The Christian right's anti-gay agenda

This year's slate of "no special rights" ballot initiatives is the most visible part of the Christian right's "family values" agenda. In Arizona, Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Texas, the movement hopes to place on ballots a fairly uniform set of statutes and constitutional amendments that would reverse and pre-empt any laws extending anti-discrimination protections and domestic partners' benefits to gays and lesbians. Such ballot measures have already met with mixed success. Colorado's narrowly passed Amendment 2 was overruled as unconstitutional; however, the Oregon Citizens' Alliance has won passage of anti-gay ordinances in numerous small counties, although not statewide.

Successful or not, however, the Christian right's ballot campaigns keep gay-rights advocates on the defensive. Aroused by fear and loathing of homosexuals, the Christian right can reap the advantages of low voter turnout, predictable during the mid-term election season. We can expect to see more Christian right candidates win elected offices, from which they will, in turn, encroach further on secular, civil liberties.

At one level, then, the anti-gay-rights campaign is a ploy by political professionals. But there's more to the story. Survey data culled by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force shows the U.S. public to be divided on the necessity of protective legal measures for gays and lesbians. About three-quarters of the public opposes discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation; but one-half to three-quarters of the public also think that homosexuality is immoral and unacceptable. This means that a sizeable segment of the population is receptive to anti-gay-rights appeals and, more broadly, to the Christian right's growing arsenal of homophobic propaganda. This year, hundreds of thousands of people will vote to deny civil rights to gays and lesbians--not just because they get a flyer from Lou Sheldon or Pat Robertson, but because their worst fears about sexual "deviants" have been stirred up by a virulent and growing cottage industry of anti-gay books, newsletters, and videotapes.

The best known of the anti-gay productions is a series of home videos--the prototype was The Gay Agenda--produced largely from risque film footage taken at gay-rights marches in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. But the range of material is much broader, and some of the propaganda themes are particularly ominous. Some of the material is aimed at presenting gays and lesbians as diseased "victims" ripe for healing by Christian counselors. Other materials portray homosexuals as the lynchpins of a sinister conspiracy to destroy American democracy.

To understand--and defeat--the Christian right's anti-gay-rights agenda at the polls, we must delve into the propaganda environment that now invests "queers" with the stigmatized status once reserved for "communists," and now increasingly assigned to Jews and other "foreigners" in Europe's fascist climate.

At the most clinical (but insidious) end of the propaganda spectrum is the California-based Exodus International and its network of some 95 "ex-gay" affiliate ministries around the country. Exodus' goal is to convince gays and lesbians that they can reverse their sexual orientation through prayer and acceptance of Christian mandates against sexual "sin." There is no telling how many gays and lesbians have consulted Exodus' referral service and submitted themselves to counseling by lay ministers who have themselves "overcome a homosexual past." Much of Exodus' counseling is geared toward the bereaved parents of adult children hopelessly lost to the "homosexual life-style."

Exodus has been around since 1976, but its profile has risen noticeably in the past few years. Typically, articles in the Christian right press about AIDS, about politically active gays and lesbians--in short, about anything connected to the "homosexual agenda"--are accompanied by referrals to Exodus and its mail-order "Christian General Store" of anti-gay books and tapes. Among the most widely circulated is Joe Dallas' Desires in Conflict: Answering the Struggle for Sexual Identity. The book is written for Christians struggling to reverse (or repress?) their homosexual tendencies. The book's tone is conversational and encouraging but unyielding on the message that gays must "turn or burn."

But apart from however many "souls" Exodus International might "save," its broader function is less therapeutic than propagandistic. "Former" homosexuals affiliated with Exodus make frequent appearances on Christian TV and radio programs, where their testimonies reinforce the idea--for mostly straight audiences--that homosexuality is demonically inspired. Some of Exodus' affiliates recently told their stories in a magazine cover story for the mega-radio ministry Focus on the Family. The recurrent theme of these stories was the amazing grace that has led ex-gays and ex-lesbians to the heterosexual bliss now so evident in photos of their smiling faces.

The evangelical media's constant repetition of these personal salvation stories is not as innocuous as it might seem. Through its daily broadcasts on more than 1,400 radio stations, its network of several dozen state-based think tanks, and its monthly political magazine, the Citizen, Focus on the Family has played a large role in mobilizing voters for anti-gay ballot measures nationwide. It is important for Christian right supporters to believe that gays and lesbians could straighten themselves out just as easily as they might dye their hair pink. By believing that homosexuality is a willfully chosen "lifestyle," Christian moralists can more righteously choose to deny civil rights to the openly gay.

