Three Religions Have This in Common

Fundamentalist Christianity, Fundamentalist Judaism, and Fundamentalist Islam all condemn homosexuality. Their agreement on this point, and most likely a number of other points, does not make them correct. But it does make me wonder why they have this (and presumably quite a few other things) in common.

So here are my thoughts: The molders (and I use that word with much careful consideration, so as to encompass both ancient, historical personages and modern religious leaders) of these religions feel that life needs to be tightly controlled and regulated--presumably by their scriptures and their clergy. So they see life--behavior--as being about a lot of rules, for what we must and (maybe more importantly) what we must not do. What clothes we should wear, how we must wear our hair, what we should (or, more likely, should not) eat. Maybe there is a view of human nature implicit here: we are all wild, savage beasts, and our natures--our lusts and other baser impulses--need control, examination, regulation, corseting.

And what about the people who are drawn to these sorts of religion, who embrace them and gladly follow them? I believe there is a certain personality type that positively likes having a lot of their conduct prescribed. I'm not sure whether this is the same personality type as the "molders" I referred to above, or a complementary type that fits that of the molders like two pieces of a jig saw puzzle.

Well, it's usually believed in modern, western democracies that people should believe and observe what they want. That's fine; but too often the attitude is, "I don't think such-and-such is right, so I am going to try to prevent you from doing it"--whether it is  homosexuality, abortion, or any of countless things which most of us feel a human being ought to be free to do.

Copyright © 2018

US Supreme Court Ruling on Same-Sex Marriage

It was just announced today: in what the news inevitably would call a "historic" decision, the US Supreme court has ruled that state bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional, and also that a state must recognize a same-sex marriage performed in another state.

I was a bit surprised at this decision--even though many pundits had said that it was a likely outcome--because the current makeup of the Court is quite conservative, with the likes of Justice Antonin Scalia who, to my way of thinking, has often shown himself to be extremely conservative (not surprisingly, Scalia was one of the four justices who dissented from the majority decision).

There are those who say that this is "redefining" marriage, and that marriage is a thousands-of-years-old institution. To that I'd like to reply that marriage was "redefined" in 1967, in the famous Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia, which ended bans on inter-racial marriage.

There was a time, maybe 30 years ago, when I did not advocate gay marriage. My position was, "Why should we try to ape heterosexual institutions?" Well, I have long since changed my mind because now I recognize that permitting us (gay people) to marry is to validate our relationships and our love. It is a big step toward permitting us to feel that we are equal members of society, rather than in many ways second-class citizens.

Of course this decision will not go down well with some people. Given that some prejudices run strong in some areas or among some people, and given how gun-happy America seems to be, my fear is that, in one of the "Bible Belt" states, such as Texas, Mississippi, or Alabama, two people of the same sex getting married might get shot while they are trying to "tie the knot."

Also, those same states will find ways to drag their feet and otherwise avoid issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, just as for 150 years they have evolved a repertoire of ways to keep African-Americans from voting. It seems that prejudice--what they'd call preserving their way of life--can spawn a lot of ingenuity.

Copyright (c) 2015

A New Archbishop for Chicago

Just now, our local (Chicago, Illinois, USA) television concluded the broadcast of the installation ceremony of a new Roman Catholic archbishop for Chicago. For those who care, his name is Blase Cupich and he had been the bishop of Spokane, Washington. More important, he is expected to further the policies and attitudes of Pope Francis.

 

I'd like to share some thoughts and reflections on this event.

I am not a Catholic nor even a Christian, but who the local Roman Catholic archbishop currently happens to be still might affect me. Who the archbishop happened to be at the time undoubtedly affected my Jewish ancestors in Europe as it could be a matter of whether they, as Jews, would be persecuted or, more likely, how vigorously they would be persecuted. (I find, more and more, that when I think about cathedrals or the Catholic Church I think about the persecution of Jews by their Christian neighbors for nearly 2000 years.)

And even today, I can still be affected by who currently is in power in the Roman Catholic Church because, if the Church preaches anti-gay prejudice, that has the potential to stir up those who hear such words and incite them to anti-gay prejudice and even anti-gay violence which I could be the victim of. Also, the Church has been influential in opposing anti-gay discrimination laws and same-sex marriage at the legislative level.

So, who the leaders of the Catholic Church are has the potential to affect me personally in several ways, and I am glad that the current pope and similarly his appointee, the Archbishop of Chicago, show signs that they are going to be more liberal, more human and more humane.

Copyright © 2014

The Bible and Gay Marriage

Yesterday, a favorable vote in the House of the Illinois legislature meant that Illinois will become the fifteenth state (plus the District of Columbia) to permit same-sex (or "gay") marriage.

I am very happy about this, but it brings to mind the debate, which has occurred many times and took place here recently. That is, some religious folks and conservatives have argued against gay marriage and, at other times and places, other measures to ensure or enhance rights of gay people by pointing to their Bibles.

My personal argument against these people and their point of view on this subject is that we in the United States live in a secular society, not in a theocracy. If it were Muslims who wanted to blur the line between church and state by imposing Islamic sharia law (as have, for example, the Taliban in Afghanistan), there would be a loud outcry. But apparently it matters whose religion is the source of the views and proscriptions that some would like to incorporate into the civil law.

