Gay N Gay: religion

Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts

The Awkward Age

I like this billboard, though I also suspect it was photoshopped, rather than a real billboard.I also like this comment on the post the image illustrates:My favorite quote thus far; “So we got the date wrong. It’s not like its the end of the world.”But that's about as far as it goes. The post itself concludes:What I am wondering is this: when the world did not end, did it cause anyone to become

The Awkward Age

Science vs. Religion

This is cute, but it's not really a good antithesis. How about "Science lets you bomb civilians from the sky without any danger to you"? Or "Science lets you shred unarmed civilians with machine-gun fire via video in your attack helicopter"? Or "Science lets you kill children with remote-control drones from thousands of miles away"? Or "Science lets you cull the human race of inferior losers

Science vs. Religion

Still an Atheist, Thank God

I got e-mail the other day that sent me back to a conundrum I've been fretting about for decades. It might be summed up by something the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote to his student Norman Malcolm:... what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc. & if it

Still an Atheist, Thank God

Step on a Crack, Break Your Mother's Back

It's possible -- no one has proven that it's impossible, anyway -- that the universe is a vast booby trap, designed and constructed by a cosmic practical joker waiting for us to make a misstep so he can jump us while holding us responsible for our doom. It's possible that the universe is set up so that it's possible to kill a human being in such a way that it's impossible for them to go to

Step on a Crack, Break Your Mother's Back

The Truth Lies Somewhere In Between

I've started reading Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (Yale, 2009), after dragging my feet because there were so many other things I needed to read. But now it's due at the library in a couple of days, and I've run out of renewals, so it may be a while before I finish it. (No way am I going to spend money on it.) I have read the first 25 or so pages, though, and while I agree with some of what Eagleton says, much of it is wackery. He reminds me slightly of Philip Kitcher, whom I wrote about here before, because of his attempt to distance himself both from religious conservatives and the New Atheists -- especially Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, whom he schmears together with donnish humor as "Ditchkins", hur hur hur. So, I reject religious conservatives and I reject the New Atheists, but I also reject those who try to split the difference like Eagleton, Kitcher, and Chris Hedges. Where does that leave me?

For those who don't know, Eagleton is a Marxist literary critic of Irish Catholic extraction at Oxford University, a former student of the great Raymond Williams. I believe I tried to read one of his books, perhaps his attack on postmodernism, but for various reasons never finished it either; it might have been the one I'd seen reviewed in The New York Times, where Eagleton evidently raved about the barbarians at the gates of academe with their dirty French philosophies. He's cute, but cute don't get the job done.

The more I read, the more it seemed that Eagleton is not really an atheist, but a Christian. He says not, though he mentions having been influenced by liberation theology in his college days. Still, he writes (or rather talks -- the book was originally a set of lectures, very chatty in tone) like a fighting liberal priest who's not afraid to talk to the young. For instance:

There is a document that records God's endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion, known as the Bible. God the Creator is not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design that will impress his research grant body no end, but an artist, and an aesthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view but simply for the love and delight of it. ... The Creation is the original acte gratuit [8].

Eagleton's existentialist roots are showing here. But, of course, the Bible is not a "document" but an anthology of documents; if it depicts Yahweh's "endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion", it also shows him setting up that organized religion he's struggling with, right down to the dimensions of the Tabernacle and, eventually, the Temple; that's when his engineering side comes into play. Sometimes he pretends he's not interested in sacrifices (the sweet smell of burning fat in which he delights), but at other times he complains that the cattle are scrawny, blemished, and not numerous enough. (As I've said before, the Bible is the ultimate source of the Borscht Belt joke about the food here being terrible -- and such small portions.) He's not even averse to sacrificing the occasional virgin. And overall there's the pity party for Yahweh, poor little guy, he gets no respect, sometimes it gets him down.

The world thus belongs to that exceedingly rare class of objects which, in a way that would have delighted the heart of Oscar Wilde, exist entirely for their own sake and for no drearily utilitarian end -- a category which along with God includes art, evil, and humanity. It is part of the world's sharing in God's own freedom that it works all by itself. Unlike George Bush, God is not an interventionist kind of ruler [9].

