Setting Our Own Agenda Against the Religious Right
Notes for an address by Eleanor Brown
to a meeting of PFLAG St. Catharines, Ontario
(that's Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gay Men)
On April 12, 2005
Thank you so much for asking me here. I'm sure many of you have walked in Pride parades -- and you've noticed that YOU, PFLAG folk, get the biggest cheers.... because of all the work you've done for the lesbian and gay community. I'm very pleased to have been asked to speak to you this evening.
Having gotten the niceness out of the way, I need to tell you that I loooove to be grumpy. Especially when I have a captive audience. And tonight I'm going to talk about some of the problems in the gay movement.
And one of the problems I'm seeing in the gay community is a lack of tolerance for our opponents. A lack of tolerance for those who are on the religious right. A lack of tolerance for those who oppose the gay rights movement for their own religious reasons.
I know that seems like a contradictory thing to say. The only way you can achieve progress is by fighting those who oppose you. But I believe that we are the ones who need to set the agenda.... rather than fighting the good fight on THEIR terms.
Because that's what we're doing right now. We're reacting to the "bad guys" all the time, rather than doing what we think is right.
When that happens, when that's your strategy, you're engaging in something I call "nyah nyah politics." That's when you go up to somebody and say: "Nyah nyah."
"Nyah nyah politics" is when you behave badly because they are behaving badly.
Let me give you an example of "nyah nyah politics."
Calgary's Roman Catholic Bishop is Fred Henry. You've probably all heard of him. In January he wrote a pastoral letter to his parishioners condemning same-sex marriage. And a column based on the same letter was published in the Calgary Sun. Here's part of what it said: "Since homosexuality, adultery, prostitution and pornography undermine the foundations of the family, the basis of society, then the State must use its coercive power to... curtail them in the interests of the common good."
I don't believe the state should be involved in issues of morality. But a lot of people do. And I believe they should have the right to speak out without being harassed by us.
And what happened is that Bishop Henry is being harassed. The Alberta Human Rights Commission has received two, not one but two, complaints about Bishop's henry's comments. One of the complainants wrote that she believes that "the publication of Bishop Henry's letter is likely to expose homosexuals to hatred or contempt. These remarks are particularly dangerous when made by a person in a position of trust or authority."
These complainants are saying "nyah nyah: we are going to do everything in our power to make your life as difficult as possible." (There's hiring lawyers, stress, worry, time....)
And a lot of gay people are very happy about this. They want to screw over our religious opponents. That's their prime purpose: To punish those who don't agree with us. That's where the gay community is at right now -- we want to punish our enemies.
We're not interested in tolerating them.
Let me give you a definition of tolerance: It's "the action of allowing something, or granting permission."
It's understandable that we are uninterested in listening to bigoted garbage. But tolerance of others is essential to free speech and free society. And what we're trying to do is stifle speech -- and it's going to blow up in our faces. It's going to blow up in our faces in a lot of different ways.
To start, we are going to create religious martyrs. Don't laugh -- I'm serious. We like to say that religious folk control everything, but they certainly don't here in Canada.
Let me give you an example that is currently obsessing the religious right. On June 30, 1977, the Saskatoon Star Phoenix ran an ad which listed four Biblical citations on the left, then an equal sign, and then two male stick figures holding hands. The pair of men stood inside a circle with a line going through them -- the international symbol for "no."
A man named Hugh Owens placed the ad. He obviously on purpose picked the most obnoxious time of year to buy the ad: right around Pride celebrations. Right in the middle of our celebration of gayness and of community.
Of course, three gay activists filed a complaint with the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission. And in June 2001 they won. An adjudicator fund Owens guilty of spreading hatred against an identifiable group. That is against the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code, and Owens was found "guilty."
Here's what the adjudicator ruled: "There is no question that Owens believed that he was publicly expressing his honestly held religious belief as it related to his interpretation of the Bible and its discussions of homosexuality." The adjudicator then wrote that a fine and a public spanking by an agent of the state were both reasonable restrictions on Hugh Owens's right to freedom of expression. The three complainants were, after all, "exposed to hatred, ridicule, and their dignity was affronted on the basis of their sexual orientation."