Another example of mine: Jewish people (in the US and of course elsewhere), if they are observant Jews, believe that one should not eat pork. Now suppose that I, as a Jew, argued in the legislature that since I believe that eating pork is a sin (and the Bible—Leviticus—says, I believe, that the eating of pork is an "abomination"), then no one in the US should be permitted by law to eat pork. I'd love to hear the screams and shrieks of those African-American ministers who fought against gay marriage in Illinois when their pork chops are taken away!

And, round about the year 1850, the Bible was pointed to as not only permitting, but positively endorsing, slavery.

A column today by Neil Steinberg in the Chicago Sun-Times had the same idea but he used different examples. He said that if you stone your daughter for speaking disrespectfully toward you, it won't serve you as a defense to point to your Bible. Nor can you perform a sacrifice in your driveway and point to your Bible as permitting it or requiring it. As Steinberg said, "That battle has been lost."

Just as 150 years after the slavery debate our views have changed, and no one would try to defend slavery, maybe in another 10 or 15 decades people will look back  to these times and see that it was ridiculous to point to the Bible as justifying the inferior treatment of gay people.

Copyright © 2013.

Why Do People Believe What They Believe?

I often read, and write comments on, the online news site Huffington Post. I am moved to write replies to people who express ideas counter to mine—such as "homosexuality is a sin (abomination, etc.)."  This may result in a back-and-forth dialog in which they in turn try to refute what I said.

Of course I have to suspect that no one convinces anyone. Neither they nor I am there to have my mind changed. Nor, generally, do we behave with open minds. So much of what we read only reinforces opinions we already hold. Liberals read liberal magazines, conservatives read conservative magazines. That's called "preaching to the choir." So we hear (or read) what we already believe because that's what we want to hear.

But as a thoughtful person—forgive a little patting-of-self-on-back—I wonder why people believe what they believe.

Often people have received their ideas, to put it simply: from parents, teachers, preachers. Of course that only begs the question, by moving it up, or back, to someone else, and then we have to ask why they believe. . . ad infinitum.

As to receiving ideas from one's teachers: it is commonly believed that education makes one more liberal. I'd agree, but would hasten to add that it depends on the kind of education. The business school student who reads Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman is going to have different ideas than the English major who reads John Steinbeck and Kurt Vonnegut.

Many people receive the ideas, attitudes, values, beliefs, etc., that are prevalent in their environment: their family, culture, church, etc. A great majority of people are not likely ever to doubt or question their beliefs. If and when people do question what they (and their family, etc.) have believed, it's often the result of something occurring. Something has occurred to shake a person's faith in God. A mother learns that her child is gay and starts to question the condemnations of homosexuality that she has heard all her life. The son of slave owners comes to feel that blacks deserve better treatment than they are receiving under the system of slave ownership.

There are characteristics of the individual at work sometimes. Those few people who question the beliefs received from their parents may possess a certain character--perhaps something like autonomy, or skepticism; at any event, what we might call an independent cast of mind. And, some people are more thoughtful, more "sensitive." This we might call personality, character, whatever. And they'd do well to have some courage, too, because they are going to be "on the outs" with their families, and that can be a difficult row to hoe.

I think people with a certain psychological makeup or personality type are more likely to be conservative, and there probably is something more or less parallel in the making of a liberal. And probably there is simply a certain mystery to it all.

Sometimes it's a whole culture that undergoes a conversion to new ideas. I was just reading some interesting ideas about why Hitler was as powerful and influential as he was. I think that's an interesting question. It's often been pointed out that here was a cultured nation, arguably the leader of the world in many fields of scholarship and the arts, that allowed itself to be led into an insane war and also to commit some of the worst atrocities in human history.

But maybe that was not so much a case of changing of minds as just stirring up and exploiting existing attitudes. The article on Hitler's influence said that the German people were already predisposed to anti-Semitism. But it did not go too much into the nationalistic ideas that had prevailed in Germany for a long time, nor Germany's wounded national pride as the result of its defeat in World War I and the humiliation (as they saw it) of the Treaty of Versailles. It's clear that all these things were going on.

Religious conversion might be an interesting case. If you look at they way in which many European cultures became converted to Christianity, often the king or other ruler was persuaded to convert—and then (certainly not miraculously!) the rest of the country converted, too.

Other times religious evangelizing has targeted individual after individual. One only has to think of missionaries, such as Mormon missionaries, who go door to door. So when this is successful, it is a case of changing people's minds. Christianity sometimes won converts because it promised an afterlife. It might be interesting to figure out what carrot (or stick) the Mormons use to gain converts; I'm neither inclined nor qualified to do this here and now.

So, back to my original question. Sometimes we can see where people's ideas have come from. Then there are the issues of whether and in what circumstances minds do or don't get changed. Sometimes we can see what has gone on. But to put it all in a larger perspective, human behavior is complex and very seldom explained simply.  We've got the science of the behavior of the individual—psychology—and sciences of the behavior of people en masse—sociology, political science, economics. I submit that none of these fields is so far advanced that we thoroughly, completely understand human behavior.

Revised and expanded April 29, 2013

Appendix A, Added April 29, 2013

Okay, now I would like to propose a question for my readers (with some possible answer choices). I pose this as a question put to my readers because, while this blog has, very gratifyingly, been getting a significantly greater readership lately, my postings—which sometimes try to be controversial and provocative—have not been getting any comments.

