In mid-January, CNN’s Larry King Live aired a four-person discussion of Brokeback Mountain and marriage for gay persons. The guests were Janet Parshall and Albert Mohler speaking for the religious right, and Chad Allen and Casper, Wyo., councilman Guy Padget speaking in favor of allowing gay people to marry.
At a new web site called A Tenable Belief, Steve Boese analyzes the rhetoric: The logic (or lack thereof) of each speaker; how many words were spoken on a variety of issues, and the percentage of discussion devoted to religion, civil liberties, or unrelated issues. ATB discovers that “conservatives got 50% more words in than the progressives, and faith garnered twice as much attention as rights and liberties.” ATB observes what may have changed, and what hasn’t, in the public debate over the past 10 years.
Concluding with a detailed analysis of Parshall’s rhetoric, ATB observes that “The true root of resistance by folks from the religious right to granting recognition of or civil rights for blgt folks is that gays hold wrong beliefs. Arguments like those offered on the King show — that no recognition of gay folks is called for because gay people who adopt conservative Christian beliefs no longer need distinct civil liberties or rights — recalls the work of some Christian missionaries to remote tribal cultures, where long-standing beliefs and traditions mattered primarily as targets to be eradicated.”
I have avoided dropping names here at XGW, but I am close to this discussion on LK Live.
The ‘you’re not like us’ is an easy value to fall back on.
How closely gay men and women DO live or try to within certain institutions is lost on the Parshalls and the Mohlers of the world.
Their attitude is and knowing that, no matter what a gay person does, they are still gay-enough to be isolated from some very basic institutions and therefore easier to force into an impossible position.
A gay person could resemble any and every other American in what they are expected to do in public.
Just as no matter how closely a black person lived, walked and talked like a white person…they STILL weren’t and couldn’t be ‘just like us’, so therefore-still unable to participate in everything white people did.
What you ARE…not just what you DO…is still the impossible and as Mr. Boese points out, the untenable.
It’s impossible for a gay person to be straight most often or shouldn’t be the condition on which civil equality rests. And as directly mean spirited to demand such as thing, as it would be to demand that Parshall and Mohler give up their religious identity.
With a sometimes cruel and bloody past as many religious groups have in our American history, and the destruction caused to many indigenous identities, would and should it be right or fair for Christians to modify their beliefs if it proves cruel to such a specific and exclusive group like gay people?
Exactly.
A Christian person, living as such, will not have to give up their identity or beliefs regarding gay people, regardless of whether gay people marry or not.
But they in effect, are demanding that gay people do it or, at the expense of what a gay person can do to secure their loved ones, would deny that gay people deserve such security.
This is a serious lack of respect for what a gay person’s goal is.
It’s as if to punish the gay person for not being ‘one of us’.
What a well-done analysis. Thanks for the link, Mike!
Love the new site!
I’m glad that you like the new site. Now if only some people would comment there. 🙂
I will…I will if you fix the link to Replace the lies with truth! It doesn’t work…..but I love the new look there and the graphs are intriguing. The pick of Chad could have been bigger but that is a biased statement and we won’t go into that….
Mike said:
… that no recognition of gay folks is called for because gay people who adopt conservative Christian beliefs no longer need distinct civil liberties or rights…
I’m not sure I understand this part. I mean, I understand the analogy to early missionaries and other cultures (actually, I think “educating the savages” was a general practice and attitude of Western society in general), but this seems an odd statement to me. Who is saying this? Is this referring to the rights of “exgays”?
Otherwise the study looks thorough and I would tend to agree with the findings. I don’t guess I’m too surprised by the results but it’s interesting to see it broken down like that.
David
I think what Mike’s getting at is the greater question “Do gay people exist?”.
If the right-wingers takes the position that gay people can be converted to heterosexuality then gay people, per se, do not exist. They are just not-yet-heterosexuals. And if the not-yet-heterosexuals are choosing to “remain in a homosexual lifestyle” then they can be condemned and villified and denied rights.
Thanks for offering the clarification, Timothy. I agree that’s probably what the ATB author intended in the quoted statement.
Thanks, I get it now – sort of 😉 Then again, if what Bernie and a few others have said is true, that becomming gay is only one sexual experience away, would the proper question be, Do Heterosexuals Exist?
David
/tongueandcheck mode off
“Do heterosexuals exist?” LOL Good one. I needed a good laugh.