My Friend Just Got Gay-Bashed: Here’s Why it Matters
By: James Finn
Tags: LGBTQ, Equality, Religion, Morality, Violence

Two men gay-bashed my friend yesterday

They attacked him as he walked along a riverbank taking art photos in a major urban center. Apparently tipped off by my friend’s clothing or mannerisms, the duo called him a fag, grabbed him, and wouldn’t let go as they continued their slurs.

My friend is fine.

He fought them off and ran to safety, but the incident reminds me that violence against LGBTQ people in our society is pervasive and getting worse instead of better. The violence he experienced reminded me of something else very important:

Conservatives can’t fight for belief systems that stigmatize minorities and then distance themselves from moral consequences

By coincidence, when my friend messaged me to tell me he’d been assaulted, I was reading an article by Alexandra Desanctis in the National Review. Like many other commentators on the Right, including Ryan Anderson in Public Discourse, whom she cites, Desanctis has a lot to say about religious liberty and anti-LGBTQ discrimination, prompted by a series of recent Supreme Court decisions.

Systemic discrimination against LGBTQ people must be morally bankrupt.

They applaud rulings that privilege religious beliefs, like granting Catholic schools the right to fire LGBTQ teachers. But they go much further, urging conservative thinkers not to stop at religious liberty arguments — to attack equality for LGBTQ people “on the merits.”

Desanctis claims mistreating LGBTQ people is neither discrimination nor bigotry

She calls on social conservatives to fight for anti-LGBTQ public policy by defending anti-LGBTQ belief systems rather than by merely making liberty claims. “Fighting for the right to practice one’s faith,” she writes, “is not the same as making the case for why doing so, especially in the realm of sexual ethics, is not bigotry or discrimination, as many on the Left increasingly maintain.”

She leads with the case of Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who refused to sell a wedding cake to a same-sex couple: “Belief in traditional marriage isn’t bigoted and [it] isn’t discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation to decline to celebrate a same-sex wedding ceremony.”

Putting aside the tired argument that selling a cake is celebrating a wedding ceremony in any sense of the word celebrate, Desanctis’s argument is hard to parse. Same-sex marriage is legal everywhere in the United States. That’s not going to change. No religious institution has the power to grant or deny marriage to anyone. Marriage is a civil institution, after all, governed by civil law, not by religious doctrine.

So, of course declining to sell goods or services for a same-sex wedding but not for a mixed-sex wedding is an act of discrimination. That’s what discrimination means.

Is it bigoted?

Again, the answer seems self evident. Leveraging one’s private religious beliefs to publicly stigmatize or exclude LGBTQ people is bigotry. Let me illustrate:

A historical example of racist discrimination and bigotry

Photograph of Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, June 12, 1967

Let’s look back to when huge majorities of religious people in the American South (and large pluralities of religious people elsewhere) believed marriages between people of different races were wrong, on religious grounds.

People felt so strongly about this that many states criminalized mixed marriage, also called miscegeny. Then in 1967, the Supreme Court decided in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegeny laws violated the 14th Amendment. The justices struck the laws down across the entire country as they voided a felony conviction in Virginia against Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, a mixed-race married couple.

Ask yourself two questions about racism:

Would a religious person refusing to sell goods or services for a mixed-race wedding be discriminating against that couple based on race? Would that religious person in so doing be indulging in an act of racist bigotry?

I think the answers to those two questions are clear and unambiguous. Of course refusing the mixed-raced couple would be discrimination, and of course it’s racist bigotry.

The parallels to discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity are so exact that I have a hard time crediting arguments social conservatives make.

But I increasingly see them, as I did yesterday, digging their heels in. Desanctis crystalizes her argument in a manner I find very revealing:

There is no evading the fact that we live in a climate increasingly hostile to religious beliefs and traditional moral values, nowhere more so than in the realm of sex and gender. We do ourselves no favors by making arguments that appear to ask for special treatment on the grounds of religion rather than offering a vigorous defense of our beliefs on their own terms.

Privileging discrimination against minorities is special treatment

I quite agree with Desanctis here, though perhaps not in a way she would appreciate. Allowing people to legally discriminate against LGBTQ people on religious grounds IS special treatment. Social conservatives often complain (on specious grounds) that LGBTQ people want “special rights,” when we actually demand full equality under the law.

Social conservative are actually the people asking for special treatment. In the 1950s and 60s, they demanded the privilege of treating Black people unequally. Today, they ask for the special privilege of targeting LGBTQ people.

Desanctis and Anderson, along with a host of other social conservatives, seem to realize they’re out on a limb, so they’re urging a full frontal assault on LGBTQ equality outside of religious liberty arguments. They insist they have a strong case to make for their discriminatory religious belief systems on the merits.