So, here is my question which at the very least I hope may provide food for thought. Why are conservatives anti-gay? Please feel free to vote with your answer or any other comment.

A. Because, in the sense of "conservative," they want to keep things as they are, and discriminating against gays is the way it's always been.
B. Because they subscribe to a brand of religion which is basically anti-sex.
C. It's their personality type. For example, they are tight-asses or maybe just mean and nasty people.
D. All of the above.
E. Some other reason (please specify).

Copyright © 2013.

African-Americans and Gay People: Have They Got a Lot in Common?

Recently I posted a comment on Huffington Post in which I said that African-American people should be more sympathetic or empathetic with gay people than they are since they are both minorities who have been discriminated against.

There was a reply to my comment in which the writer denied that the two groups should be compared. I have thought of a few reasons why maybe that person is right.

1. It was never illegal to be African-American.

2. It is not illegal for two African-Americans to marry one another nor for African-American couples to adopt children.

3. African-Americans are not told, from the pulpit, that they are sinners, simply because of who they are, or that they are going to hell because they are African-American.

4. No one has claimed that natural disasters such as floods and tornadoes are the result of God punishing America for tolerating African-Americans.

5. African-Americans may have their own bars and so forth, but those bars don't get raided by the police.

Yes, all those things have applied to gay people. And where discrimination in hiring and housing on the basis of race is illegal everywhere, gay people don't have that protection under federal law, so they may be legally discriminated against in some areas.

On the other hand, African-Americans do get called names (as gay people get called faggot) and sometimes are beaten up or even killed for who they are.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

The "Logic" behind Anti-Gay Views

Along with many others who hold conservative views, anti-gay people often are hard-pressed to support their views with good, logical arguments.

Someone else--a frequent poster and commenter on HuffPost (formerly Huffington Post) who has, to my mind, intelligent and progressive views—pointed out that if you ask anti–gay marriage people how or why a same-sex couple getting married will affect them, they typically will simply change the subject. Because they can't show any way in which it would affect them, let alone hurt them.

Similarly and again on HuffPost, I challenged a woman (I think the person in question is female but it's often hard to tell their gender from people's online handles) to answer this question: If being gay is a choice, as she maintained, explain to me why anyone would choose to be gay—when being gay means discrimination in many spheres, being told you're a sinner from the pulpit, and even being physically attacked.

Her reply was that people "choose" to be gay to shirk responsibility or avoid pregnancy.

I assume that the responsibility she refers to means the responsibilities, etc., of being a parent. Well, many gay couples these days—mainly lesbian couples but definitely gay male couples as well—do want to be parents and do so through adoption or other means.

Second, many gay men are in fact married and may have fathered children in those marriages. Particularly among my generation, many gay men got married when they were young. (These marriages sometimes are successful but frequently end in divorce, so I'd say that generally it's not a good idea. Still, in these cases you can't say they have shirked the responsibilities of marriage and/or parenthood.)

As to her other argument, about avoiding pregnancy. That's simply silly. People can (and of course do) avoid pregnancy and conception, both within and outside marriage—and that has absolutely nothing to do with being gay.

So, my point is, press these people to back up their opinions and you get replies that are lame at best, totally nonsensical at worst. I have a feeling that, even as they are saying these things, they know they're not making very good sense. But is that going to make them open their minds? You know my answer to that question. Post a comment if you believe I'm wrong.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

I'm Sick and Tired of Homophobia

It seems that any time the Huffington Post (HuffPost) publishes any article online that relates, no matter how tangentially, to any gay issue (they do have a page called HuffPost Gay Voices, but sometimes gay-related things get posted elsewhere), for some reason all the homophobes come out of the woodwork, very happy to have a platform to express their anti-gay views.

So we hear (over, and over, and over again) that homosexuality is wrong, it's unnatural, it's perverted, it's against Nature and "God's law." So often religion is invoked. I've become firmly convinced that, as a gay man, religion is my enemy.

It makes me truly sad to have to think that homophobia is so widespread. One of these people touched on something very true when he or she said, "They just want to be accepted." I'd put a spin on that in a way that he or she probably did not intend and say, Yes, we gay people would very much like to be able to feel that we were not disliked (let alone hated), rejected, persecuted, discriminated against.

Let me tell you from personal experience that it is a tough row to hoe in life if you belong to any minority—and I belong to at least two or three.

I spend too much time reading and responding to many of those people. Here is what I wrote in reply to one:

There is an old American Indian proverb that says, "Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his moccasins." I only wish that you and others like you would have even a fraction of the humanity that is embodied in that saying.

I am getting very, very tired of you homophobes posting your ranting (and very, very tired) old, bigoted ideas any time there is anything posted on HuffPost that has anything to do with anything gay.

And, as to "abominations" named in the Bible, are you aware that Leviticus also says that you should not eat shellfish, you should not wear garments that have two fibers mixed, and that a woman who is not a virgin on her wedding night should be put to death?

Are we maybe just being a tad selective in what we do and don't point to in the Bible? It's not the Bible, it's just your bigotry.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Reading HuffPost: How Any Liberal and/or Gay Can Get Very Disheartened

I mentioned in an earlier posting that I have been spending time reading articles on AOL/HuffPost, reading other readers' comments, writing my own comments and replying to other comments.

