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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Shoddy scholarship and pseudoscience
Anti-gay advocates should be embarrassed by the quality of what passes for scholarship coming from their side. A case in point is the Spring 2002 issue of Regent University Law Review, which is entirely devoted to attacks on homosexuality. In one article, Dale M. Schowengerdt, faulting the work of gay-marriage expert William Eskridge, acknowledges, "No one will argue that homosexuality has not existed" -- then cleverly cites the condemnations in Genesis 19:1-29; Romans 1:24-27; 1 Corinthians 6:10; and 1 Timothy 1:10. Not surprisingly, he leaves out 2 Samuel 3:2-5; 1 Kings 11:3; Deuteronomy 22:13-21; Ezra 9:12; and Mark 10:9 -- which concern the right to take multiple wives and concubines; the requirement that nonvirginal brides be executed; and prohibitions of mixed marriages and divorce.
Schowengerdt quotes fellow Eskridge debunkers Peter Lubin and Dwight Duncan, who criticize Eskridge's footnoted references to what they consider obscure civilizations, saying, "Bullied by footnotes, the reader's critical faculties surrender without a fight." Oddly enough, this observation is made in one of Schowengerdt's 136 footnotes.
On the uniqueness of heterosexual marriage, Schowengerdt writes, "No other combination but man and woman involves the unique sexual complementarity of the one-flesh union upon which the survival of the human race depends." Reading this, one would think that the entire human race were about to "turn queer" and stop reproducing, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.
Regent's president and chancellor, the Rev. Pat Robertson, is known for regularly proclaiming his close personal relationship with God; praying for Supreme Court justices to die; and defending his erstwhile mining business associate, indicted war criminal Charles Taylor of Liberia. In 1998, Robertson warned that God would punish Disney World for hosting "Gay Days" by sending a hurricane to hit the park in Orlando, Fla. As God would have it, however, Hurricane Bonnie that year turned away from Orlando and hit Virginia Beach, where Robertson's ministry and university are headquartered. In 2003, Robertson's televised prayers on "The 700 Club" failed to divert Hurricane Isabel. Perhaps God was watching another channel.
For many years, a primary source for anti-gay statistics has been psychologist Paul Cameron, who was expelled by the American Psychological Association in December 1983 for using unsound methods and misrepresenting the work of others. His Family Research Institute publishes pseudoscientific reports claiming that gay parents harm children, gays rape and murder children, and gays have a dramatically shorter life expectancy. His "research" has been used by syndicated columnists, members of Congress, and Defense Department officials. In November 1997, former Education Secretary William Bennett stated, both on ABC's "This Week" and in the Weekly Standard, that the average life expectancy for gay men was 43 years. The source of this bogus fact was Paul Cameron.
A work of questionable scientific merit that has been seized upon recently by the religious right is "The Man Who Would Be Queen," by J. Michael Bailey, a psychology professor at Northwestern University. Bailey's errors include accepting old stereotypes of gay femininity and relying on wildly unrepresentative samples, such as the men he found at Chicago's gay dance bars. The book was praised by John Derbyshire, a virulently anti-gay contributor to National Review.
One argument that is often made against gay people is that homosexuality is unnatural, existing nowhere else in nature. This was disproved by Bruce Bagemihl's 1999 book, "Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity," which surveys scholarly studies documenting homosexual behavior in 450 animal species. Yet when we show that homosexuality is observed throughout the animal kingdom, our opponents turn right around and say that doesn't make it right. "Since when is animal behavior the standard for humans?" we are asked. I quite agree, but will these people please make up their minds? Speaking of unnatural things, there is nothing natural about technology, medicine, literature or the arts. The argument from nature is really just a ploy designed to obscure the fact that homosexuality is indeed normal for a small portion of the population.
Those preparing to apply gay-related scholarship to matters of public policy should first consult the Gay Directory of Authoritative Resources, a listing of experts working in various gay-related policy areas, published by the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies.
Defending a sacred institution
Both President Bush and Sen. Kerry have talked about marriage as a sacred institution, but the government is not charged with defending the sacred. That is the job of religious leaders. When the sacred needs politicians to defend it, the sacred is in big trouble. The surest way to protect the sacredness of something is to keep politicians as far away from it as possible.
The moral authority of some religious leaders is seriously called into question by some of their own statements. In a 1986 pastoral letter on homosexuals, Vatican doctrinal chief Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger deplored anti-gay violence, only to justify it: "[W]hen civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase." Thus we have the princes of the Church making excuses for thugs.
But this line of argument is not only used against gays. When a record number of women in Spain were murdered by their husbands and boyfriends in 2003, the Spanish Roman Catholic bishops responded with a pastoral letter that fingered the sexual revolution as the culprit.
Opponents of same-sex marriage like to say that we are trying to overturn six millennia of tradition. But this steady-state portrayal of marriage ignores the fact that notions of marriage, courtship, love and sexuality have varied considerably over the centuries and across cultures. Women used to be treated little better than chattel; does the fact that this was a long tradition make it preferable to the standard of equal partnership that we have today? Apparently so, according to the Southern Baptist Convention. In 2000, the Southern Baptists, citing biblical authority, adopted a revised summary of their faith that declared: "A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ." Unfortunately, the same biblical author cited by the Baptists, Paul, also instructed slaves to obey their masters. As usual, the fundamentalists conveniently pick and choose which holy passages they care about, while acting as if the rest of us don't have the same privilege.
The fundamentalists, of course, are free to believe what they like, thanks to the First Amendment's "wall of separation between Church & State" described by President Jefferson in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. What they are not free to do is impose those beliefs on the rest of us. Endless rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, the present dispute is not about sacred marriage as ordained by churches but civil marriage as ordained by government. That being said, the moral arguments against homosexuality have been addressed and refuted rather thoroughly by ethics professor John Corvino in a series of articles that are available on the Independent Gay Forum.