Just to nitpick, it doesn't sound like that class of non-utilitarian objects is really all that "rare," since it would have to include everything in the world as well as the world itself. But how do you like that timely bit about George Bush? However, Yahweh as depicted in that "document" the Bible is very much an interventionist kind of ruler, quite hands-on in fact: walking around the Garden of Eden at dusk, kicking out Adam and Eve when they disobey, killing everything in the world because he was peeved at humanity, visiting Abraham and opening Sarah's womb, sending plagues on Egypt, rejecting Saul in favor of David, and neither last nor least, sending his Son to die on the cross for the sins of humanity. To this day he's cooking up tsunamis and earthquakes, famines and viruses, just to keep us on our toes. The doctrine of Yahweh as not just creator but sustainer of the world is found in the Bible as well as in later theologians. With his Thomist background (and he has quite a boner for Aquinas), Eagleton must know all this, but he's got all this fine blarney to unreel for our entertainment.

For theology, science does not start far back enough -- not in the sense that it fails to posit a Creator, but that does not ask questions such as why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intelligible to us. Perhaps these are phony questions anyway; some philosophers certainly think so. But theologians, as Rowan Williams has argued, are interested in the question of why we ask for explanations at all, or why we assume that the universe hangs together in a way that makes explanation possible [13].

Funny, in my experience it has been precisely philosophers who asked such questions, including philosophers of science. The theologians I've read usually don't write about such interesting stuff, they're usually trying to reconcile the Bible with Plato or Aristotle or Heidegger or Charles Schulz. In general, Eagleton seems to talk about "theologians" when he means "philosophers," but it sounds like he's still stuck in the era of logical positivism, when a clique of mostly British philosophers did claim that such questions were bogus, and that was around the time when Eagleton was in college. But things have changed since then.

The morality Jesus preaches is reckless, extravagant, improvident, over-the-top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents: forgive your enemies, give away your cloak as well as your coat, turn the other cheek, love those who insult you, walk the extra mile, take no thought for the morrow [14].

While Eagleton was revisiting the Sermon on the Mount, he should have noticed the bits about cutting off your arm and plucking out your eye to avoid sin, lest your whole body be cast into Hell. But that's not quite compatible with Jesus the Warm Fuzzy Hippie, I guess, so he leaves it out, along with becoming a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven and observing every jot and tittle of the Torah, the lesser commandments along with the greater.

Jesus probably preached this kind of ethic because he thought the end of the world was just around the corner, which turns out to have been rather a grave miscalculation. His sense of history seems to have been a little awry. ... Even so, it is not quite the kind of morality one associates with chartered accountants or oil executives [15].

Oh, that's all right then. But I don't go along with the bogus loaded alternatives Eagleton posits here: either take no thought for the morrow, or become an oil executive. That's the sort of fake choices I associate with religious believers, though I admit they're not the only ones guilty of it. And it is entertaining when Eagleton quotes Hitchens fuming like a Dickensian miser or an American Teabagger about Jesus' ethic: "The analogy of humans to lilies ... suggests -- along with many other injunctions -- that things like thrift, innovation, family life, and so forth are a sheer waste of time". But it doesn't appear that Eagleton is any more interested than Hitchens is in actually emulating Jesus in this respect; he's not living on pure thoughts and the kindness of strangers, he's a hardworking professor and a prolific author (forty or so books, and recently a visiting faculty at Notre Dame University). He goes on (and on and on):

Because God is transcendent -- that's to say, because he doesn't need humanity, having fashioned it just for the fun of it -- he is not neurotically possessive of us [15].

Really? We're talking about Yahweh here, remember, Yahweh the jealous god, his name is Jealous, and you shall have no god but Yahweh, or he shall strip you naked before your lovers, et cetera, et cetera. "Neurotically possessive" is just how I'd describe the god of that "document" the Bible. Like most theologians and religious laymen, Eagleton makes up a god he likes to think about, and projects it onto the Bible, even though his fantasy clashes in many obvious ways with the picture of Yahweh most readers find there.

Eagleton does say in the Preface that he's just trying "to 'ventriloquize' what I take to be a version of the Christian gospel relevant to radicals and humanists[;] I do not wish to be mistaken for a dummy" (xii). But since he accuses 'Ditchkins' and their ilk of "writ[ing] off a worthless caricature of the real [New Testament], rooted in a degree of ignorance and prejudice to to match religion's own" (xi), he's casting the first stone in a glass house. Except that Eagleton clearly isn't ignorant; he's just disingenuous.

