Demagogue

when I find myself agreeing with Andrew Sullivan. Based on this NY Times piece a lot of people are talking about, Sully points out something I've thought for a while-- that being gay is often erroneously compared to being a racial minority. While I do think it fits in some ways, it's a hard sell to a lot of people because of the ways that it doesn't fit. (Visibility, mostly.) But today's anti-gay rhetoric mirrors almost all the classic anti-Semitic arguments.

It's all so familiar. I think the arguments now made by some Christianists are replicas of the old anti-Semitism, peddled by so many Christians in the past: that Jews are to be loved, but loving them is dependent on their conversion to Christianity; that you can love individual Jews while disdaining Judaism; that Jews' stubbornness in resisting conversion is evidence of their inherent evil; that such evil, at some point, has to be segregated from mainstream society as much as possible. Gays are not the new blacks. They're the new Jews. And the Church, in both Catholic and Protestant variants, is dredging up its old anti-Semitism in new guises. The GOP is along for the ride.
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The danger of the Jews/Gays spreading their disease throughout society, their enormous power despite tiny numbers, their ability to pass, their threat to children, their flaunting of their disagreement with the New Testament.

Not to mention that we're irrationally hated, feared, are considered untrustworthy and we supposedly have a secret "agenda"-- all of which we can "change" if we just convert to born-again Christians! As a gay person who grew up in a half-Jewish, agnostic/atheistic family, I noticed these similarities a long time ago. I spent a lot of my youth telling people that I didn't need their Jesus and that I'm not going to their made-up hell. As a kid I even had parents stop letting their kids play with me when they found out that my parents didn't go to church. I can't help but seeing all of this as a variation on a theme.

Ironically, the very biblical passages that Christians use to support their unfriendly beliefs about homosexuality are cherrypicked from Leviticus, which also outlines all the kashrut laws that they don't believe apply to them. (Not to mention that Jesus never talked about homosexuality-- ever. Additionally there are a few ambigious same-sex relationships in the Bible that everyone seems to ignore.) Meanwhile most Jews, with the exception of most Orthodox Jews, are far more accepting of gays and lesbians-- even if they do observe many of the laws outlined in Levitucus by keeping kosher. Weird, ain't it?

It's just too bad that being gay can't be declared a "religion," because then we could get a whole lot of those "special rights" that religious people get for something that they choose and can change if they so desire.