I’ve been trying to formulate a response to this all night, and I haven’t quite got it, so my apologies in advance if this is a little rambling and incoherent.

Nate, I think you are being disingenuous or obtuse. I think that Liz would condemn violence against anyone, although of course I cannot speak for her. However, if this is not clear to you, allow me to offer an alternate interpretation of the passage you quoted.

Liz said, “Because as long as it’s perfectly socially acceptable for someone to say horrible things about gay people, to equate homosexuality with bestiality and pedophilia, there are those who will inevitably take the next step and think it’s perfectly socially acceptable to do violence against them.”

I read this statement as saying that, as long as it is socially acceptable to say degrading things about a group of people, there is some segment of that population which will act beyond name calling and will resort to violence. I don’t think this is unclear. Nor do I think this is a particularly controversial statement. Calling names is the first step in differentiating and dehumanizing which can, for some, lead to violence.

As for homophobia…

To me, at least, homophobia is a term which refers to bigotry toward those who are homosexual. It is similar, in my lexicon at least, to racism, which is bigotry toward those of another race, or sexism, which is bigotry toward those of another sex.

If I were to say, “This is why it’s not enough to say we’re “being inclusive” by allowing racism to remain part of the national dialogue,” or “This is why it’s not enough to say we’re “being inclusive” by allowing sexism to remain part of the national dialogue,” would there be any issue?

People who believe that homosexuality is immoral or disgusting or just plain wrong may have well thought out reasons for believing so. They may be able to cite experts and have internally coherent arguments, but that doesn’t mean that they still aren’t wrong. After all, people who said that there were differences in the races also had experts and coherent arguments and morality to back them up, even as people who make that argument about the differences between the sexes.

Neil, you wrote:

People who believe that homosexuality is immoral or disgusting or just plain wrong may have well thought out reasons for believing so. They may be able to cite experts and have internally coherent arguments, but that doesn’t mean that they still aren’t wrong.

If you think you differ with me on this point, then you’ve misunderstood my post. There are many things that are wrong, however, and I argued in my post for the freedom to be wrong and to express wrong things, not for the rightness of the belief that homosexuality is immoral.

I think you also mistake my point about Liz’s post. I agree with you that she would probably condemn violence against anyone. That’s why I wrote: “I suspect that she would vehemently condemn someone who beat to death a pedophile in the street while maintaining, at the same time, that this in no way compromised her stance against pedophilia.” I was attempting to expose the contradictions in what I see as an incorrect and dangerous argument.

I hope I’ve made things more clear.

To be clear, these comparisons between the sex lives of gay men and lesbians and pederasty (which is the proper term for the act, as opposed to the desire) and bestiality, are horrible. They’re also rather plainly specious. The reason we condemn pederasty and bestiality is that we believe children and animals to be incapable of giving truly free consent to engage in sex with adult humans. Thus, these acts are inextricably linked with the implied abuse of power that human beings with the full use of reason may wreck upon those souls without such capabilities. Because we believe these acts to be, in themselves, so dangerous towards one half of their participants, souls whom we feel bound to protect, we condemn and, in America, ban these acts entirely. Other lawgivers throughout history have been less concerned with protecting these less-developed souls or more willing to engage in case-by-case analysis to determine which younger (to leave the beasts out of this) souls actually consented, but in America we like clean laws more than we believe we can achieve justice in every case (a very defensible position, I hasten to add).

Now, some may rejoin that in fact we condemn pederasty and bestiality because they’re perverse (just in the sense of in the wrong direction) and use our sexual organs to the wrong purposes, hence the comparison to homosexuality is valid in that homosexuality is asserted to be perverse and to misuse our sex organs. But such a comparison is in fact rhetorically dishonest because it conflates two things that are putatively of the same genus, but, by virtue of the consent aspect, are in fact in the same category as rape, and not of the category of consenting sex between adult human beings. “Man on dog” is simply not in the same specific category (species?) as “man on (wo)man” and anyone who asserts as much is being not only incorrect but almost certainly inflammatory and thus dishonest. The categories of “sexual” and, subject to dispute, “erroneous,” maybe, but there are other less inflammatory and misleading comparisons to use in making the latter point (as Michael did in the other thread, notably using the example of masturbation).

So, yes, these comparisons should be stricken from the discourse, just as all other errors and products of ignorance should be. How best to go about that task?