They’re wrong for two important reasons —

First, their positions are morally bankrupt

Organized religion has been playing catch up to secular moral philosophy for centuries, at least in the European/Western tradition. While religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam can take great credit for the principles of love, charity, and justice they advanced centuries or millennia ago, most religious institutions have been resisting moral progress since at least the days of John Locke, Adam Smith, and the seminal moral philosopher David Hume.

Religious institutions that stigmatize LGBTQ people and work to exclude us from full participation in civil society do so on the basis of dogma, ignoring not only moral philosophers like Hume, but advances in human knowledge, which progressive faith leaders say must inform the practice of faith.

The dangers of ignoring advances in human knowledge become clear when we look at how dogmatic religious racists invented pseudoscientific justification for racism while ignoring actual evidence of the fallacies of racial inferiority. Hugh Gilmore details that process exhaustively in his book, Gods of the Upper Air.

Advances in human knowlege tell us LGBTQ people are harmless, minority variants of human beings. Our sexual orientations are rooted in biology and are as old as humanity itself. As far back in time as we can peer, we find clear, consistent evidence of gender and sexual minorities. Some cultures have accepted us, some have tolerated us, others have persecuted us.

No evidence shows that accepting or celebrating the lives and contributions of gender and sexual minorities harms society. To the contrary, hurting LGBTQ people by stigmatizing and shaming us accomplishes nothing other than increasing suffering in small but significant minorities of human beings —for no rational purpose.

Therefore, if morality can be defined (as it often is) as a state that tends to advance human happiness and decrease human suffering, then systemic discrimination against LGBTQ people must be morally bankrupt.

Second, their assumption that significant numbers of secular people support anti-LGBTQ discrimination is wrong

Desanctis, Anderson, and other social conservatives are calling for arguments against LGBTQ equality on the merits, because they say focusing on religious liberty arguments leaves out secular people who also support discrimination.

This argument may be appealing in terms of winning them a few allies in their puzzling fight to stigmatize minority human beings, but it doesn’t make a lot of practical sense.

Secular Americans overwhelmingly support LGBTQ equality

According to PRRI, striking majorities of American support full legal equality for LGBTQ people — so much so that many Americans were taken by surprise last month when the Supreme Court ruled that discriminating against LGBTQ people in employment violates federal law. They assumed discriminating against members of gender and sexual minorities was already illegal.

Secular Americans who support anti-LGBTQ discrimination are statistical anomalies. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans who support discrimination againt LGBTQ people almost always learn their intolerant views in church. The less religious the American, the less likely they are to support discrimination against LGBTQ people.

Most religious Americans support LGBTQ equality

Among religious Americans, attending progressive places of worship (like mainline Protestant churches or Jewish synagogues) tracks closely with strong support for LGBTQ equality.

Even most American Catholic lay people strongly oppose anti-LGBTQ discrimination, in numbers that actually slightly exceed the general public.

Most religious Americans who support discrimination against LGBTQ people are white evangelical Protestants, but even they are slightly outnumbered by white evangelical Protestants who support LGBTQ civil equality.

Social conservatives who wish to advance arguments for stigmatizing members of gender and secular minorities seem to face an impossible challenge with secular Americans and an uphill battle with most religious Americans. Pleading for special treatment for their increasingly peculiar religious beliefs, as morally bankrupt as that is, may be all they have left.

Let’s talk about gay-bashing

I started writing this story because two men called my gay friend a fag as they physically assaulted him. That matters a lot. Anti-LGBTQ stigmatization is not an academic matter. It’s not a subject best fit for rarified discourse by public intellectuals.

Gay men, lesbians, transgender people and bisexual people suffer discrimination and worse, every day. Yes, sometimes we lose our jobs or lose out on a place to live. Sometimes we’re denied equal access to public services.

But mostly? The toxins we breathe aren’t legal ones. Like my friend, we get called names, roughed up, or worse. The queer press report incidents of violent assault just about every day. If not for copyright concerns, I could insert many photos of a bruised face here, taken from just about any random edition of Pink News or LGBTQ Nation, which try to call public attention to anti-LGBTQ violence.

Stigma produces the toxins we live with

When respected institutions like churches and respected publications like the National Review advance positions that other LGBTQ people, they lend a veneer of respectability to marginalizing us. They create and perpetuate toxins that lead to inevitable harm.

Granted, churches and social conservatives almost never advocate violence; they usually condemn it. But stigmatizing LGBTQ people even while calling for respect (in some dissonant manner or another) has consequences.

Advocating against the equality of intrinsically harmless members of human minorities is irrational and immoral. Othering leads to inevitable harm, up to and including senseless violence.

My friend was gay-bashed yesterday in a major urban center, a progressive city filled with liberal people. Why did it happen? Because too many serious people argue that stigmatizing queer people is perfectly OK, normaling bigoted attitudes.

It’s time to end this. It’s time to say no to hate, which is literally the only value social conservatives promote with their irrational, immoral dogma.