In The Antigay Agenda, Didi Herman seeks to do much like other authors we’ve read, and shed some light on the true complexity of an issue of central importance to the Christian Right. In this case, of course, it is the details of their antigay agenda that she hopes to unravel. In doing so, she admits that certain aspects did not live up to her expectations, and that the antigay movement turns out to be more varied and complicated than many within and outside of the Christian Right believe. While some of the previous authors have related such variation to the complexity and diversity of conservative Christianity in general, Herman seems to focus more on how it is “contradictory” and “conflicting”, suggesting that her attitude toward the CR’s antigay movement is indeed what one might expect given her other works and the reviews quoted on the book’s back cover. However, her attitude toward the topic does not imply that her arguments about it are not well researched and logically consistent. The number of sources she uses from within the CR itself leave little room for doubt that there are indeed conflicting and contradictory impulses within the genre of antigay media, even if one disagrees with some of Herman’s secondary arguments. For instance, given the strict hierarchy and nationalistic tenor involved in Nazism, it is hard to deny that associating gays with both Nazis and savage anarchists produces somewhat of a contradiction, as does implying that they are both like Nazis and like (historical negative stereotypes of) Jews.
When the many conflicting implications in antigay propaganda are combined with the relatively recent appearance of some of the associations (like that between gays and the other “rights-undeserving” minority of Jews), it is apparent that there must be something else underlying the whole movement. Antigay Christians can’t ultimately be opposed to gay rights because gays are wealthy and thus not as deserving of rights as poor racial minorities, because this argument has only recently become popular, and is in fact in some tension with the much older notion that homosexuality is something that can be freely chosen at any time. The recent (and still nonexistent, in some cases) inclusion of lesbians into the antigay genre of propaganda suggests that it is specifically male homosexuality with which the CR has a problem. Furthermore, in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, homosexual behavior started out being seen as just one part of a great body of evidence that our society as a whole was growing more sexually depraved and licentious, and thus paganistic. In the Bible itself, which is always held up as the fundamental justification for withholding rights from gays and lesbians, the practice of male homosexuality is never singled out as some especially abominable sin, but rather is always listed among several other behaviors that are ostensibly just as sinful.[1] So what is it about (male) homosexual behavior in particular that led it to be such a central motivation behind the antigay movement of today’s Christian Right?
It seems that at least one reason for this is, in fact, the “commonsense story…that a groundswell of conservative Christian protest against sexual immorality began to surface…as a reaction to the perceived values of the ‘permissive sixties,’” (p. 28). That is, once homosexuality began to be seen as more openly permissible, and once gays and lesbians themselves started fighting for their own rights, homosexuality became more of a problem in the eyes of the CR than other aspects of sexual depravity. (There is no adultery-rights movement, or any overt pornography lobby, for instance.) Suddenly there was a particular, discrete group of people (the so-called “militant” gays, as opposed to the nice quiet ones who could perhaps be turned straight by dedicated Christian ministry) upon which the CR could blame the far more generalized tide of sexual “immorality”. Once an enemy was created in the fight against sexual licentiousness, it was only natural to attach to that enemy a nice stock of stereotypes that had been built up over previous decades from fights against other (perceived) anti-Christian forces. So homosexuality has become anarchistic like the savage Indians, a disease like communism, genocidal like the Nazis, greedy like the Jews, and intent on the domination of good, God-fearing Christians like communists, Nazis, and Jews alike. Any stereotypes that have successfully held back other minorities and ideologies in the past, it seems, are now fair game to be attached to homosexuality and the gay rights movement, just so long as someone can find a way to make the association subtle enough to convince people without alerting them to how the propaganda is actually evolving. Since the gay rights movement hasn’t simply laid down and died, it seems the Christian Right has continually felt the need to step up their efforts to counter it, rather than admit some kind of defeat, to the point where multiple nationwide organizations exist for the sole purpose of promoting antigay activism.
All
of this leads to a second, more pragmatic question: What, if anything, might the movement for LGBT
rights be able to do to effectively counter the CR antigay agenda?
[1] Significantly, there is also the fact that it’s not at all clear that any activity more general than male cult prostitution is actually listed in New Testament passages supposedly prohibiting homosexuality. And female homosexuality is rarely (if ever) mentioned in the Bible, which could be one reason for its invisibility throughout the antigay genre.