I’m not sure if Liz was advocating censorship (it seems unlikely) or a kind of social shunning (also somewhat dubious to me) or some sort of other kind of enforcement of what shouldn’t be socially acceptable, or if in fact she had even thought out a practical strategy for striking these ignorant and dishonest “horrible things” from the discourse of all persons. By her use of the phrase “socially acceptable” it seems she’s looking towards a time comparable to how, today, it’s in most society impolite to maintain racist views. I like that aspect of contemporary American educated society: it’s pleasant to me. But I’ve come to realize that it can be a way of masking a real discussion and self-examination of the still-present racism people have. I consider this to be a bad thing, one that inhibits self-knowledge and serves to make racism a cool and subversive thing. I’ve witnessed the former phenomenon in myself and the latter phenomenon in a surprising number of people our age (and I’m not talking about jokes about racism or racist-sounding jokes, I’m talking about full-on racists thinking racism is cool and true and only bringing these opinions out to impress other white people). Bad, bad stuff, caused in large part because it’s not socially acceptable to bring up potentially offensive opinions such that they can be corrected. Education has to take place, always. And there has to be space—socially acceptable space, even—to be wrong. And we Americans, particularly men (and let’s make no mistake, it’s primarily the men we’re worried about when it comes to “taking things too far”), need to be able to learn in public and about the public.

It seems also by the use of the term “inclusive” that Liz was concerned that inviting people like Mr. Warren into the public, socially acceptable, space is to in some way praise their erroneous and potentially dangerous opinions. Yep, it does that to a certain extent, but only indirectly. By allowing holders of wrong opinion to state them, we extend the courtesy (the “validation,” if you will) we have towards these people to some extent to what they have to say. But once the holders of those opinions voice them, that’s when we have free rein to go at these opinions, point out their utterly facile nature (and let’s be honest, Mr. Warren’s a guy who gets a lot of things, but his arguments against gay marriage are laughably easy to criticize), and ask their erstwhile holders what they think next. You include the speakers, destroy the wrong opinion, and then see what you do have in common. It’s like Marbury v. Madison: you say, “I’ll grant you the power to voice your facile opinion for the moment, but in exchange I get the ability to critique and modify and reject those opinions and you have to listen to me, sucker.” Suppressing or shunning these wrong opinions won’t work, long-term. We only have two percent to convince in California. Embrace the Warrens; then demolish their false opinion.

On diction: Like Nate, I think the term homophobia properly applies to fear of the homosexual (that is, “the homosexual things, including persons, actions, desires”). It can cause a lot of bigotry, sure, but it isn’t the same thing as bigotry. I mean, it’s in the damn word “fear of the same [sex]”; let’s use it meaningfully and use other words like “bigotry” and, if needed, “anti-gay” when needed. Why do I stand on this distinction? ‘Cause homophobia’s a real phenomenon, an error to be rooted out and gotten rid of.

Nate,

I hope you are not so naive as to actually believe that what you describe here will every be the case. Such discourse is not what is actually desired. What is desired is, as usual, total moral validation from the state for a certain belief/practice/whatever.

It will be achieved through the proven means of first legislating from the bench, then brainwashing the next generation through the schools and media, and, finally, creating a national environment where even the slightest whiff of opposition to the belief/practice/whatever has such swift and catastrophic effects on nearly all aspects of one’s existence that only the already marginalized will dare voice it. The next generation will then only have known a world in which the opposition stance exists as a fringe, crazed, ‘redneck’, or otherwise ‘ignorant’ viewpoint, and they will be taught to pity those who have adopted it, because surely no person born with normal mental faculties could hold to such ludicrous and barbaric ideas. Thus they will believe that they are free men who have come to their beliefs through free, open discourse in places of learning, but they will be, in one regard, less free than those in North Korean thought-control facilities who at least realize on some level that they are being group-thought into submission.

Then again, if your post is merely intended as a nice dream, well, kudos, I suppose.

Ah, victimhood.

hb, just want to say I really appreciated your comment. May I quote it on my livejournal?

Tania: Sure. Giving it a once-over again…

I do just want to clarify the reading of this sentence: “”Man on dog” is simply not in the same specific category (species?) as “man on (wo)man” and anyone who asserts as much is being not only incorrect but almost certainly inflammatory and thus dishonest.” I don’t mean to impute bad motives to anyone who asserts this opinion (though some may have them), just to say that the comparison, in itself, is inflammatory in its ignorance and its appeal to a far worse and categorically different set of actions to make homosexuality seem bad. Also, dishonesty sounds like a pretty big charge—and it is—but I meant it here to include the self-deception, the lie in the soul, that is in fact dishonest but is not, I think, worthy so much of censure as of pity.

