More Views on Homphobia

Creeping through the Prop 8 trial has been the suggestion that somehow either gays are pedophiles or marriage is a bulwark against pedophilia. We know Dr. Tam suggested gay marriage was a prelude to legalizing sex with children. Where does this stuff come from? The proponents of gay marriage and their professional witnesses come across as the ones defending the institution of marriage; the others don't.

Like the birthers, these people got me to dig deeper into this issue--more than is healthy. Like the birthers I had to entertain their argument and actually discover their was literally no merit to it even if President Obama were born on the moon. The gay as pedophile argument has never struck a cord with me. The vast majority of gay males I've known with the exception of Bayard Rustin and Tom Kahn are conservatives--once Republicans, maybe still are. The lesbians I know are all liberal Democrats. People forget that in the days I really started commuting to Washington in the Reagan years the Republican Party teemed with gays. The young conservative movement was led by gays--and not closeted gays for that matter. At least a dozen Republican congressmen were gays. Hell, Karl Rove's father was gay and modeled penis piercings in fetish magazines. And who could forget the most noxious gay of all--Roy Cohn? While the Democrats were almost ferociously homophobic in the 1980s. The story of how Republicans became homophobic is really the story of the rise of the evangelicals to control the party. That's a different story but one we shall return to.

So the story of child sexual abuse unfortunately indicates that maybe straights shouldn't marry. Half of child abuse cases involve their parents; another 18% are relatives. Of the perpetrators of child sex abuse less than one-third know the victims outside of their own family. Often child sex abusers are conflated with pedophiles. Pedophiles are those with intense sexual fascination with prepubescent children. Of nonexclusive pedophiles, those who have sex with adults also,almost all are completely heterosexual. 50% of all pedophiles are married. And only 7% are exclusive pedophiles. According to Dr. John Badford of the University of Ottawa,who has studied pedophilia for 23 years (can you imagine!), 4% of the population are pedophiles and this includes both men and women. So the case of child sex abuse rests heavily against heterosexuals from the record, not gays.

But if we look at this politically, something obvious pops up in the anti-gay literature on the Right--NAMBLA. NAMBLA was basically disowned and condemned by the gay rights organizations almost immediately after the Stonewall riots in 1969--that's 41 years ago. NAMBLA advocated the elimination of the age of consent between adolescent males and adult men. Unfortunately for gays, NAMBLA had two gay stars on its boards--the poet Allen Ginsberg and the scif-fi writer Sam Delaney. Over the decades, NAMBLA disintegrated into almost a criminal enterprise linked to child porn rings and trafficking of children. And this is the group in the minds of the Religious Right that represents all gays and lesbians. The history of gay and lesbian groups condemning the organization and at a very early stage is meaningless to these people.

But there is another issue here--the social pathology in the evangelical community. Studies by their fellow churchmen have found fundamentalist males are almost addicted to hard core pornography--a whopping 50% are habitual consumers of porn. Spousal abuse is off the charts and for the procreation argument 40% of children are born out of wedlock. Exhibit A: Bristol Palin. What we have here is a classic case of projection. The issue of so-called protecting families from gays is an in grained inferiority complex because of an awareness that the fundamentalist flock is totally dysfunctional and susceptible to all the vices they rail against in the modern society. We have seen this with major preachers in the evangelical community being exposed for buying gay sex. Since their argument is that gay is a lifestyle, not a born condition, they fixate on the notion that adult gays are "recruiting" younger people to adopt their lifestyle. And hence the arguments against normalizing gay relations as leading to sex with children. And this explains the central position played by NAMBLA to their arguments.

What's so interesting is the absence in all this of any rancor toward lesbianism. I believe it has to do with the Abrahamic religions being patriarchal and therefore women are really not valued except as vessels for reproduction. Yes, I know there is an honorable tradition in the Old and New Testaments and the Koran of noble, courageous, gutsy women. But the prohibitions on sexual behavior center on the males. Even while growing up, there was a tolerance for the so-called "Boston marriages" of two women.

One of the stranger signs against gay marriage outside the courthouse was "Same Sex Marriage is the Idea of Satan's Jews". Now are all Jews Satanic? or Just some. And if prohibitions against gay sex were orginally Jewish, than how do the anti-gay crowd deal with that? I would leave this issue to a Talmudic Scholar to figure out.

Is racial animosity this ingrained? Ted Olson is betting on justice being blind and that as a rational conservative justice will out. I'm not so sure. I think he is over-estimating the state of reason in our society today.