I think I spend too much time doing this and I am resolving to stop doing it, not because of the time I'm spending but because it's too discouraging to read what other people think and say.

For one thing, there are so many conservatives who want to bash Obama and the "libs" (or, one time, "libbs"). They demonstrate the stereotypes and animosity they hold. Of course they are entitled to their opinion, and I must recognize that there are people out there—and even a great many people—who do not or would not agree with some of my ideas. But it's looking like America is getting to be very polarized; there could almost be another civil war, I sometimes think.

Secondly, any time there is an article relating in any way to homosexuality (and HuffPost has a subsection called "Gay Voices"), all the homophobes come out of the woodwork. They are quick to state their opinion that homosexuality is wrong, it's immoral, it's a sin (their Bible tells them that). One woman said thinking about it "makes her skin crawl."

It's a disease, a disorder, it's sick, it's unnatural, it's evil. We've heard all this before. We've been hearing it for many years. And all this anti-gay prejudice is one reason why being gay is still difficult (even though, supposedly, things have gotten better in the last 50 years), and why there is a much higher rate of suicide among gay teens than for non-gay young people in the same age group.

And people will chime in with their disbelief about climate change and their antipathy to illegal immigrants (as I said elsewhere, this usually boils down to "we hate Mexicans").

All in all, I see so much bigotry, ignorance, close-mindedness, belief in misconceptions and discredited ideas. (It is a sad characteristic of human beings that they are capable of believing things that are not so.) And, as I have said before, the rhetoric of the Right often includes asserting things which they even know to be incorrect. As an example, a Right-wing anti-abortion group was actually slapped with a lawsuit for incorrectly asserting that "Obamacare" (as they delight in calling it) includes taxpayer funding of abortion.

I wrote in another blog posting about my overall, philosophical view of humanity and its prospects. I think I have become more pessimistic: I don't think we're much further along than the days when people who were nonconforming or in some way odd were burned as witches.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Male-to-Male Sexual Abuse

Today on AOL there was a news item about an episode of the TV show "Law & Order: SVU," which I have never watched. The article was about the show's dealing with a taboo topic, male-to-male sexual violence. To put that even more bluntly, that would be a man raping another man. Yes, it can happen but it's rare. I think it's more the rarity than the taboo nature which is the reason you don't normally hear about it. (I believe I recall one news item that in fact was in our mainstream newspapers some years ago, about a man who got attacked in a downtown parking garage.)

Anyway, I knew--I just KNEW--that there would be a comment on the article that sought to tar all gay men with the (doubtless new to them) brush! The person wrote something like, "And this is why we need gays in the military?"

The online articles on AOL (which I confess to spending a lot of time reading, these days) normally allow the posting of comments, and replies to others' comments. In this instance I didn't see any provision for writing my rebuttal to that comment, so I'm using my blog as my forum.

As I hope nearly anyone would recognize, that's a ridiculous comment. Gay men do not typically go around raping other men. A large fraction of men raping men undoubtedly goes on in prisons; and it's well known that even that is not a result of the rapists' being gay. Sociologists (or whichever branch of scholarship studies such matters) call that "adventitious homosexuality," meaning that men will turn to other males when they don't have any other sexual outlet available. These men don't consider themselves gay, and once they are out of prison the resort to exclusively heterosexual behavior.

Religious Right and other homophobic types try to blame gay men for child sexual abuse, when statistics have shown, over and over, that the percentage of men abusing girls is much higher than for boys. But those people all too often don't care about facts and prefer to keep repeating the same misconceptions, distortions, and out-and-out lies.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

Ladies, Is Your Husband Gay?

Remember the movie Brokeback Mountain? In it, there were two guys who were married but who ended up having both a sexual and romantic relationship with one another. In one case, the wife caught on, but only after she happened to catch a glimpse of her hubby embracing the other guy.

I thought that, after that movie, a lot of women were going to begin to have anxieties about their own husbands and suspecting that they might be gay. If anyone ever thought that, because a man is married and maybe has children to boot, that he can't be gay—well, that idea has gone the way of the idea of a flat earth.

I once heard a saying, "Married at 20, gay at 30." An awful lot of gay men my age (late 60s and thereabouts) have been married, many formerly and undoubtedly some currently. I've heard it said that, "back then"—that is, when we were younger—they were pressured by family to get married, or they felt it was "the thing to do," or they themselves had not realized their homosexual leanings.

So it was not uncommon for gay men in, say, the 1960s to enter into heterosexual marriages, and certainly that hasn't stopped. A man may not yet recognize his attraction to men; or he may want to "pass" and/or he gets married for the sake of the myriad advantages of, shall we say, doing the majority thing--like even having a political career!

This blog even received a comment from a woman who said she suspected her husband was gay but needed to come out, and she wasn't sure what she could do to help him.

The online magazine Huffington Post has reprinted an article from Christwire.com titled "Nine Signs Your Husband Is Gay." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/18/signs-your-husband-is-gay_n_687160.html#s128442&title=He_Has_A Evidently Christwire is a satirical site, and thus, if taken literally, their "nine signs" would be ridiculous.

