To the Editor:

Matt Osman’s Jan. 20 letter (“Columnist Obviously Doesn’t Understand Ways of Baptists”) offers two defenses of Christian intolerance of homosexuality.

Mr. Osman’s first defense is the claim that “this country is founded on Christian principles,” and America’s founding documents are cited as evidence. But Mr. Osman’s memory of those documents seems a bit shaky. The Constitution of the United States contains no reference to God or Christianity. The Declaration of Independence contains a passing reference to God, but nothing distinctively Christian. (This is hardly surprising, since its author, Thomas Jefferson, was a Deist, not a Christian.)

Mr. Osman mentions the Pledge of Allegiance. This hardly qualifies as a founding document, since it was written in 1892, and the words “under God” were not added until 1954. In any case, it too contains no reference to Christianity or any distinctively Christian doctrine.

A more relevant document is the 1796 Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Tripoli, drafted under the authority of George Washington, in which the administration of our nation’s first president officially puts itself on the record with the declaration: “The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

Osman’s second defense is that Christians are required to be intolerant because the Bible requires it, and such Christians must “believe in the Bible …. The Bible is an all-or-nothing deal.” But Mr.Osman’s memory of the Bible appears to be a bit shaky as well. The Bible is full of injunctions that few Christians take seriously, from the prohibitions on self-defense (Matthew 5: 39-41) and the eating of oysters (Leviticus 11: 9-12), to the insistence that slaves must obey their masters (Colossians 3: 22) and the endorsement of witch-burning (Exodus 22: 18).

Why should the Bible’s crude and ignorant animadversions on homosexuality be treated any differently? In practice, no Christians really treat the Bible as an all-or-nothing deal, or regard themselves as bound to obey all its literal commands down to the last bizarre detail.

More to the point, even if Mr. Osman were correct in claiming that Christianity requires a literal adherence to the Bible in every detail, this would be irrelevant as a defense of Christian intolerance. If Christianity really did require intolerance, then Christianity would be an evil and ungodly religion, and Christianity would be morally obligated to renounce it. Fortunately, Mr. Osman’s assertions are as groundless in theology as they are in American history.

Roderick T. Long

I can’t go that far; that’s the year 2000! Negroes [and whites], okay. But that’s too far!

– irresistibly reminds me of these lines toward the end of the recent Doctor Who episode “Day of the Moon,” set in 1969:

DOCTOR: Canton just wants to get married. Hell of a reason to kick him out of the FBI.

NIXON: I’m sure something can be arranged. … This person you want to marry – black?

CANTON: Yes …

NIXON: I know what people think of me, but perhaps I’m a little more liberal –

CANTON: … he is.

NIXON: I think the moon is far enough for now, don’t you, Mr. Delaware?

CANTON: I figured it might be.

It struck me because I’d seen DW viewers complaining that it was “unrealistic” that Nixon would even have so much as considered the issue of same-sex marriage.

To the Editor:

Bruce Murray argues [Tuesday] that gays’ right to marry has not really been violated, since they have the same right to marry that straights do – namely, the right to marry someone of the opposite sex.

With equal logic, a Roman emperor could have argued that Christians under pagan rule had the same religious freedom that pagans had – namely, the freedom to worship Jupiter.

How would Mr. Murray feel if the government were to permit only same-sex marriage, and to assure him that straights have the same marriage rights that gays do – the right to marry someone of the same sex? Would that be genuine equality?

Oddly, Mr. Murray complains that “homosexual unions are far from monogamous.” But if this is a bad thing, as he clearly supposes, then why further discourage monogamy by denying to gays access to the institution of marriage? That seems inconsistent.

Mr. Murray points to the supposedly harmful effects of same-sex marriage in other countries to bolster his support for special rights for heterosexuals; but then he admits that the same effects are occurring here without same-sex marriage, thus undermining the plausibility of the putative causal connection.

Finally, Mr. Murray maintains that the purpose of marriage is to “encourage mating couples to establish a permanent home for their children.” This claim raises several questions.

