What do the motley crew of Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill,
Jesus Christ and Malcolm X all have in common?
Are you struggling? Let me give you a little hand. These men
““ and a growing list of other historical heavyweights ““
are all being slowly coaxed out of the closet by kindly academic
historians.
Yes, that’s right. These paragons of masculinity, valor
and holiness have all been found singing from the wrong hymn sheet,
putting from the rough, dancing with the divas … you get the
picture.
The late C.A. Tripp, an American sex researcher and eminent
historian, wrote a book that he left in his will, titled “The
Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln,” in which the United
States’ most revered president was found to have had several
plausible male lovers.
And what about the son of God? According to Biblical scholar
Morton Smith of Columbia University, a fragment of a manuscript
found at the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem in 1958 showed that
the full text of St. Mark chapter 10 implies Jesus spent the night
with a young man. Jesus “taught him the mystery of the
Kingdom of God”? Sounds like a good Christian chat-up line to
me.
But if the country’s greatest president and Jesus Christ
himself didn’t see anything wrong with hooking up with
another man, why are hundreds of thousands of gays and lesbians
across the United States ““ and the world ““ still
actively stigmatized by a hostile culture and oppressive laws?
Tomorrow at noon, Bruin Plaza will be turned into a mock-up
church by the admirable and intensely dedicated members of the
Student Coalition for Marriage Equality. William and Sean, who
I’m sure are deeply in love, will do what people deeply in
love do: get married.
According to the event’s organizers, all students and
staff are very welcome, but UCLA only has the honor of hosting the
ceremony because same-sex marriage is not recognized by state law
in California ““ nor any other state in the union, with the
noble exception of Massachusetts.
The kinetic Sara Sposito, director of publicity for the SCME,
told me, “The ultimate goal of the coalition is to get
600,000 signatures in five months to get an amendment put on the
June 2006 ballot. We hope the wedding will be a wonderful
celebration but also bring attention to the issue, so when we start
petitioning next year students will be responsive to us.”
Gay marriage’s absence from the statute book is the result
of a narrow-minded amalgam of religious dogma, ignorant bigotry and
the conservative nostalgia for a fictional sanctified family
life.
Christianity, Islam and Judaism have a long history of negative
attitudes toward homosexuality.
Everyone knows the episode in the Bible where the cities of
Sodom and Gomorrah are razed to the ground by God because the
inhabitants have committed the grave crime of being gay: “If
a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed
an abomination: they shall be put to death: their blood is upon
them.” (Leviticus 20:13).
The hadith, a collection of sayings attributed to the prophet
Mohammad, doesn’t mince its words either: “When a man
mounts another man, the throne of God shakes.”
This religious dogma ““ considerably more pervasive in the
United States than the rest of the West ““ also has an oblique
but very real effect on secular societal attitudes. For example, a
recent poll by the Boston Globe found that 50 percent of Americans
disapprove of gay and lesbian marriages, while 37 percent approve
and 11 percent are neutral.
The 66 percent who are against or undecided are not all devout
Christians, Muslims or Jews, but their attitudes have undoubtedly
been influenced by the homophobia that emanates from these
religions.
In the United States, the Christian right has noisily and
vehemently opposed marriage equality for gay people, though there
exists a considerable movement of progressive Christians ““
including many pious gay and lesbian people ““ who are working
for a more modern and tolerant approach in the Church.
Aside from the retrograde wings of the major religions, there is
loud opposition from other quarters.
There are the putrid reactionary arguments that same-sex
marriage will dilute the essence of matrimony or that it’s
the harbinger of the death of the family as we know it, to give
just two examples of the rhetorical flourishes you can find rotting
away in conservative archives.
So let’s look at the facts ““ a form of reasoning
that’s often absent in high-minded moralizers.
Where gay marriages have been allowed by law, there has been an
increase in marriages and a decrease in divorce.
Darren Spedale, a corporate attorney, studied Denmark, where de
facto same-sex marriage has existed for more than a decade. In
Denmark, the gay divorce rate is one-fifth the rate for
heterosexuals.
But there’s even more ammunition with which to fire back
at the social conservatives.
Following the introduction of gay marriage in Denmark, the rate
of heterosexual marriage rose by 15 percent and the rate of
heterosexual divorce fell by 12 percent. So same-sex marriage
manifestly has nothing to do with eroding the
“sanctity” of the union between men and women.
I don’t have time to ruminate on whether homosexuality is
hereditary or a lifestyle choice, although I would say that
speaking to gay or lesbian people about their personal feelings and
a cursory look at history should dispel any doubts.
What we should all be interested in are the basic tenets of
freedom and liberalism as expounded by people like John Stuart
Mill, who wrote in 1848 that we should be allowed the
“liberty of our tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of
our life to suit our own character; of doing as we like, subject to
such consequences as may follow: without impediment from our
fellow-creatures … even though they should think our conduct
foolish, perverse or wrong.”
Based on information from thefacebook.com, I would tentatively
reason that the average UCLA student has about 80 friends. Now, if
Professor Alfred Kinsey’s infamous 1948 findings are to be
believed (that at least 10 percent of the population is gay), the
average student here knows (very roughly) eight gay or lesbian
people.
Even if we hold by the very conservative estimate that 4 percent
of the population is gay, that still means the average UCLA student
knows at least three gay people, whether you are aware of it or
not.
Until progressives really take on these prejudices that should
have been firmly deposited in the dustbin of history a long time
ago, many people will believe that their deepest passions are
somehow wrong, immoral or un-Christian, and never feel confident
enough to be candid about their feelings.
Do you know eight openly gay people?
Some historians have even averred that Abraham Lincoln’s
lifelong depression was brought on by repressed homosexuality. This
type of depression is one of the few tragedies of the human
condition that can be remedied very simply ““ the antidote is
called tolerance and equality.
In the moving words of Andrew Sullivan, the United States’
leading campaigner for gay marriage, denying gay people the right
to commit themselves to each other is uniquely cruel “because
it attacks the very heart of what makes a human being human: the
ability to love and be loved.”
We should all celebrate with Sean and William tomorrow and ask
the lingering question: Do we really need to wait for a full-scale
gay and lesbian civil rights movement for the lawmakers to do the
decent thing?
Kennard is a third-year history student. E-mail him at
mkennard@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to
viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.