Finally, separately, it doesn’t do anyone any good to be glib, so let me expand very slightly on my mention of victimhood by saying that I disagree with Dan’s reading of the way America’s discourse has worked on, say, abortion (presuming he didn’t mean the comparison with segregation that also fits his rough outline). It’s very, very hard for me to look back at the past forty years, especially 1981-93 and 2001-2008, and say that the conservative position in American politics or thought has been dealt an unfair blow by the power of the “state.” The use of the courts has been a boon to this position, not an instrument of brainwashing. Yes, yes, academia is hostile to conservatives, but they’ve made progress there. The Warren Court was stopped and its cases curtailed. The country severely questioned its knee-jerk liberalism and indeed has largely been cured of it. And the New Deal has been rather thoroughly questioned and, potentially, fatally undermined. To the extent the conservative position has failed, it has done so because it has failed to persuade either the people or the leaders, not because it’s been the victim of unfairness.

@hb:

I made the comment to you in person that this was a helpful parsing of the issue for me. There’s a particular pleasure (and humility) that I’ve experienced several times at Monadology where I post a basic complaint or point and someone comes along and says, “That’s a great beginning, but let’s get to the real issues.” Similarly, my post is, essentially, simply an argument that we ought to aspire to a higher level in our conversation about sexuality, whereas you begin an actual conversation.

The phrase “It is better to light a candle than to curse at the darkness” is a perfectly useful and accurate bit of folk wisdom. (No matter what Christopher Hitchens thinks.) I often feel like the lazy curser, while better friends go on to be actual lights.

Enough self-indulgent personal narrative. I think you’ve missed the substance of this issue for many Christians. You write: “The reason we condemn pederasty and bestiality is that we believe children and animals to be incapable of giving truly free consent to engage in sex with adult humans.” This may be the foundation of our legal basis for the prohibition of these acts, but it strikes me as dramatically (and even humorously) removed from the reason a person might believe them to be immoral.

Robbie has brought this up in another thread, and I think it warrants follow-up.

Also, I sense that there’s a deeper problem here over our understanding of what the word “morality” even means. Method reveals something of his view of it, which might be the one pluralistic and democratic societies tend toward generally, when he says: “It seems that the necessary and sufficient condition for an act to be moral is that it be moral—in particular that it respects others’ autonomy and personhood, increases good and decreases harm.” I am inclined to doubt that everyone here would agree on that.

I admit I’m inclined toward Method’s view. Sure, eating gluttonously only to visit the vomitorium is wildly decadent, certainly not virtuous — but immoral? Maybe so, but in a fairly deep way, I think, the application of that word immediately sends my mind to elaborating on the scenario with other people who are suffering from deficiency. For me, and it sounds like for Method, and I would wager for most modern Westerners, morality is basically and fundamentally about other people. With this talk of teleologies, it sounds like for some of us here it may also be about that, but perhaps not principally.

Robbie’s right to see this as a fault line. For me, it’s very important that the law be “basically and fundamentally about other people”; on the other hand, it seems patently inaccurate to say that morality does not deal with the self. For the moralist, it seems strange to bring an animal’s consent into the issue of the morality of bestiality. (I should confess that I regularly pay people to raise animals for the sole purpose of murdering them and delivering their muscle and fat tissue to me so that I can consume it.) Bestiality clearly harms the person involved, by distorting that person’s sexuality, turning something that was meant to bond him to another human being in mutual and maturing affection.

Similarly, pederasty may be damaging in a particularly obvious way to the younger parties involved, but is the moralist so crazy to assert that it’s also harmful to the older party?

Why shouldn’t the Christian of Warren’s bent respond to you by saying that there is clearly a world of difference in the material consequences of sin, and that it is utterly necessary to have something like law that tries to restore proportion to the world, but that morality is something real and different, where things that should be perfectly legal may be as immoral as things that should carry the strongest legal prohibitions?

As to the necessity for space to be wrong, I suspect that the language you use is far more helpful in advancing the cause. This explains very clearly (I think) what was more vague and intuitive to me:

Bad, bad stuff, caused in large part because it’s not socially acceptable to bring up potentially offensive opinions such that they can be corrected. Education has to take place, always. And there has to be space—socially acceptable space, even—to be wrong. And we Americans, particularly men (and let’s make no mistake, it’s primarily the men we’re worried about when it comes to “taking things too far”), need to be able to learn in public and about the public.

@Dan: For me, the perception of fear and contempt entirely overshadowed any actual arguments you were trying to make in your comment. Some of that may be my fault: I suspect people often read me as being more sarcastic and vicious than I intend to be. Regardless, this makes it very hard for me to understand what you hope to achieve.