Eagleton claims that

the Jewish and Christian religions have much to say about some vital questions -- death, suffering, love, self-dispossession, and the like -- on which the left has for the most part maintained an embarrassed silence [xii].

I don't think so -- that is, I don't think that the left has "for the most part" been silent on such issues; it's exactly the left that has dealt with them in ways that made sense to me; and I don't agree that the Jewish and Christian religions have much to say about those vital questions. Or rather, they do have a lot to say, but what they have to say is usually inhumane, irrelevant, and downright wrong. Sure, some Jewish and Christian writers have contributed useful ideas to my worldview, but they were not, as far as I can tell, representative of their faiths. (Most of the numerous Jewish writers I've learned from were aggressively non-observant.) Which reminds me, at one point Eagleton tries to adduce Spinoza as a "key theorist of toleration ... a Jewish rationalist who was also a mystic" (18), conveniently neglecting the facts that Spinoza's god was not the God of the Hebrew Bible, and that Spinoza was thrown out of the synagogue for his heterodox views.

Finally, there's this popular evasion:

For it is of course always easier to buy one's rejection of a belief system on the cheap, by (for example) triumphantly dismissing a version of Christianity that only seriously weird types, some of them lurking sheepishly in caves to ashamed to come out and confront the rest of us, would espouse in the first place [5].

You know what I'm talkin' about -- Christians love to complain that critics of the faith are either attacking a totally fabricated straw man, or are stereotyping all Christians on the basis of a few bad apples like Fred Phelps or that guy in the Vatican in the pointy hat. The trouble with Christianity as far as I'm concerned lies in the New Testament itself (though it can of course always be reinterpreted to mean whatever one likes) and in versions of Christianity that are held by millions of ordinary believers. Dismissing them as "seriously weird types" is a popular way to try to distract critics from the real problems, but it's 1) dishonest and 2) doesn't work with me. I always ask the people who use this tactic which version of Christianity I should go by, then, and that's how I developed my rejection of that belief system -- not on the cheap, but by doing quite a bit of study, more than most Christians do. So I can say pretty confidently that the version of Christianity that Eagleton is "ventriloquizing" here is espoused only by a few seriously weird types, not lurking in caves but, like Eagleton, in Oxford and the Notre Dame campus. It's based on a shamelessly selective reading of the Bible generally and of the gospels in particular, which means that Eagleton is relying on the ignorance of his audience and their readiness to believe the best about Christianity, whatever the facts may be.

The Truth Lies Somewhere In Between

Spheres of Influence

Returning to The Pure Society -- Pichot touched on a question that has been on my mind for some time now, ever since I read Stephen Jay Gould's Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (Ballantine, 1999). I've read most of his other books, and Rocks of Ages was the first I couldn't finish. Gould argued for a division of spheres of influence between science and religion, for what he called "non-overlapping magisteria" or NOMA. He actually drew a parallel between this proposed division and the infamous division of the New World into Spanish and Portuguese spheres by the Treaty of Tordesillas, which overrode Pope Alexander VI's bull granting most of the land to Spain. In both cases, there are other claimants to the territories involved, not least the people who are living in them to begin with.

Gould first declared that moral and social questions were the proper sphere of religion, and explanation of the universe was the proper sphere of science. As long as each magisterium kept to its knitting, all would be well. But then he backtracked, admitting that religion hadn't done such a good job with moral questions, and dropped the matter. The author of The Mismeasure of Man might have done better to point out just how badly science had done when it ventured into the moral and social arena.

Richard Dawkins attacked Gould in his normal manner, what Pichot calls the "idiotic hawker" (70) style, in The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). To some extent I agree with Dawkins, as when he asks why religion should be consulted at all:

I suspect that both astronomers were, yet again, bending over backwards to be polite: theologians have nothing worthwhile to say about anything else; let's throw them a sop and let them worry away at a couple of questions that nobody can answer and maybe never will. Unlike my astronomer friends, I don't think we should even throw them a sop, I have yet to see any good reason that theology (as opposed to biblical history, literature, etc.) is a subject at all.

Similarly, we can all agree that science's entitlement to advise us on moral values is problematic, to say the least. But does Gould really want to cede to religion the right to tell us what is good and what is bad? The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free license to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway? The one in which we happen to have been brought up?