But, as with a lot of satire and stereotyping, there may be a germ of truth in those "nine signs." At any rate I think it's very interesting, and doubtless a sign of our post–Brokeback Mountain times, that many modern married women might at least be considering the possibility that they could be married to a man with gay leanings.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Heterosexism in the US in the 1950s

When I was young (and impressionable, which goes without saying)—that is, in the 1950s, my teen years—all the models of love and romance that were held up to a young male in American society were of heterosexual couples. Everywhere one looked, the portrayals were of only heterosexual couples. This was true of songs, movies, musical shows--and books, with the exception of a very few books that still had, basically, "underground" status and which therefore very, very few people had access to or even awareness of. I remember when, here in Chicago, even in this big city, library books with a gay theme were kept not on display but locked away, so that you had to request them from a librarian. Kind of like the embarrassing situation that my fellow teen-age guys had to confront when they wanted to buy condoms, as these also were kept hidden and locked away in the drugstore.

Not only were all the models of romance in movies, etc., of a man and a woman. If you saw a ballet or anything else where there was dancing, it was always a man and a woman who were dancing together--even though that man dancing might actually have been gay and, by summoning up all the acting skills he could muster, had to feign romantic or sexual interest in his partner.

My examples will be from a few songs circa the 1950s. First the song, "There is Nothing Like a Dame," from the Broadway musical show South Pacific—which premiered on Broadway in 1949 and was later made into a movie. Here is a much-abbreviated version of the lyrics to that song (the setting is sailors, etc., on some Pacific island during World War II):

We got sunlight on the sand,
We got moonlight on the sea,
We got mangoes and bananas
You can pick right off the tree,
We got volleyball and ping-pong
And a lot of dandy games!
What ain't we got?
We ain't got dames!

…………

We get letters doused with perfume
We get dizzy from the smell!
What don't we get?
You know darn well!

We have nothin' to put on a clean white suit for
What we need is what there ain't no substitute for...

Any suggestion that of one of the uses (or needs, I should say) for a "dame" is sex is only very subtle here. Such was the morality of the time.

To continue quoting the lyrics of this song:

There is nothin' like a dame,
Nothin' in the world,
There is nothin' you can name
That is anythin' like a dame!

…………..

There ain't a thing that's wrong with any man here
That can't be cured by pullin' him near
A girly, womanly, female, feminine dame!

I get particularly offended by that last part, with its generalization about "any man" who inevitably needs a woman. There is no acknowledgment whatsoever, in this song, of the fact that there might just be some men in the service (and there definitely were!) who had no interest at all in "dames." (Nowadays I imagine a lot of women would object to the use of the term "dames.") Not to mention that, among the chorus boys dressed as sailors who were singing this song, there doubtless was a significant contingent of gay men, who again had to impersonate heterosexuals.

And all libidinous attraction was assumed to be to the opposite gender. Here is a bit of the '50s song, "The Petticoats of Portugal":

There's not a guy alive
Who doesn't thrive
On watching skirts blow free,
Especially the petticoats of Portugal.

Never mind that it would do nothing for this guy nor for hundreds of thousands of people like me: we simply didn't exist, at that time.

Then there was the popular song, "Love and Marriage" (later the theme song of the TV sitcom Married with Children):

Love and marriage,
Love and marriage,
Go together like a horse and carriage.
Dad was told by Mother,
You can't have one without the other.

The message would seem to be that, even for heterosexual couples, if you love one another, ya gotta get married. That should seem silly and maybe even offensive even to straight people! And there's no provision for the possibility that the object of your affection could be someone of the same gender. In the 1950s no one could even conceive of two people of the same sex getting married; and even in 2011, same-sex marriage is still impossible in more than three-quarters of the states of the United States.

So it was easy for me back then, growing up in a smallish town, to believe that I was the only one on Earth who was experiencing an interest in the bodies of other boys.

Since this was a metropolitan area of at least a few hundred thousand people, there probably was at least one gay bar somewhere in the area. But I would not have known about it, and I was too young to visit bars, anyway.

It wasn't until I was in college and studied fields like Sociology that I learned that such a thing as gay bars existed—in big cities. So then I—again like a lot of others—thought not merely that gay people congregated in the larger cities but that they existed only in those large cities.

So the point here is the painfulness of growing up with minority status, made even worse without the benefit of knowing even that others do exist. Accurate representations of any minority sexual interest did not exist because it was a taboo topic.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Equal News Coverage for Celebrity Gay Couples

It seems that celebrity news now carries news about gay couples. I pretty regularly look to see what news stories show on AOL, even though I normally don't look specifically at the "Entertainment" news section.

So today I see (1) an item about George Michael breaking up with his boyfriend, and (2) an item about Ricky Martin spotted vacationing with his boyfriend.

I believe that Americans devote much too much of their attention to celebrity news and gossip. (I mean, these are just people like you and me. My theory is that this celebrity mania stems from the 1930s when the publicity departments of Hollywood studios tried very hard to drum up interest in the lives of their film stars. But I think it's gotten worse and we have more and more magazines, TV shows, etc., with celebrity news.)