First, why are infertile or aged couples allowed to marry, then?

Second, gays have children too. Why does Mr. Murray seek to discourage them from raising their children?

Third, since when is social engineering a proper function of the law? The Declaration of Independence limits government’s legitimate powers to the protection of individuals’ rights to control their own lives. Encouraging particular patterns of family structure is none of the
government’s business.

Roderick T. Long

To the Editor:

The arguments one hears nowadays against treating gays like human beings all seem to be recycled from the arguments 150 years ago against treating women like human beings.

In the 19th century, a married woman had no legal right to control her own property, to have access to her own children, or to resist being raped by her husband. Those who fought against this legalized oppression of women were accused of seeking the abolition of marriage.

The male supremacists’ argument was that the subordination of the wife to the husband had so long characterized marriage that it should be considered part of the very definition of marriage, so that no relationship between legal equals could count as a marriage.

If we were to apply that standard nowadays, we would have to say that there are no married couples in the United States today. If we’re not willing to say that, then we must admit that marriage’s history does not define its boundaries.

Just as the 19th-century male supremacists rejected same-rights marriage as contradictory, so today’s hetero-supremacists reject same-sex marriage as “impossible,” as Bruce Murray does in his letter [Sunday]. But if we reject the former argument, we must reject the latter for the same reason.

The anti-marriage-equality act (calling it the defense-of-marriage act is the equivalent of calling the old prohibition on women’s and blacks’ right to vote the defense-of-voting act) is trivially unconstitutional; there’s no way that granting special rights to heterosexuals and denying them to homosexuals can be considered “equal protection of the laws.”

More importantly (since justice is always more important than legality), the anti-marriage-equality act is a sin against human equality, and an oath to enforce it would be just as illegitimate as an oath to commit any other crime.

Roderick T. Long

For previous posts on the definition of marriage, see “Who Defends Marriage?” and “The Form of Sound Words.”

Should gays and lesbians serve in the military? Once in the military, they will be expected to blindly follow the orders of their superiors and not exercise independent thought. They will oftentimes not be in a position to know whether an order is in fact dubious or immoral. They will be expected to, without reservation, drop that bomb, fire that weapon, launch that missile, and throw that grenade, as well as directly kill people and destroy their property.

Read the celý piroh.

Sheldon’s American Conservative article on left-libertarianism is now online.

David and Linda Beito’s article “Selling Laissez-faire Antiracism to the Black Masses: Rose Wilder Lane and the Pittsburgh Courier,” in the Fall 2010 issue of the Independent Review (pp. 279-294), seeks to draw attention to Lane’s neglected work for the Courier. I’ve been hearing about this material informally from David for years, and it’s exciting – though frustratingly tantalising – to see a bit more. (The full article won’t be going online for several months, so consider this an advance plug.)

Before her discovery of the Courier, Lane by her own admission had had a blindspot on the issue of race; she had “heard of lynchings and other racial injustice, but had assumed they were isolated incidents.” After she began reading the Courier’s documentation of the extent of racial oppression in the u.s., she declared that she had been an “utter fool” and a “traitor” to the “cause of human rights.” (p. 284) Soon she had joined the paper’s campaign against racism by becoming one of its regular writers.

Race was not the only topic of her columns; she advanced libertarian ideas across the board, often taking left-libertarian positions. For example, she defended the striking United Mine Workers for “refusing to submit to tyranny” (p. 288); praised Samuel Gompers as a proponent of an antistatist form of labour activism (for Gompers’ actual merits or otherwise, see here); championed “free mutual associations” as an alternative to the welfare state (p. 285); expressed concern about the tendency of women to subordinate their interests and identity to those of men and family (p. 286); and saw the “Big Boys” – politically connected plutocrats – as the chief enemies of the free market, declaring that “they can get themselves murdered in cellars for all I’d care.” (p. 285) (Her views on such subjects could be complicated, though. During her early flirtation with Marxism she’d even written a book praising Henry Ford as a practical implementer of Marxism.)