(I'm going to come back to this point later.)
NOW, we pushed very hard as a community to get a law passed that banned hate speech -- that banned people from inciting the mass murder of gay people, for example. We told everybody who would listen that religious speech would be allowed. That people who believed in what the Bible said about homosexuality would be allowed to speak.
We're not filing criminal charges against religious people who speak out -- but we are harassing them. We are doing everything else that we can do to shut them up. We are filing human rights complaints against them. We ARE trying to stifle religious speech.
It's very clear that everything we said about respecting others' right to speak was big fat lie. Apparently, we said it just to get that bill passed. We perpetrated a scam upon the public, and now off we go on our merry way, filing human rights complaints, and giving religious believers the finger.
Even Pierre Pettigrew, Canada's minister of foreign affairs, said earlier this year that naysaying churches should butt out of the gay marriage debate. Everyone has freedom of speech in Canada, and in fact should feel a civic obligation to speak out on matters of public import -- expect religious folk.
This is the "freedom of speech but" argument. I believe in freedom of speech for everyone BUT you.
***
Owens' advertisement didn't quote the Bible, it just cited some numbered verses. Including the infamous Leviticus 20:13.
I'm an atheist. But even I know that the Bible condemns homosexuality. And I have no patience for people who try to argue otherwise.
Leviticus 20:13 reads: If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them." You know, that seems pretty clear to me.
When you argue that it means something else, your opponents think you're just rationalizing. You're not going to win any converts with that sort of argument -- they just think you're willing to say absolutely anything to win your point. But look, it's a very simple sentence; read it and deal with it. Argue something else.... read through Leviticus, argue that we don't sacrifice goats every Tuesday, the way we're supposed to if we were all truly pious. Whatever. But respond honestly, don't twist things so that you're the one who sounds like you're grasping at straws.
But back to my argument on freedom of speech. I find this intolerance of the speech of others particularly awful because, as a community, gay men and lesbians know what it is to be censored. You'll recall it was all we could do to get gay books into print 50 or 60 years ago. Remember all those pulp novels? The big bad lesbian always led the good lady astray -- I like those ones....
The good people at Vancouver's Little Sister's Book Emporium recently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting Canada Customs, eventually going all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. Our words have been censored for many, many years.
And now here we are doing it to other people. Doing it to the religious right.
I know I've given you lots of examples of this community behaving (in my opinion) badly. This is because I want to show it's not just one person over there, it's happening across the country. So here's one more: In Surrey, British Columbia in 2003, two lesbians filed a complaint with the B.C. Human Rights Commission. You'll recall there was a nasty fight at the Surrey school board over children's books that portrayed same-sex parents.
The school board had banned these books. Now, I've read them, and I would ban at least one of these books, too. They are some of the most boring kid's books available on the market today -- they're horrible. Unfortunately, these were banned for another reason -- because of their gay content.
The school board held public hearings into the book banning. And the two complainants believed that school board officials should have stopped bigots from making vicious remarks about gay people. I'm quite sure many of those comments were based on religious beliefs.
These were public hearings. That means the public must be allowed to speak. You either have public hearings, or you don't: Pick one. You cannot, must not, tell people you've invited to speak -- oops but shut up, your opinions will not be heard.
I've given you quite a few examples. With all of this, I'm not at all surprised that the religious right is afraid. As I hope I've shown, they have some basis for this fear.
I know many of us want to say they have no basis for this fear. But they do. In fact, the gay community has won just about every battled it has engaged in. Some battles have taken longer than others, but we DO keep winning.
There are fewer and fewer incidents of book censorship. Even marriage is a legal necessity, whether the politicians continue to dither or not.
And so I think that we must accept that some of the religious right are truly afraid for themselves. And by their rhetoric, we must accept that they are afraid of US. Truly afraid of us. We dismiss that, but if you read their advertisements and talk to them, you'll see that this is true. One of their guiding principles of fear.
