I am homophobic (andrew janssen thread)

>>>>> "andrew" == andrew janssen <asjatnac-/[email protected]> writes:

  andrew> I appreciate your comments, Kendall, but you have the
  andrew> Christian position all wrong. 

Really? I guess we'll see.

          Where are the Christian
  andrew> crusades against, say, rape? We don't need one! We don't
  andrew> have people out there telling us that rape is ok because
  andrew> it's a 'natural' urge or someone's personal choice!

So the Christian position as you see it is not to oppose sin per se
but, rather, just to defend the hegemony of the Christian moral
vocabulary? That's remarkable. It doesn't matter that real women are
really raped every real day; what matters is whether anyone dissents
from the Christian position vis-a-vis rape?

(By the way, there *are* people who say precisely that about rape:
it's called the pornography industry, which right-wing Christians do
crusade against but for weird and suspect reasons. I've never heard a
Christian anti-porn person even express much less purport the
connection between porn and sexual violence against women. I'd happily
stand corrected on this point, however.)

Your point really only reinforces mine: anti-homosexual crusading by
Christians isn't about what gay men and lesbians do (or even who they
are per se); it is about political power.

It's about Christians defending their failing (I think and hope) moral
hegemony; about Christians preventing gay men and lesbians from
attaining whatever political equality they can; and, lest we forget
oppressive gender roles, about making sure as many men enter into very
traditional (and very oppressive) relationships with as many women as
possible, which means defending traditional notions of what
constitutes a family; about making sure only a married man and woman
(preferably one who never leaves the house) have any responsibility
for the rearing of children.

Thus the anti-homosexual crusading is just part and parcel of the
Christian retrenchment against the expansion of political equality to
people of color, women, gay men and lesbians, and so on.

If that's not political, nothing is.

  andrew> I'm not even sure where you see this so-called crusade? I
  andrew> know that some Christian leader's are out there who may
  andrew> spend more time on the subject, but I've never been to a
  andrew> church in 29 years where the pastor spent much time on the
  andrew> subject.

Where "much time" is *always* *more time* than the pastor ever spends
on sexual abuse of women and children, domestic violence, date and
acquaintance rape, and the like.

But your not having heard it much in local churchs is really beside
the point. (Let's take an equally valid -- that is, equally irrelevant
-- counter-example: I spent a lot of time in a wide spectrum of
Protestant churchs from age 3 to about 20, and I never heard a
*single* word about rape, coercive sex, date or acquaintance rape, or
the like. Never a single word. Can we conclude from *that* that
Christians approve of it? Nope. We can conclude that for those churchs
teaching young men about rape was simply not *thinkable*, much less
doable. Oh, right: I did hear the principal of a fundamentalist
private Christian junior high, which I attended for 1 year, say that
*real* Christian women should only surrender their "virginity" through
violence; that is, that all *real* Christian women went to their
marriage bed as she had gone: kicking and screaming, having locked
herself into the bathroom, forcing her husband to remove the door from
its hinges before *taking* her virginity from her.) It's rampant among
the Christian political-cultural groups. Rampant and very explicit.

The crusade exists in the space between Donald Wildmon's American
Family Association, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the Catholic
hierarchy in Rome. Broadly speaking, every Protestant denomination in
the US falls into one of two camps: 1) actively working against
political equality for gays and lesbians or 2) in some state of
internal conflict as to how or to what extent it will formally
accomodate gays and lesbians.

  andrew> Also, you say christians are all hypocrites because some
  andrew> churches in the south had homosexuals in their music
  andrew> programs and accepted it as long as they kept it quiet. 

I didn't say "all" Christians. Not even close, actually.

          Your
  andrew> right! That is hypocritical, but please don't try to say
  andrew> that all Christians are hypocrites because of what a few
  andrew> have done. 

The point -- which I illustrated with regional knowledge I have by
virtue of living here -- is that gay men and lesbians have been an
open secret in all American churchs, and that the public turn against
gay men and lesbians happened *precisely* as a result of gay men and
lesbians in the wider culture demanding some measure of political
equality.

In other words, as long as they are quiet (that is, politically
disenfranchised) Christians don't care. Once they act up and fight
back, the war is *on*.

          Does that mean that all liberals are great
  andrew> exaggeraters because you just said that?

Probably not since I'm not a liberal, but at any rate, whether I
exaggerated or not, my position is not that all Christians are
hypocrites. My position is that the Christian crusade against gay men
and lesbians is very political, is explicitly political, and came
about in response to the efforts on the part of gay men and lesbians
to achieve political equality.

As much as Robertson and Falwell and the rest cloak their efforts in
talk about morality, that's just humbug and hokum to keep the faithful
in line. It's not credible or coherent.

  andrew> I don't have time right now to respond to the rest, but I
  andrew> will. Also, I hope there are no hard feelings! I just enjoy
  andrew> talking about today's issues and I respect feelings no
  andrew> matter how much I disagree.

I have no hard feelings, but then I have full political equality! I do
have hard feelings for those who don't have it, and I have hard
feelings and sharp words against those try to prevent them from
achieving it.

I suspect that a great many gay men and lesbians (and lots of straight
folks too) have "hard feelings" about the degree to which -- to take
merely one example -- Gary Bauer and Ronald Reagan's
religiously-masqueraded political agenda set back AIDS research for
about two years (Bauer *directly*, in the name of his
religiously-branded hateful political agenda, opposed efforts to
present Reagan with the enormity of the early AIDS epidemic.), leading
to the deaths of only a god could know how many people.

Kendall
--
Jazz is only what you are. -- Louis Armstrong