Gay Rights

Why are liberals for gay rights? The answer is simple and straightforward. For liberals, gay rights follow naturally from Nurturant Parent morality. A nurturant parent treats his or her children fairly and loves them equally. By the Nation As Family metaphor, the government, as metaphorical parent, should treat all citizens fairly and equally, gay or not.

Why are conservatives against gay rights? Why is there so much hostility against homosexuals on the part of conservatives? This has nothing to do with disliking big government and bureaucracy, or supporting fiscal responsibility, or supporting states' rights. The answer is Strict Father morality. Gay and lesbian couples simply do not fit the Strict Father model of the family. Homosexuality challenges the monolithic authority of the father. And above all, it challenges the natural order, which presupposes that sex is heterosexual sex in which men are dominant over women and that, in a family, this natural order carries over to the moral order.

But this is not just a matter of the family. The family, conservatives understand well, is the basis of all morality, all social arrangements, and all politics. Homosexuality challenges the very idea that the Strict Father family is the right model of the family, and therefore of morality and politics.

That is why conservatives resist seeing homosexuality as natural for a certain percentage of the population. Conservatives do not talk much about the increasing evidence that homosexuality has a genetic basis. Gays speak of "discovering" that they are gay, rather than "choosing" to be gay. Conservatives, however, speak of the gay "lifestyle," as though being gay were simply a conscious choice of a particular way of life. If there is no choice about being gay, if one is born gay or bisexual or heterosexual, then the force is taken away from the idea of homosexuality as an immoral choice of "lifestyle." Indeed, if free will is taken away, if there is no choice, then it is much harder to make homosexuality a moral issue.

The conservative version of the Moral Strength metaphor requires that sexual morality be a matter that one has control over: it is a matter of self-discipline. If homosexuality is genetically determined and, therefore, natural, normal, and out of the domain of free will, the concept of Moral Strength, which requires that all immoral behavior be preventable through self-discipline, becomes inapplicable. You can no longer say: if you just try hard enough, you can be heterosexual. Because the priority of Moral Strength is so central to the conservative moral system, conservatives will necessarily have a very hard time accepting the idea that homosexuality is biologically determined, natural, and normal for a certain segment of the population.

Interestingly enough, many conservatives would still find homosexual sex, gay households, and gay families immoral, even if being gay were a matter of genetics, not choice. Homosexual sex would still be a violation of the natural order and gay households would still be a challenge to the Strict Father family, which is the basis for conservative morality. Gay men are "deviant"; they deviate from the sexual norms of the community, going outside of the bounds set by Strict Father morality. Not only are gays seen as immoral in

themselves, but they are seen as a threat since they could lead others "astray," either directly or indirectly through the very existence of homosexual sex and gay households and families, which "blur the boundaries" of moral and immoral behavior.

Perhaps the institution that gays "threaten" the most is the military. President Clinton's proposal, at the beginning of his administration, to allow gays to function openly in the military was attacked violently by conservatives both inside and outside the military. The military is, to a large extent, the institutional realization of Strict Father morality. It has hierarchy, strict roles, punishments and rewards, and requires both physical and moral strength. Discipline is what the army is all about. Though it has a kind of socialistic internal structure (top-down bureaucratic control, government-paid medical care, government-provided housing and schools, PX discounts for members only, no free enterprise, government-provided golf courses and athletic facilities), it serves in the defense of capitalism and it has a Strict Father culture. It has a macho masculine culture. Gay men, despite the popularity of bodybuilding in the gay community, are conceptualized as being weak and feminine, rather than properly macho. Gay men in uniform threaten the image of the uniform: that anyone wearing it is a real man! The masculinity implicit in the meaning of the uniform is anything but trivial. But what really makes gays anathema to the military is all of the ways in which homosexuality flies in the face of Strict Father morality, which is the basis of military culture.

The Clinton administration approached the question of gays in the military as one of civil rights, as if the integration of gays into the military was akin to the integration of blacks and women into the military. It was a drastic mistake. The attempt to integrate gays into the military was seen as an affront to manhood and Strict Father morality all over the country.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 966