Your use of the passive voice in your first paragraph in describing “what is desired” summons up the idea of a vast, monolithic group with a straightforward, unified agenda. Set aside any arguments about the particular things you ascribe to this group: that’s already wrong. I laugh when people talk about the Evangelicals as if they’re monolithic and easy to understand; Evangelicals are, just like everybody else, complex and hard to define.

Who is your unidentified monolithic group? It is gay people? If so, you’ve already defined people like Andrew Sullivan out of that group, since the passages of his I’ve quoted argue specifically against the things you claim. Let me assure you, as someone who knows quite a number of gay men (and even some women), that they are no more automatically unified in their agenda than Bill O’Reilly and I are, by virtue of our heterosexuality.

I have known relatively few people in life as capable of rich, complex, satisfying discussion as you, Dan, but sometimes you come across to me in your online comments simply as dismissive and angry. (I should acknowledge that very, very similar things have been said of me.) I think it would aid your arguments on Monadology to focus more on persuasion than polemic.

I am supposed to be writing a paper right now, which is already late; and I have been writing it, in a simmering sort of way, and will leave to do it in a more workman-like way momentarily; and that paper, about an immense epic and a war, has nothing to do with any of this really, but at the intersection of this and that I am wondering why we so often assume that if everybody is just somewhat reasonable and somewhat charitable, then we’ll all get along just fine. Might it not be that men will be at odds with one another, sometimes intensely and intractably so, because of circumstances that precede them, despite everyone’s being mostly reasonably and even charitable?

I think Neil was right to make a comparison to racial commentary. Maybe the Johnny’s comment on her blog was over-the-top; but I wonder, Nate, if you really could have read it the same way, or could have responded the same way, if she was talking not about comparisons of homosexuality to pederasty but about reasoned, dispassionate arguments concerning racial superiority. If presented with someone who otherwise seemed to be a nice guy but who argued — not spewing hatred and fear and vitriol, but calmly arguing with facts and statistics — that blacks are biologically determined to be violent and oversexed and less intelligent than other races, and who asserted that his belief was not based on hatred or fear, but “clear, articulable reasons[…], whether they be right or wrong,” would you be at all reluctant to call him or his belief racist or bigoted?

It seems to me that cases like yours, Nate, when someone stops believing that homosexuality (or homosexual sex) is immoral, almost always (should I say always?) follow not from a particularly compelling new argument presented by a friend in conversation one evening but from coming to develop real friendships with actual gay people. Your presentation of your own case sounds close to the revelation of the new argument (in the form of Andrew Sullivan’s book), but I wonder how much your experiences in and after college with your wife and other friends had prepared you for that argument.

This is reminiscent of Harvey Milk’s exhortation to other gays to come out to their families immediately, right now, handing them a telephone, declaring some statistic about how people who “know one of us” voted overwhelmingly against an oppressive law.

And if relationships with real people are so pivotal — or sympathy, as in the case of your being able to connect your own pre-sexual yearning to Andrew Sullivan’s — doesn’t it seem fair to call the thing being overcome fear? Or a fear-like discomfort?

I think there is some dangerous ground here where we might be tempted to dismiss arguments by psychoanalyzing their proponents, and maybe that’s what you’re (rightly) nervous about. But I don’t think there’s much room to doubt that with sex as with race (and, less inflammatorily, with all sorts of other things) thinking people build intellectual edifices to justify (or “to explain”?) their pre-existing feelings.

Maybe there is something charitable about not wanting to identify a whole person by a noun that describes one of their mistakes; he’s not “a racist” or “a homophobe” (or “a bigot”) — though perhaps a few of his beliefs are racist or homophobic (or bigoted).

I think what the Johnny blogger was expressing might have been a moral opposition to a belief, and I don’t think I want to discredit that. I do think it’s important to engage civil debate, even (or especially?) against racist and homophobic arguments; I do not want to revoke (as if I could) anyone’s “freedom to say horrible things.” However, I do believe that arguments that stigmatize and marginalize human beings — even if they are loaded with “love the sinner, hate the sin” provisions — have a real human cost. I don’t believe, for instance, that gay teenagers are at such an elevated suicide risk because their souls or psyches are fundamentally disordered; I think it’s more likely because they are awakening to their natures in families and churches and a society that calls something basic and unchangeable about them either disgusting or sinful or broken, that even many of the ones who seem nice and reasonable — who don’t seem like hateful bigots at all, who get prestigious invitations from Obama — say that something about them that they feel powerfully and cannot change is like bestiality or pedophilia.