As I already pointed out, Gould had backtracked on the advisability of letting religion pronounce on moral and social questions. One might also ask, though, why anyone would ask Dawkins's advice on morality or any other matter. (Of course "theology" is a subject, if an eminently dismissible one; the idiotic hawker is letting his rhetoric run away with him, as usual.) His discourse on social matters, which has been abundant, is no better than that of "religion" (as though religion were a coherent body of discourse), notable for its incoherence when it isn't just good old-fashioned scientific racism.

I was even more startled when Michael Shermer declared in his The Science of Good and Evil (Holt, 2005, page 6):

Most people don’t go to church to hear an explanation for the origin of the cosmos and life (and if they did, and they knew something about the findings of modern science, they would be dismayed to be told that the Genesis myth of a six-day creation less than ten thousand years ago was to be taken literally). Instead, most folks go to socialize with like-minded friends, neighbors, and colleagues to contemplate the meaning of their lives and life and to glean moral messages from the homilies presented in stories, myths and anecdotes of the knotty problems that life presents to us all. To date science – even scientism – has had little to do or say in this social mode, …

As long as religion does not make quasi-scientific claims about the factual nature of the world, then there is no conflict between science and religion.

Why doesn’t this reassure me? The avoidance of turf wars between two vicious gangs doesn’t necessarily make a better world.

I am still boggled by Shermer's claim that science has had little to do or say in this social mode. As Pichot's book shows, this is completely false, though I knew that long before I'd read Pichot. Shermer lets the cat out of the bag when he says a few pages later (9), "As such, evolutionary ethics is a subdivision of a larger science called evolutionary psychology, which attempts a scientific study of all social and psychological human behavior." Evolutionary psychology is the current alias of sociobiology, the main intervention of "science -- even scientism" into the "social mode."

Pichot says it better (341):

Against these temptations and attempts, it has to be reasserted that the universality of human rights is not based on the genetic identity of the human species. Such a notion leads straight to the differentiation of social and political rights as a function of variations in the genome – whether these are racial variations or not. It is not up to biology to lay down the law, to make decisions of a political and social order, whether on matters of race or of ‘genetic correctness’.

As we have explained, there are two quite distinct social uses of biology … On the one hand, there are uses, such as Pasteurianism, that are essentially technical, and these are perfectly acceptable and even desirable. On the other hand, there are uses, such as those made of genetics and Darwinism, that claim the right (or even the obligation) to intervene in the social-political order and modify this to make it correspond to a [342] supposedly natural order – which in reality is more like an order of profitability. This second category of social uses is totally unacceptable.

In these matters of society and politics, geneticists have nothing to say; it is up to political philosophers to make comments and recommendations. As these latter keep silent and abandon the field to biologists, which they certainly should not do, I shall attempt, for better or worse, to step into their place and maintain that, although the objective physical and intellectual qualities of individuals may be different – whether this difference is hereditary or acquired – this does not affect these individuals in their essential being, because they cannot be reduced to a set of objective qualities. Persons are not objects, ‘human resources’ whose profitability or contribution to progress is to be measured. In this respect, they are neither unequal nor different; they are in fact incomparable. And it is because they are incomparable that they are equal, in an equality that is based neither on measurement nor on comparison, but on an equality of dignity and right. Biological criteria have no place here.

Of course, we mere humans needn't defer to political philosophers either...

Spheres of Influence

Topics for Further Research: Religulous

Last night I was browsing in my neighborhood video store while Bill Maher's Religulous was playing on the display set. The segment I overheard excited my interest in only a negative way, though: Maher was questioning some Christian believer on Jesus' credentials as a deity. He mentioned that all around "the Mediterranean" for a thousand years before the Christian era, gods had shared certain traits and experiences. Krishna, for example, according to Maher, had been hanging around the Mediterranean for a thousand years before Christ, and was also a carpenter. The Persian god Mithras was around the Mediterranean for a thousand years before Christ, was born on December 25, died and rose from the dead on the third day. Maher mentioned a couple of other examples of gods from the Mediterranean who were also born on December 25, died and rose on the third day, and were born to virgins.

Or something. I promise I'll watch the damn movie soon and take notes. But what I heard last night indicated serious problems with Maher's polemic. Where did he get his "facts," I wonder? I'm not an expert on Hinduism, but I know a little and did some quick checking, and I can't find that Krishna was thought of as a carpenter. It's certain, however, that Krishna was never part of the Mediterranean pantheons -- he's an Indian god, from a good distance away from the Mediterranean.