I know that when convinced by this idea that the religious right is afraid of gay people, many gay people will cheer. It's about time, we say. But that's really destructive.
We gay people need to look beyond out noses. What are we doing to our communities? Not what are we doing to our gay villages -- but to our larger communities. And where can we go when the other side's fear makes them want to shmush us? How do you move forward when everybody's feeling insecure and afraid? Because of course, we're insecure and afraid, too. Or we wouldn't panic every time some religious person quotes Leviticus.
We've created this horrible circle. We're afraid of them, they're afraid of us. They hate us, we hate them. I don't think that helps anybody.
And I think those of us on the side of gay rights will be judged by how we treat our enemies.
****
What I want to see is real communication between the gay rights movement and the far religious right.
Let me give you an example: back in 1995 or so, a lesbian lawyer named Elizabeth Birch was the executive director of the Human Rights Coalition. That's the American gay rights group based in Washington, D.C.
She contacted the Christian Coalition. If you haven't heard of them, you can guess. It sometimes seems their very existence is predicated on the need to create a "gay enemy." They're not pleasant people, at least in terms of their rhetoric. And Elizabeth Birch wanted to speak to the assembled members of the Christian Coalition during their annual general meeting.
The Christian Coalition said NO. No surprise there.
Birch rented a meeting room in the same hotel -- in the hotel that was hosting the Christian Coalition conference. And she advertised and gave a speech intended for Christian Coalition members at their own AGM.
In truth I have to tell you that almost no one showed up but the media. But what an amazing idea.
I want to read some excerpts from Birch's talk.
"Dear members of the Christian Coalition: An open letter was not my first choice as a way of reaching you. I would have preferred speaking to you all directly, and in a setting where you would be most comfortable.... [that is] my motivation today. And it is supported by a single, strong belief that the time has come for us to speak TO each other, rather than PAST each other....
"I believe in the power of the word and the value of honest communication. During my years of work as a litigator at a major corporation, I was often amazed at what simple, fresh, and truthful conversation could accomplish. And what is true in the corporate setting is also true, I am convinced, in our communities. If we could learn to speak and listen to each other with integrity, the consequences might shock us.... [Join] me in finding new ways to speak with honesty not only about one another, but also to one another.
"If I am confident in anything at all, it is this: Our communities have more in common than we care to imagine. This is not to deny the many differences. But out of our sheer humanity comes some common ground....
"It's hard to communicate with people we do not respect. And the character of prejudice, of stereotype, of demagoguery, is to tear down the respect others might otherwise enjoy in public, even the respect they would hold for themselves in private. By taking away respectability, rhetorically as well as legally, we justify the belief that they are not quite human, not quite worthy, not quite deserving of our time, of our attention, of our concern.
"And that is, sadly, what many of your children and colleagues and neighbours who are gay and lesbian have feared is the intent of the Christian Coalition. If it were true, of course, it would be not only regrettable, but terribly hypocritical. It would not be worthy of the true ideals and values based in love at the core of what we call Christian. The reason I have launched this conversation is to ask you to join me in a common demonstration that this is not true....
"I am convinced that if we cannot find ways to respect one another as human beings, and therefore to respect one another's rights, we will do great damage not only to each other, but also to those we say we represent.
"I recognize that it is not easy for us to speak charitably to each other. I have read fundraising letters in which people like me are assigned labels which summon up the ugliest of dehumanizing stereotypes. Anonymous writers have hidden under the title of 'Concerned Christian' to condemn me with the fires of God and to call on all of you to deny me an equal opportunity to participate in a whole range of American life....
"Such expressions... do not -- cannot -- beget a spirit of trust. Nor do they pass the test of either truthfulness or courage. They bear false witness in boldface type. And I believe that they must embarrass those who, like me, heard of another Gospel -- even the simple gospel taught me as a child in Sunday School....
