Reply #17: Ah, our friends the Phelps. Where would we be without them. [View All]

[Plaid Adder]

Sick as he is, Phelps is useful for the same reason Alan "Looney Tunes" Keyes is useful--he forces people who are saner and more decent than he is to confront the concrete consequences of what has been for most of them, up to that point, pretty much abstract ideology. It's easy enough to endorse the evangelical Christian line on sexual morality until you see what it looks like when it empowers a scary-ass, sadistic, frothing lunatic who has no sense of decency to persecute someone you know.

I want to point out one thing about this story that I think says a lot about how this issue plays out in the political arena. A lot of the support that the community and the church are showing for Michael is tied to the hope that he might eventually be redeemed for heterosexuality. IN other words, they don't want to treat him as evilly as the Phelps family does, not just because they're not that evil, but becuase they're afraid that treating him this way will only drive him into the arms of the devil, i.e., homosexuality. Janice worries that sending Michael off to DC to hang out with the GBLT movers and shakers will confirm his sense of himself as gay--and the article shows it having exactly that effect.

Read from the a queer-positive POV--which I think was probably the POV of the author--it's a story about Michael and his family discovering that his life, his membership in the community, and his identity don't have to end just because he's gay. But read from a queer-unfriendly point of view, the whole story reinforces one of the arguments the Xtian right always makes about issues like gay marriage, which is that by allowing homosexuality to become socially acceptable we are not accomodating homosexuality but actively promoting it, swelling the ranks of GBLT America by recruiting impressionable young men like Michael who might otherwise lead happy heterosexual lives after being reclaimed by their families and churches.

Leaving aside lunatics like Fred Phelps and cynical ideologues like Rick Santorum, the basic struggle over gay rights in this country boils down to that conflict in perspective: what the GBLT community sees as acceptance and equality, the Christian right sees as recruitment.

I don't know how you resolve that conflict. As the Israel/Palestine situation has shown, you cannot negotiate with someone who denies your right to exist. I guess this story might suggest that some kind of compromise is possible, but that it will happen on the local level, in the end.

The Plaid Adder