Numerous gods, especially those associated with the sun, were said to have been born on December 25, around the time of the winter solstice when the days start getting longer and the sun 'conquers' winder darkness. Jesus acquired some sun-god traits as Christianity assimilated itself to Roman paganism, just as he acquired a priesthood and other accoutrements of Roman religion, and that may be why he was assigned a birthday in common with Dionysos, Apollo, and even Zeus. Wikipedia says,

According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, the date of creation was considered to be on March 25^th. The early Christian writer Sextus Julius Africanus (220 A.D.) thought this dating plausible and suggested that Christ became incarnate on that date. According to Julius, since the Word of God became incarnate from the moment of his conception, this meant that, after nine months in the Virgin Mary's womb, Jesus was born on December 25^th.

Whether his followers borrowed the date from other gods or by speculation about the date of Creation, December 25th didn't become Jesus' birthday until a century so after the New Testament was written. The biblical writers didn't even know the year he was born, let alone the day.

I'm skeptical about the other similarities Maher ascribed to Mithras. It's not certain that Mithras had been around for a thousand years when Jesus was born. Mithras' cult left behind no written material, unlike the early Christian churches, so everything you hear about Mithras is speculation based on the imagery -- sculpture and murals -- in temples devoted to his worship. Some modern scholars have speculated that he was born on December 25, but I will have to see what basis these guesses have. One of my readers pointed me to claims that the cult of Mithras, like that of Jesus, involved drinking the blood of the god, but this turned out not to be true: Mithras killed a bull, and the blood of a bull was used was used in the Mithraic initiation rite, but it's not clear that the initiate drank the blood. (In the Christian cult, the god's literal blood isn't consumed, unless you consider Jesus to be a wine god.)

Other gods, like the Egyptian Osiris, died and were resurrected, but usually in different ways than Jesus, whose story was rather historically specific. Osiris, for example, in some versions was murdered by his brother Set and brought back to life by his devoted wife/widow Isis. If it was so normal for gods to die and rise, why did the early Christians encounter such derision for saying that theirs had done so? A lot of people work hard to find correspondences between Christianity and other religions, but many of the supposed parallels collapse under examination.

Maher was more confident in the claims he made than the facts warrant. It doesn't look like he's in any position to criticize Christian believers for gullibility or carelessness about the truth. I'll watch Religulous soon and post more about it.

Topics for Further Research: Religulous

Stokin' Rage

David Ehrenstein is, like, totally pissed off, and I don't blame him. (Photo above ripped off from his Fablog post, I don't know where he got it.) That doesn't mean I don't have some disagreements with him, of course.

At this point I'm not even sure how substantial my disagreements are. So let's have a look; like some writer (Saul Bellow?) once said, I won't know how I feel about it until I write about it.

Ehrenstein is pissed off about the passage of California's Proposition 8. I've been mildly surprised by how un-pissed off I am by it. The enshrinement of discrimination based on sexual orientation in a state constitution is a disturbing development, after all. Maybe it's because I didn't choose this battle, and for years I've been listening to respectability-minded Homo-Americans yammer that we shouldn't do things that upset straights, like having Gays Gone Wild Pride Marches with half-nekkid people simulating intercourse in public and stuff like that. The thing is, the issue of same-sex marriage upsets straight people too. If we should be modest in public because of Teh Str8, then maybe we shouldn't try to get married either, because of Teh Str8. But when it gets down to it, advocates of marriage don't really care about upsetting straights -- they care about being upset themselves. Many gay people also object, for public-relations purposes at least, to public displays of buttcheek or mammary gland, on their own account.

But having written that, I must qualify it, since I know perfectly well that not all gay proponents of same-sex marriage want respectability -- many just want the legal perks that go with a civil marriage. They themselves may get down and dirty in Pride Parades, or at least know that it is possible to blow drunken kisses from a float and still want to file a joint tax return or share Social Security benefits. For such people, the issue is one of equal rights, though as I've said before, it's really one of equal access to special rights given to couples who register with the State, which I'm not sure I want to support, let alone advocate, since it turns singles or unmarried couples into second-class citizens.