Robbie:

Maybe the Johnny’s comment on her blog was over-the-top; but I wonder, Nate, if you really could have read it the same way, or could have responded the same way, if she was talking not about comparisons of homosexuality to pederasty but about reasoned, dispassionate arguments concerning racial superiority. If presented with someone who otherwise seemed to be a nice guy but who argued — not spewing hatred and fear and vitriol, but calmly arguing with facts and statistics — that blacks are biologically determined to be violent and oversexed and less intelligent than other races, and who asserted that his belief was not based on hatred or fear, but “clear, articulable reasons[…], whether they be right or wrong,” would you be at all reluctant to call him or his belief racist or bigoted?

I would be very reluctant. I would try to respond as I did here. The absolute dismissal of conversations regarding race does much, it seems to me, to allow the continued propagation of wrong ideas. Malignant ideas like those claims you cited as examples are allowed to fester, rather than be exposed and cured.

I don’t think there’s much room to doubt that with sex as with race (and, less inflammatorily, with all sorts of other things) thinking people build intellectual edifices to justify (or “to explain”?) their pre-existing feelings.

I thought about this issue as I wrote my post and deliberately left it unmentioned at the time because I wasn’t sure how to treat it adequately in the span of the post. This is certainly a concern, though not in a simple way. Arguments are often the grammar for expressing (and justifying) pre-existing feelings, but the relationship is a complex and dynamic one, and the life of that grammar affects the feelings underneath it. Our opinions are not fully plastic, nor should they be: we would be tossed on a stormy sea of constantly changing beliefs if we could not insulate ourselves against instant persuasion. But when the grammar of our feelings is consistently defeated, our feelings begin to change.

It is worse than uncharitable to call someone a bigot if his arguments are not themselves bigoted: it’s presumptive and arrogant. We do not interact with people soul to soul. We interact via media, things like language and touch and so on. When we talk with a person, it is our arguments that our touching, not our minds, and to chuck aside a person’s arguments and assert a knowledge of the causes of those arguments is reckless and hostile, even if one can sometimes be accurate.

I do believe that arguments that stigmatize and marginalize human beings — even if they are loaded with “love the sinner, hate the sin” provisions — have a real human cost.

Absolutely. I appreciated HB’s argument for “the space to be wrong” partially because it contained no assertion that this space is somehow safe. Falsity does have a real human cost, and there is much pain in a society that allows much that is false and ugly and wrong to be expressed. It’s not okay for people to believe that homosexuality is wrong in a full sense: that wrong belief causes harm every day. I deny, though, that there is an easy, healthy way of negating that harm. Using hostile, discourse-destroying terms like “bigot” to wage war on the people who make false arguments makes the situation much worse.

I would be very reluctant [to call a dispassionate arguer for racial superiority or his belief racist or bigoted].

Using hostile, discourse-destroying terms like “bigot” to wage war on the people who make false arguments makes the situation much worse.

I think I agree with everything you said in this response. From statements like these, I wonder if you’re not talking about a kind of decent (and pragmatic) civility. I certainly agree that using hostile terms like “bigot” to “wage war” on people makes the situation worse — which isn’t to say that words like “bigoted” don’t mean something, or that they don’t accurately describe some people or beliefs.

Which is to say, it might be true than an argument or a belief is racist or homophobic or bigoted. It might also be true that it’s idiotic, or some other very unflattering thing. To whatever extent we consider it legitimate to describe a whole person on the basis of one or a few of their beliefs, it might even be true that the person is racist or homophobic or bigoted. But it is profoundly unlikely to be helpful to say so; and it might be helpful to engage the arguments without saying so.

If this is what you’re saying, I can agree whole-heartedly — but not if you are saying (as I thought you might have been) that calling the argument racist or homophobic or bigoted is not merely impolite and counter-productive, but in fact false.

Robbie: That’s a helpful break-down.

Which is to say, it might be true than an argument or a belief is racist or homophobic or bigoted. It might also be true that it’s idiotic, or some other very unflattering thing. To whatever extent we consider it legitimate to describe a whole person on the basis of one or a few of their beliefs, it might even be true that the person is racist or homophobic or bigoted. But it is profoundly unlikely to be helpful to say so; and it might be helpful to engage the arguments without saying so.

I agree with this, and agree that this category of person exists. I also believe, however, that there exists the kind of person I described initially: a person who can believe wrong arguments for reasons that are not fear, who is genuinely ready to be convinced he is wrong if presented with sufficient evidence. I think it’s very difficult, sometimes, to tell the difference between people of these two categories. Terms like “homophobic” are usually “impolite and counter-productive” when they are accurate, but they are also frequently false, and reinforce error in these cases.