Still: While I'm quick to say that I don't think any celebrity news is among the most important of the day's events in the world, still I'm glad to see that maybe gay/lesbian people have become just as worthy of attention as anyone else. That is, as long as it's not done with the sort of tone that it might have been done with at one time--that is, in the day and age when any imputation of homosexuality would have been enough to ruin a celebrity's career.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

A Rant against Conservatives. Part II

This posting will attempt to make two points. First, that conservatives will put forth arguments that they know to be false. Second, I want to look at the idea they often put forth, trying to justify their opposition to any aid to the poor by saying, "I pulled myself up out of poverty, why can't they?"

My painter, last week, among other things, started to say that taxes--his taxes, naturally--go to pay for unemployment compensation. I pointed out that unemployment benefits are funded through an insurance scheme into which employers pay. Turns out he knew that. (In Part I, I mentioned another example of this same guy using something that he probably knew was incorrect in arguing.) Also he said, in so many words, about those bad people who collect unemployment benefits and get food stamps, "Why can't they just go and get a job?" I failed to remind him that jobs, just now, are hard to get. He'd probably insist that anyone who really wants a job can get one.

On the national scene, one Senator Kyle publicly claimed that Planned Parenthood spends 90% of the funding it receives from the government on abortions. When it was pointed out to him that the correct figure actually is 3%, he (or his lackeys) said of his assertion, "That was not intended to be a factual statement." What??? As I think about that, the only "translation" I can make of that absurd statement is, "It was a lie and I knew it at the time."

The myriad organizations that lobby against rights (such as marriage rights or non-discrimination in employment) for gay people very egregiously use false information: half-truths and out-and-out untruths. I think they use this tactic cynically and calculatingly, and know that they're lying. The belief (or simple prejudice) comes first, and then the wide reach to find something to support the belief. (As an aside, a University of Chicago law professor named Martha Nussbaum has said that she beliefs that nearly all anti-gay prejudice has at its base a disgust at the thought of sex acts between two people of the same sex.) Anyway, their tactics work in fund-raising letters. (Sadly, the "other" side may use at least broadly similar, "the-sky-will-fall-unless-you-send-money," tactics in its fund-raising letters.)

Now, my other point. I think a lot of conservatives are your stereotypical up-from-poverty, Horatio Alger* types. One might think that someone who lived amidst poverty or other disadvantage in childhood might have more sympathy for others who have had similar struggles. But it doesn't seem to work that way. It becomes, "If I could do it (get up and out of the ghetto, or whatever), then why can't they?"

Some people are afflicted by poverty. Some by drug or other additions. Some by disabilities or other liabilities. And some people show wonderful success in how they deal with these problems; others do not.

Also, even if you look at, for example, those with the problem of drug or other addiction, it would seem that, even for a single individual, there might be times when they can deal with the problem successfully and times when they cannot. They might go along for months or years before they somehow become ready, willing, and able to change.

I wrote about this once. But, since I personally never have never had to deal with an addiction, I would have liked a person who has done so to tell me more about what had to first change within them before they could make progress in fighting their addiction.

But it's not completely clear that escape from poverty is analogous to shaking off a substance addiction. It might be said, without much of a stretch, that there are external conditions in both cases. It's almost a cliché—and I don't know enough about the subject to know how true this is—that the addict may begin to use drugs regularly to escape from an unbearable reality. However, although poverty is a matter of an individual's or a family's personal pocketbook, there are definitely impoverished neighborhoods, so it seems to be a social, rather than strictly individual matter.

So, our model person in the Horatio Alger scenario says to him- or herself, "I'm living in these awful conditions, and I don't want to live with plumbing that doesn't work (etc., etc.) for my whole life. So I'm going to study hard, get good grades in school, go to college. . . ." I think that, whether it's this case or that of overcoming other sorts of disadvantages, it takes determination and perhaps a whole lot of internal traits, and maybe luck and other external circumstances such as a mentor, a teacher, someone to inspire, encourage, etc.

And it's not a case of some unchanging internal state: the addict may be able to do something--admitting his problem and going to seek treatment--tomorrow but not today. Today but not yesterday.

The more conservative types will say, Anyone can do it, it's just a matter of wanting to. I think this is a more complicated matter than that and needs more thought and maybe study by scholars.

By the way, the painter quoted here (and in Part I) is a nice guy. He's done some things for me with no remuneration. And a lot of conservatives would strike us (or me) as "nice people" if, for example, we met them on a cruise and did not yet know some of their views. Clearly, people can or will be "nice" to people who they know, but they're not benevolent to some people they don't know--"them." I think it's analogous to the fact that small-town Americans are helpful to their neighbors but can be suspicious of strangers. This is not just an American trait, it's a human trait: the business of "we" versus "they" that I have blogged about before.
_____________
* Alger was a nineteenth-century writer—better known at one time than now—who wrote books for juveniles in which the protagonists rose from rags to riches.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

Do We Need to Teach Gay and Lesbian History?

One of our radio stations, which I don't usually listen to, just had a commentator talking—negatively—about a bill in California to introduce the teaching of gay and lesbian history in that state's schools.

There was a phone number for listeners to call with comments. I didn't phone, for a variety of reasons, including my lack of confidence in my ability to organize my thoughts in anything like a persuasive manner while speaking. That plus—this needs to be mentioned--the fact that I stutter.

One of this guy's points was that history largely includes bad guys, like Hitler. So he said, "Okay, if you want to find a gay marauder to include. . . ."