But her columns did frequently deal with race issues; and in the Beitos’ judgment, “[n]o libertarian has ever more creatively weaved together antiracism and laissez-faire than Lane.” (p. 283) According to the Beitos, Lane “anticipated … the strategy of the lunch-counter sit-ins of the 1960s” by suggesting that blacks should “emulate the crusade of … women like her who had once asserted their right to smoke in restaurants.” (p. 284) She also subverted the assumptions of traditional discourse on race by talking about the need to “solve the White problem” (after all, it’s those doing the oppressing who constitute the problem) and parodying stereotypical portraits by writing:

The American White is generally a friendly fellow, good-hearted, generous, and meaning no harm to anyone. His errors, even his cruelties, come from the false beliefs instilled in him by his environment and training. He needs help to overcome them. (p. 284)

Lane rejected the concept of race as a “ridiculous, idiotic, and tragic fallacy” (p. 283) that “did not exist” (p. 291), preferring the terms “dark-skinned” and “pale-skinned”; nowadays she would be called a social constructionist about race, and like today’s social constructionists she wrestled with the problem of whether and how to make use of existing racial categories and identities. Thus, on the one hand, she called on all people, black or white, to “renounce their race” (p. 283) and even rejected “the idea of a Negro novel” as being as irrelevant as the idea of a “blond novel.” (p. 286) But on the other hand, although she “heartily approved ” of calls for the “abolition of the term Negro,” she also “conceded that doing so was not a decision for her to make,” noting that to “millions,” the term represented “pride in achievement and the fellowship in the struggle for human rights.” The strategic choice between renouncing racial identities and embracing them thus constituted a “genuine dilemma.” (p. 284)

Lane’s recognition of the tensions involved in accepting or rejecting socially constructed racial identity anticipates more recent debates over gender and sexual orientation. Judith Butler, for example, argues in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity that “the identity categories often presumed to be foundational to feminist politics … simultaneously work to limit and constrain in advance the very cultural possibilities that feminism is supposed to open up” (p. 187/200), and that appeal to such categories “presumes, fixes, and constrains the very ‘subjects’ that it hopes to represent and liberate.” (p. 189/203) Yet at the same time she acknowledges that “it still makes sense, strategically or transitionally, to refer to women in order to make representational claims on their behalf.” (p. 181/194)

Here’s hoping that more of Lane’s Courier material gets made available.

I’m curious to know what the right-wing anti-mosqueteers’ response will be to this proposal (CHT Starchild) to open a gay bar – catering specifically to gay Muslims – next to the non-Ground-Zero non-mosque.

It puts them in a bit of a bind, I should think. Lately, people who’ve never given a damn about the rights of gays before have been invoking Islamic homophobia to justify their own Islamophobia. It’ll be interesting to see whether the conservatives’ newfound concern for gays will extend to a support for this latest effort, i.e., whether their anti-Muslim bigotry will be strong enough to overwhelm their usual anti-gay bigotry.

In other words: will the anti-mosqueteers be willing to pass beyond mere lip service, suppress their gag reflex, and swallow a gay bar? (Sorry.)

I reserve the right, however, to remain skeptical about the claim that the bar will have better music than the Islamic center. But then, I really like Islamic music.

The answer, obviously, is that the state imposes special burdens on couples who don’t marry in the approved manner. If, for example, you want to be able to visit your hospitalised spouse, or want to marry a noncitizen and not worry about their being deported, only a governmentally approved marriage will do.

It may be asked why civil unions, rather than something explicitly called “marriage,” wouldn’t be good enough for such purposes. Of course most opponents of gay marriages oppose civil unions too; but in any case, words matter. Suppose that all government documents used the n-word to refer to blacks, but didn’t otherwise treat them differently from anyone else. Wouldn’t blacks still have a basis for complaint? (I owe this point to Jacob Levy.)