What comes closest to bothering me seriously about the success of Proposition 8, aside from the aforementioned enshrinement of discrimination in the California State Constitution, is the ineffectual campaign waged against it, which apparently was run by the usual bunch of human-services professionals and diversity managers who've sunk gay-rights causes before. One problem with these professionals is that they are evidently most comfortable in a corporate environment, where people have few if any rights and where they can be coerced into going along with a diversity agenda. Anyone who's worked in such an environment will know the drill: posters, videos, employee training sessions, etc., with disciplinary action as backup. That's not an approach that's going to work very well to persuade voters in the voting booth. (It doesn't even work very well in GLBT corporate environments like large urban community centers, as Jane Ward shows in her book Respectably queer: diversity culture in LGBT activist organizations [Vanderbilt, 2008].)

Anyway, back to David E. First he tears into the openly gay director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Kinsey) for saying in the L. A. Times:

“If you’re asking, ‘Do we take discrimination against gays as seriously as bigotry against African Americans and Jews?’ . . . the answer is, ‘Of course we do.’ But we also believe that some people, including Rich, saw Prop. 8 not as a civil rights issue but a religious one. That is their right. And it is not, in and of itself, proof of bigotry.”

As Ehrenstein says, "we" (it's unclear who "we" are) don't take antigay bigotry as seriously as bigotry against African Americans and Jews. (Hell, racism is still alive and well in white America, including white gays.) But then Ehrenstein goes on to say,

To speak of their hatred as a “right” is unacceptable. More imp[o]rtant you would do well to keep in mind that all homophobia is premised on the perception of our being weak and powerless and therefore neither willing or able to fight back.

I've already had some things to say about "hate." Both Condon and Ehrenstein are wrong. Bigotry is not "hatred," contrary to Ehrenstein, but even hatred is a "right." (Our Christian opponents claim that they love us while hating our sin; gay Christians don't even seem to go that far, though they also love to wave the word "love" around.) According to the principles of free speech and press, people aren't obliged to say or write or do only loving things -- indeed, these freedoms guarantee our right to be outraged and offended -- or else Ehrenstein's expression of fury would itself be endangered. Or "themselves" -- his blog often vents his rage at various targets, often quite hatefully, which is fine with me. But he feels, as do his opponents on the Right, that his expression of wrath and condemnation is just and righteous: it's okay when he does it, because he's the Good Guy; but it's not okay when they do it, because they're the Bad Guys. It's very dangerous to let the state decide whose righteous wrath is proper, and whose improper. I myself don't have any faith that it would decide in my favor.

But Condon is also wrong. The word "bigot" first was used in contexts of religious disagreement, centuries ago, and most liberal Americans nowadays, at least, would agree that it would be bigotry to disenfranchise Roman Catholics or Presbyterians or Quakers or any other religious group because their beliefs or practices violated the religious standards of the majority. Yet in the past, such persecution was considered not only proper, but an obligation. And because of the respectability of religion, and the feeling that many believers have that religion should rule all aspects of their lives, racial and other forms of bigotry have been justified by religion. American white supremacists of the 1950s and 1960s had Biblical arguments to support their opposition to racial integration. (Those arguments were dubious, selective and self-serving, of course, but so are everybody's Biblical arguments. Believers don't base their positions in scripture: they pick and choose from scripture to support the positions they already hold for other reasons. [That's a slight oversimplification too -- sometimes people are struck by a scriptural passage that contradicts their prejudices, but I'd bet that on some level they were already ambivalent about their positions, which are based in real-world experience as much as in theology.]) Hence the racially-segregated Christian "academies" established in large areas of the US to evade school desegregation. Would a nice liberal like Bill Condon care to claim that these white racists saw Brown v. Board of Education and the 1964 Civil Rights Bill "not as a civil rights issue, but a religious one"? I rather doubt it. But they did. As was their right. It was also their right to build their segregated Christian schools, but not to demand to be subsidized with tax exemptions. They just did not have the right to impose their views on others, or to demand that their views be respected.

The occasion for Ehrenstein's tirade was the resignation, under pressure, of the director of a nonprofit music theatre in Sacramento, who had donated (as an individual, not officially) a chunk of money to the Yes on 8 campaign; and the calls for the removal of the Mormon head of the Los Angeles Film Festival, who'd also donated to the campaign. Condon was being critical of these developments, but as I have explained, his arguments don't work. Even if their support for Proposition 8 was based solely in their religious beliefs, it is still bigotry when it attacks the rights of other people (assuming for the sake of argument that marriage is a right). The real question, then, is whether people should lose their jobs because of their religious beliefs, no matter how loathsome those beliefs are.