But I thought he missed the point. History and other courses in our schools have been tilted and slanted to favor sort of a majority, history-gets-written-by-the-victors point of view: male, white, Euro-centric, and of course heterosexual. As just one example: We might learn about Jane Addams and Clara Barton. But there were lots of very fine woman painters. How many can you name? Possibly, at most, these three who are very well known: Georgia O'Keefe, Frieda Kahlo, and Mary Cassatt. And it's not a coincidence that two of those are pretty modern; earlier ones never got much attention.

In the last few decades women and African-Americans have become vocal in pointing out how their contributions have often been overlooked or downplayed. It's a similar story with the contributions of countries and civilizations outside of those which, for several hundred years, have conventionally been thought to be in the path of the transmission of civilization from East to West. In other words, it's been Mesopotamia and Egypt, then Greece, Rome, Europe, and the U.S.

As just one little example of how wrong this is: It's been found that bronze smelting and casting was done very early in Vietnam. Is Vietnam and its contributions to world civilization included in our history?

Now, as to gay and lesbian people: In many fields there have been contributions by people who were gay or lesbian. Leonardo, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, E.M. Forster, Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams, and so many more. Their sexual orientation has usually been very deliberately omitted from discussion when these people are discussed in our schools. Forster was not free to publish a homoerotic novel he'd written. Whitman was forced to change the pronouns in his poetry, changing them from talking about love of males to females. When history is thus "cleaned up" or sanitized for consumption by our students, not only is an injustice done but we find ourselves in the business of dispensing half-truths which are masquerading as truths.

So it's just a case of how far we feel we need to go to redress the balance. In a way it's the same issue as with affirmative action: Do minorities who have been overlooked, suppressed, discriminated against, now need special emphasis or consideration? They would not, if they had been getting a fair shake all along. And, your answer to that question might just reveal what your prejudices are.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Gay Men: Closeted, Repressed, and so forth

As readers of this blog who have read my bio know, I am a gay man. In blog postings I think I alluded to that fact once, but I have not posted very much, if anything, specifically on that subject. I guess I haven't wanted to make this a "gay" blog.

Well, I had some thoughts I shared with a friend, and I think I ought to make this more widely available. So, here goes:

As practically anyone knows, a lot of gay men are closeted. (It's very surprising, and incomprehensible to me, that even among older gay men--men my age--there is a percentage who are closeted. I have to wonder who they are hiding their sexuality from; maybe their children.)

Also, among gay men my age, a lot of them are or have been married. I've heard some say that when they were young they were pressured by family to marry and maybe have children as well (as an aside: for a humorous look at that sort of scenario, check out a delightful Mexican film called Doña Herlinda y su Hijo--Doña Herlinda and her son).

And many gay men get married, and perhaps have children, for the advantages--career and otherwise--of "passing." Around here there are a lot of guys who are married and yet are trolling the internet for a connection with a guy. That often makes me angry because I think they are trying to have the advantages of both; seems unfair to me.

Plus, many years ago--probably when I was just coming out and felt a need to find out, Just what is this gay thing, anyway?--I read a book called Society and the Healthy Homosexual, where he talks about the psychological toll of hiding one's sexuality. I tend to be a bit preachy on that subject as a result.

And then there are the men who are even more than just closeted: they even deny their sexual orientation to themselves. Maybe "repressed" would be a better term than closeted. The boyfriend of someone related to me, in my view, is one of those. When my relative first told me about this guy who'd entered her life, describing him, I said, "It sounds to me like he's gay." She said, quite defensively, "He's not gay, I can assure you!" Okay, end of subject. But there are doubtless many guys like this one. If they do ever wake up to their gay leanings, and it comes at a pretty late point in their lives, it can be devastating. Those to whom it happens at an earlier age are more fortunate--totally aside from the fact that guys who come out at a relatively mature age feel that they've "missed" a lot. The reader must surmise what that means.

Update, October 3, 2011
Here is a link to an article on coming out at a late age:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/15/national/main6299584.shtml

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

Parents, Beware! . . .Lest Your Actions Backfire

Sometimes parents' actions, with respect to their children, backfire. And sometimes, I think, the parents deserve it.

When I was a kid, I think I can say that religion was more or less forced down my throat. I was made to go to Hebrew school (two hours a day, after regular public school, four days a week), even though I was terrified of my Hebrew school teachers which caused me stomach aches that landed me in the hospital. But attending Hebrew school had to be done, so that I could have a Bar Mitzvah. (I didn't want to have a Bar Mitzvah, but, in my parents' eyes, how could a boy not have a Bar Mitzvah?) Also, where religion was concerned, I felt I saw hypocrisy in my parents, that they were saying, Do as we say, not as we do.

So I later rejected the ancestral faith pretty completely. I absolutely don't observe it at all--although, to be completely honest, my parents' actions don't get all of the blame for that. But I think my parents richly deserve that outcome.

In another example, when I was a kid I was into photography (I still am). I would use my mother as a photographic subject. So, maybe as a birthday present, my mother gave me a book called How to Photograph Women.

After she gave me the book, my mother discovered that the book had pictures of naked women (I was an adolescent at the time, I believe). Well, one day when I was not around, Mother seized the book—and cut out all the pages with the nude photos.

