Out of the mouths of babes, eBill:
pfaw.org
PEOPLE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY FOUNDATION
Anti-Gay Politics
and the Religious Right
The recent highly publicized ad campaign by a coalition of fifteen Religious Right organizations is the latest tactical ploy in a long-term political strategy of vilification and political marginalization of gay and lesbian Americans. Far from the campaign of compassion that Religious Right leaders have portrayed, the recent ads further an explicit political agenda that seeks to criminalize gay relationships and deny basic rights to gays and lesbians in a range of critical areas: employment, housing, and families.
Anti-gay politics have long been at the core of Religious Right fundraising and organizing efforts. As the Religious Right becomes an increasingly powerful element of the GOP base, anti-gay rhetoric and policies have become more prominent in party platforms, legislative fights, and public policy at local, state, and national levels. Republican Party leaders risk being caught between public support for equal rights for gays and lesbians and the unremitting hostility toward gay rights from Religious Right groups that form the party's core activist base. Congressional leaders' willingness to embrace anti-gay rhetoric and legislation may be part of a strategy to energize Religious Right voters for the fall congressional elections, and it may reflect the longer term impact of the Religious Right's growing strength within the party. Nevertheless, some GOP leaders are concerned that the party's close identification with anti-gay bigotry may cost it support among the general public in the year 2000.
This memo briefly analyzes elements of the Religious Right's broader anti-gay political strategy; our staff can provide in-depth information on any of these topics. People For the American Way Foundation has monitored the Religious Right political movement and its attacks on gays and lesbians for nearly two decades. The Andrew Heiskell National Resource Library, which is open to researchers and journalists, has catalogued a wealth of original source material, including Religious Right groups' direct mail and television and radio broadcasts. In addition, People For the American Way Foundation publishes an annual report called Hostile Climate, which extensively documents incidents of institutionalized anti-gay bigotry and discrimination from around the country.
The Ad Campaign
In early May, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay hosted a summit meeting between GOP congressional leaders and a group of disgruntled Religious Right leaders who demanded more congressional action on right-wing social issues in return for encouraging religious conservatives to go to the polls in this fall's election campaign. Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA) was put in charge of a "Values Action Team" to make sure that Religious Right concerns were high on the GOP agenda.
Three weeks later, President Clinton issued an executive order protecting lesbians and gay men from employment discrimination in the federal workforce, provoking outrage among Religious Right leaders. On June 15th, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott compared homosexuals to alcoholics and kleptomaniacs while appearing on the Armstrong Williams show, a cable television talk show. His comments generated criticism from gay organizations and from the White House, and elicited support from Religious Right groups.
In mid-July, fifteen Religious Right organizations launched a newspaper ad campaign that Bob Knight of the Family Research Council called "the Normandy landing in the larger cultural wars." The same week, Rep. Joe Hefley (R-CO) proposed an amendment to overturn the Executive Order and Rep. Frank Riggs (R-CA) proposed an amendment to withhold federal housing funds from San Francisco as punishment for the city's domestic partner benefits ordinance.
In the public debate spurred by the newspaper ads, organizers of the ad campaign claimed that the ads were not political, and that the message was one of "hope" that gays could be "cured." The timing of the ads and the political nature of many of the groups that signed them made it clear that those protestations were not credible. The ad campaign was an effort to change public debate from a discussion of discrimination to a discussion over whether homosexuals can be "cured" and turned into heterosexuals. For civil rights advocates, the answers to complex nature/nurture questions are irrelevant to civil rights issues; for anti-gay activists, a simplistic model of gays as diseased - and "curable" -- is central to their fight against equality.
Janet Folger, director of the Center for Reclaiming America, organized the ad campaign. The Center is a creation of Coral Ridge Ministries, the $40 million empire of Florida-based teleevangelist D. James Kennedy, who has been hard at work to build his national profile. For the past five years, Coral Ridge has hosted an annual "Reclaiming America for Christ" conference that has attracted many GOP leaders; in 1995 Kennedy established a foothold in Washington, D.C. with the Center for Christian Statesmanship.
Gays as Diseased
The ad campaign followed a public furor touched off by Sen. Lott's equating gays with alcoholics and kleptomaniacs, but it has long been a central tenet of Religious Right groups that homosexuals are diseased, and can be "cured" with a combination of religious indoctrination and psychological counseling. Reparative therapy as practiced by a variety of "ex-gay ministries" includes a large dose of gender stereotyping: men are encouraged to play football or learn auto mechanics, women to wear dresses and makeup. Scientifically, the benefits of so-called "reparative therapy" are dubious at best: the American Psychological Association has denounced the practice as ineffective and potentially harmful, while groups claiming to "cure" gays provide no evidence to back their claims, carefully neglecting to conduct follow-up studies of their former patients. John Paulk and his wife Anne are the current "poster children" of the "ex-gay" movement, appearing on the cover of Newsweek; in 1993 John Paulk told the Wall Street Journal that "To say that we've arrived at this place of total heterosexuality - that we're totally healed - is misleading."
Politically, Religious Right groups use the disease or addiction model to assert that civil rights protections should not be afforded to gays and lesbians. According to this "logic," public policy that treats gays with equality and dignity actually inhibits individuals from seeking to be "cured." In Maine earlier this year, "ex-gays" were featured in one of the television commercials run by Religious Right groups during the successful campaign to overturn a statewide anti-discrimination law.
The recent ads also attempt to equate homosexuality with AIDS and other diseases; one of the recent ads was titled, "From Innocence to AIDS," cleverly alluding to Religious Right myths about gay recruitment of children and promoting Religious Right efforts to portray homosexuality as a "death-style." Typical of such rhetoric was a recent Chuck Colson article about Billy, a doll being marketed in the gay community. Colson suggested that all Billy dolls should come with a plastic coffin, asserting that most gays are "men whose lives are tragically marked by disease, addition, misery, and early death."
Dr. Robert Garofalo, a Boston pediatrician who authored a health study of gay teens last spring, complained to the Boston Globe that the recent ad campaign, was "a complete misrepresentation" of his research on substance abuse and other high-risk behavior. Garofalo told the Globe he believes the disproportionate risk of gay youth for substance abuse and suicide are the result of alienation gay teenagers face in a "culture that is often unaccepting." Religious Right groups attributed the problems to homosexuality itself, which Garofalo calls "the complete opposite conclusion of what the paper actually concluded."
Misrepresenting ideology as science is a favored tactic. Paul Cameron is a virulently anti-gay "researcher" whose methods led to his being ousted from the American Psychological Association. Although Cameron has been thoroughly discredited, his "research" continues to be a favored source of ammunition for the Religious Right. William Bennett, Chuck Colson, and others continue to repeat Cameron's conclusion that the life expectancy for gay men is 43 years, a statistic based on his reading of obituaries in gay newspapers. (Cameron's statistic was effectively demolished in online magazine Slate - see www.slate.com/HeyWait2/97-12-18/HeyWait2.asp) Bennett's trumpeting of this statistic last year on ABC's This Week and in the Weekly Standard was picked up by National Review and continues to circulate as the kind of "truth" that the Religious Right wants to tell America. |