The sugar-coated "recovery" theme seems to work well enough for the kind of homophobic mass audience tuned into James Dobson's Focus on the Family. The more committed anti-gay activists seem to need more hard-core stimulation, however, and there is plenty to go around. On the heels of their successful fight against open inclusion of gay military personnel, the producers of the blockbuster Gay Agenda video have stayed in business with a new magazine, the Lambda Report. Ty and Jeannett Beeson, two nobodies from the Springs of Life church in Lancaster, California, teamed up with writer Peter LaBarbera, a former editor of Concerned Women for America's monthly magazine. LaBarbera writes the articles, and the Beesons sell the subscriptions at $29.95 apiece. Each issue of the Lambda Report features the inevitable tale of a gay or lesbian gone straight. Mostly, though, the magazine reports on grass-roots campaigns to head off local gay-rights ordinances and harps on two fictions central to homophobic propaganda: the pedophilic North American Man-Boy Love Association as the vanguard of the gay-rights movement; and wealthy gay-rights activists wielding growing--and disproportionate--power over government agencies and politicians.

Together, the package of propaganda themes in the Lambda Report is a coherent one: some homosexuals have the decency to repent and change their ways, but most won't because they're perverts who want to infiltrate the Boy Scouts and spend a fortune on the president's inaugural ball and obscene parades in big cities.

The pedophilia theme is vile and crude, pandering to homophobes' dual sense of repulsion and fascination with homosexual fantasies. The excessive-power theme follows from Clinton's early moves to reverse the ban on gays in the military, but its psycho-political value is more expansive. Psychologically speaking, this propaganda allows the Christian right to project its own power and influence onto its enemies/victims. The trick is to divert attention away from the right's grip on the Republican Party through stories of politicians supposedly beholden to the "gay agenda." The Lambda Report has focused on Massachusetts Governor William Weld, a liberal Republican, who has backed a bill to protect gay students from harassment in public schools. Weld is exceptional among Republicans; but for homophobic propagandists, his stance becomes emblematic.

The political-power theme underlies some of the most paranoid recent additions to the Christian right's homophobic literature. Here we enter the realm of apocalyptic fiction, though fiction peddled in concert with purportedly factual reporting.

During the months when Colorado's Amendment 2 underwent judicial review, its sponsor, Colorado for Family Values, ran in its monthly newsletter serialized excerpts from a forthcoming novel, Colorado 1988, in which homosexuals control the government and exact revenge against Bible-believing Christians. In one of the installments, four-year-old Heather is taken from her father and placed in a foster-care facility after her teachers identify her as a problem child "being home schooled in a right-wing homophobic home." When Heather's mother refuses to comply with a family court order to undergo a Queer Sensitivity Services training session, the child is told she will never see her parents again.

I heard a variation on this theme at the top of a recent pair of anti-gay radio broadcasts aired by Beverly LaHaye's Concerned Women for America (estimated audience: 500,000). Each show began with a dramatic exchange between two Christians lamenting, sometime in the near future, that since passage of a federal gay-rights bill all churches have had to hire homosexuals or else be shut down.

At a recent Washington, D.C., meeting of the Traditional Values Coalition, one of the scheduled speakers was Spenser Hughes, whose novel The Lambda Conspiracy takes the cake for the most delusional item in the right-wing's futuristic horror-fiction genre. I don't want to give away the plot, but after reading the first 50 pages, I could not put it down--not until I knew if the cabal of gay New Agers controlling the White House and responsible for killing a Christian U.S. senator at the evangelical broadcasters' convention would prevail against the handsome, 35-year-old TV journalist who sacrifices fame, fortune, and even his fiancee's unborn child to tell the truth about Them--the queers. I don't know if this potboiler is more dangerous because it's published by the reputable Moody Press and widely available in Christian bookstores, or because the Traditional Values Coalition is selling the book and promoting author Hughes as an "information" source fit to share the podium with elected officials and former Secretary of Education William Bennett.

While I could not put The Lambda Conspiracy down, neither could I stop thinking, page after page, of Hannah Arendt's explanations of racial bigotry and anti-Semitism in her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism. What made Jews the officially designated enemy of Christian Europe was the flip side of the color-based biological determinism that allowed white colonizers to look downward and justify their theft of darkskinned people's resources. With anti-Semitism, the prejudiced mind looks upward and sees the mirage of an elite, conspiratorial clique controlling the media, the labor unions, the schools, and the government itself. This cabal--the term comes from Kabbalah, the Hebrew word for mysticism--can become the imagined culprit for large numbers of people who know their society is sick but don't quite know why.

For the mass-based, anti-elite, and rhetorically populist Christian right, gays and lesbians are perfect foils. There aren't very many of Them, but it seems like They are everywhere. They do bad things in the dark, and yet They have the audacity to demand equal rights at a time when everyone knows there is just not enought to go around. This is why, although the Christian right may lose some (and win some) of its anti-gay-rights measures this fall, its continued targeting of gays and lesbians for hate campaigns is a sure bet.

COPYRIGHT 1994 American Humanist Association
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