellow travelers were little prepared to challenge Communism, whatever their personal reservations, when threatened with an analysis that showed their critique to be nothing but an apology for the capitalistimperialist ruling class...
...Our local bishop was right, I think: gay rights legislation really does constitute an official stamp of moral approval for homosexual conduct...
...What this means, among other things, is that we are telling those unregenerate members of the public who continue to hold that there is something immoral about homosexual conduct that there is something immoral about them...
...If you're intolerant of homosexuality, we begin to wonder how deep your 29 November 1985: 663 commitment to democratic tolerance runs...
...just as, during the 1960s, passing civil rights legislation was a way of telling unregenerate racists that their racism was immoral...
...The local Catholic bishop contributed to the controversy, opposing the ordinance on the grounds that it implied a moral endorsement of The proposal provoked a popular local newspaper columnist to observe that it takes courage to be publicly supportive of gay rights...
...it is neither "sick" nor "immoral" nor "unnatural...
Vol. 112 • November 1985 • No. 21