The answer is probably no, and I'd guess that both of these men would have a case under civil rights law that they were discriminated against for their religious beliefs. (The Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in employment because of an "individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin".) Boycotting Cinemark Theaters because its CEO donated to Yes on 8, whatever his reasons, is okay, just as it would be okay to boycott the LA Film Festival because it's run by a bigot. (Back to the corporate environment, though: if a corporation fires an officer because his or her religious beliefs caused the corporation to lose money through boycotts, that is probably legal under the strict letter of the law -- as would firing an officer who took any other public stand that hurt profits, like supporting gay rights.)

"We’ve taken names and we’re kicking ass", Ehrenstein crows in boldface. I've seen that tone of type before. It's about power (or not being "powerless", as Ehrenstein says), not about right or wrong. Whether I like it or not, disputes like this often come down to who wields the power -- but as the passage of Prop 8 showed, it's not obvious that gays do wield the power in California. And both sides can play that game, as "The Vote Yes Crowd Turns to Judicial Intimidation" and opponents of same-sex marriage take names and prepare to kick judicial ass, "threatening to lead a statewide recall against any and all justices on the CA Supreme Court that vote to overturn the outcome of the referendum (and thus re-legalize same-sex marriage in California)." Joe Moag, the writer of that piece, blusters and fusses about "hate" and other usual suspects, but that's how it goes in politics, and I'm not nearly as sure as Moag that the recall efforts would fail.

Next, Ehrenstein reprimands producer Christine Vachon for saying that she "can’t quite stomach the notion that you fire somebody because of what they believe. It doesn’t feel right to me." Ehrenstein ripostes,

Well being attacked by those who claim a Big Invisible Bi-Polar Daddy-Who-Lives-in-The-Sky is the ultimate moral authority and has condemned me to death, doesn’t feel right to me and a great many others. What also doesn’t feel right, Christine, is when you say

“Many straight people really don’t understand it’s a civil rights issue. . . We didn’t do our job well enough. We need to do it better.”

Honey I’m 61 years old and have been talking to straight people all my life. If they don’t understand by now they can go fuck themselves.

It’s really just that simple.

Hm, I knew I'd seen that tone of type before -- it's typical of right-wing, especially Christian right-wing tract writers, from the use of boldface down to the sloppy punctuation and the onward-Christian-soldiers braggadocio. You know, David, I largely agree with you. But many of the opponents of Prop 8 also believe in a Big Invisible Bi-Polar Daddy Who Lives in the Sky; just look at that one sign in your photo, "Would Jesus Spend Tax Free Dollars to Spread Hate and Injustice?" No one knows what Jesus would do, and anyone who claims to know is a liar, whether they're Yes on 8 or No on 8. I feel fairly sure that a sign like that isn't going to sway a voter in favor of same-sex marriage, any more than celebrity talking-heads in commercials or outspending the opposition is going to do it by itself. Christine Vachon is right. I'm almost as old as you are, David, and I know how frustrating it is that straights haven't understood yet, just as it's frustrating that after an even longer time, men don't understand and whites don't understand. And getting people fired for their beliefs isn't going to work -- it hasn't worked on the gay movement, after all. It only creates martyrs. It may make you feel better for a few minutes, but the bigots will find other jobs and the California Constitution will still be amended to make queers into second-class citizens.

It may be that what doesn't feel right to Christine Vachon and what doesn't feel right to you cancel each other out. Your fury seems to have blinded you to that. (Oh dear, someone stop me before I say that two wrongs don't make a right.) This has nothing to do with religion -- many atheists are just as obsessed with getting even as Christians. ("Forgive your enemies" has hardly won much lip service among Christians, let alone observance, but then the gospels' Jesus looked forward to casting his enemies into Hell anyway, so they haven't had a good example to go by.) It's sheer practical politics to bring about change by grass-roots face-to-face work. That's why the radical gay movement that inspired both of us rejected professionalism and expertise in favor of coming out, not just to other gays but to straights. And you're complaining because we haven't won in 40 years? Not to mention that most gays are still closeted and would rather hire other queers to do the work for them from above, at a safe distance. There's still a lot of work to be done.

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