I think that that's screamingly funny when you consider that I grew up to be gay. I mean, what were the photos supposed to have done to me, make me feel lust for women? Of course I can't say that not having those pictures made me gay; but in hindsight, maybe my mother might have wished that she could have fostered lust for naked women in me.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

Yet Another Homophobe Outed As Gay

If you follow the news, you've heard or read about Bishop Long, of a huge (25,000 member) African-American church in Georgia. This is a man who is a very vocal homophobe, and now he is accused of having had sex with (at latest count) four men from his congregation when they were adolescents.

This is just the latest of a long list. Remember these: Foley, Craig, Haggard? I think there have been several more that I can't recall at the moment.

I have to wonder, when will people stop listening to these people with credence and simply question whether the volume of their rhetoric is in proportion to their desire to cloak their own homosexuality?

Here is an article that is excellent and, in my opinion, gives a very good slant on the issue of homosexuality and the Bible.

http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/opinion-bishop-long-and-whats-long-overduer-for-christians/19645378

Update, August 26, 2011
Yet another instance to add to the list along with Sen. Craig, etc.--just the latest among many: An Indiana state senator, Phil Hinkle, arranged, via Craigslist, a liaison in a hotel room with a very young guy (either 20 or 18). He claims, "I am not gay."

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein

Growing Up Gay 50 Years Ago

This posting represents a departure for Mourning Dove Hill. My profile lets on that I am gay but I have not discussed that or any gay matters in a post. So here goes:

When I was growing up—my teen years were in the 1950s, a time that, strangely, is often romanticized—the word gay was never heard. (I first heard it in 1963, when it was explained to me as a code word, a word that you would slip into a conversation to let the other person know you were gay; and if he understood, of course he was gay too.) The popular culture of the time—songs and so forth—depicted a world in which 100 percent of men were attracted to women. In other words, gays didn't exist. For that reason I, and thousands of other young males growing up in small towns in that era, were able to believe, each of us, that we were the only ones in the whole world who were "different" in that way.

Heterosexual males have 50 percent of the population that they can pursue. (Well, we have to exclude the women who are too young, and I was going to add "and women who are married," but let's not be naïve; that doesn't stop a lot of men.) On the other hand, a gay man has to find a partner among the three or five or whatever percent of the male population who share his sexual orientation. I, like millions of others, learned that the major cities had significant gay enclaves, and so wanted to move to the big city. The pickings are a little better there!

The social conservative/Christian/evangelical community keeps insisting that being gay is a "choice." (Here, and in so many other cases, I have become more and more convinced that they do not really believe what they say. They really just are repelled by the idea of gay sex and will find any reason whatsoever—for instance that it's a choice, or that the Bible proscribes it—to justify a prejudice which at heart is disgust stemming from their sexual puritanism.) If you examine this idea with a modicum of reason, it can't possibly hold up. Why would someone choose to be gay when

1. People like them revile us.
2. It's harder to find a partner among that much smaller population.
3. There might be discrimination in finding a job, etc. In spite of all the progress and nondiscrimination legislation passed in many jurisdictions, it's still a disadvantage to be gay.
4. Gays and lesbians don't have equal rights, including the right to marry their partners (in most jurisdictions); their partners may not be able to visit them in the hospital when they are gravely ill; and their partners don't automatically inherit property or Social Security benefits as do spouses in married heterosexual couples.
5. Many gays and lesbians were raised in, and still wish to be affiliated with, churches that tell them that they are sinners. What damage does this do to one's psyche?
6. It's well documented that GLBT teen-agers are subjected to verbal and physical harassment by their peers and even teachers. And there is a higher rate of suicide among GLBT teens than among their straight peers.

If there is a greater incidence of alcoholism and other such problems among gays and lesbians, it very likely is due to the burden we must cope with, that of dealing with society's homophobia. The 1968 play (and 1970 movie) The Boys in the Band—one of the first plays to depict gay characters—leaves us with the sentiment, voiced by one of the characters, "If only we didn't hate ourselves so much."

The San Francisco Chronicle said, when the film version of The Boys in the Band was revived in 1999,

. . . in the attitudes of its characters, and their self-lacerating vision of themselves, it belongs to another time. And that's a good thing.

Of course it's a good thing, if it's true. I believe the Chronicle is saying that gays and lesbians growing up today do not have the baggage of internalized homophobia. I am sure it is correct that it's easier for young gays and lesbians today: there is greater societal acceptance of homosexuality and certainly it's a subject much more out in the open. A young GLBT person today can find others like himself or herself far more easily.

But not all of us of the Boys in the Band generation are yet gone from this Earth.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

Is the Right, Right?

Wall Street, bankers, insurance agents, doctors are just among the many American institutions that people used to be able to trust, but are not able to anymore. (I can't add politicians because there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that mistrust of politicians goes way, way back.) I hate to agree with the Right in any sense, but when they argue that ethics and morality have declined, I think I agree. But of course they include homosexuality (and marital infidelity and abortion) in with the evidence of moral decline, and of course there they and I would part company. They seem to be assured that anything having to do with sex is evil. One time I saw on TV a woman from a Phyllis Schlafly, Right-type organization debating a woman from the American Library Association on book censorship. The Right-wing lady was wearing a dress buttoned up to the neck, and I thought that said a great deal.