"Neither of us should forsake our fundamental convictions. But we could hold these convictions with a humility that allows room for the lives of others. Neither of us may be the sole possessors of truth on any given issue. And we could express our convictions in words that are -- if not affectionate, and if not even kind -- then at least decent, civil, humane. We need not demonize each other simply because we disagree.
"I came to my task in the campaign for human rights with this conviction: if we, in the name of civil rights, slander you, we have failed our own ideals as surely as any Christian who slanders us in the name of God has failed the ideals of Scripture...."
***
Now, I think that lecturing a religious person about what and how their religion should be about is a bit... condescending. But there is an important message here for Christians. And also an important message here for us.
This sort of communication is what Canada needs more of.
We have a national lobby group, Egale, and that's what I want it to do. I want Egale folk to take an Alberta bishop to lunch. I want British Columbians to buy coffees for hysterical Surrey parents. I want gay people and their allies to stop filing human rights complaints and to stop relying on the state to bully religious people into shutting up.
I want to focus on our common ground.
I know this behaviour is not nearly as fun and satisfying as telling enemies to you-know-what-off. And I know those coffees or lunches will be agonizing. That many of our dining companions will say awful things, that others will be nodding politely and quietly muttering thanks for the cotton wool they've stuck into their ear canals.
It doesn't matter.
Imagine what will happen when we take the high road and reframe the relationship between the religious right and gay people.
I've said that it will be healthier for the body politic. I also believe it will be healthier for each of us, as individuals.
I'm not saying don't fight back -- I'm saying fight differently. The community needs to get out there into the jaws of the lions.
We also need to do more than just talk. I think we need to support religious homophobes in key ways.
Some of the most annoying homophobes in the world are ex gays. In general, our reaction to ex gays is pity. Maybe anger, maybe even disgust.
But if we believe in our right to self-determination, then we must believe in THEIR right to self-determination. We must respect the choices made by ex gays. Not to say that they're delusional and self-hating, but that we believe in their right to live their lives as they see fit.
We need to say so publicly. And to show it publicly.
And when it comes to anti-gay-marriage churches, we need to speak out publicly and say; "We support your right to say no."
But even that's not enough, since we've been saying that and then turning around and trying to undermine the rights of religious folk. We need to actually say that we will stand with the religious right, in your churches, to fight encroachment on your rights. And then we have to do it: I would link arms around a bigoted church to stop other gay people from storming in and staging a gay wedding.
That's what we... need... to do.
****
I want to return now to something I let drop earlier. A lot of gay people who spend their time trying to silence homophobic speech argue that homophobic speech hurts.
I think that's true. Absolutely.
And it doesn't matter.
Yes, bigoted comments may well encourage hatred. But we have survived far worse times. And we need to be prepared for the ignorance or the hatred of others. We need to have the strength to fight and argue and talk back.
What we cannot do is argue that our gay rights trump their religious rights.
I also don't believe in the right of gay people and of our loved ones to live lives that are completely without pain.
This is NOT a Christian Martyr complex type of analysis.
It's about surviving daily life. If we are honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge that there is no such thing as "safe space." And if we believe there is, we will never be prepared to when someone says something nasty or does something nasty. And we have to be.
Because we are all nasty to each other, sometimes without even meaning to be.
Our most vulnerable are our youth. But we cannot protect them from all manner of evil. They already know that the world can be a bad place, and that strength must come from within. This is what we must teach our children. They must learn to deal with the unexpected bile of everyday life. Or they will collapse at every turn.
"Safe space" is something each of us creates within ourselves, gay or straight. And that is the true battle.
Thank you.
****
NOTES: These are notes only -- I did go off-script quite a bit, if people looked perplexed or if I thought of something to add while talking.
Some discussion of this speech can be
found here.
The complete text of Elizabeth Birch's speech to the Christian Coalition is available in "In Our Own Words: Extraordinary Speeches of the American Century," edited by Senator Robert Torricelli and Andrew Carroll (Washington Square Press, 1999).