A Second Motive

Matthew Yglesias published an insightful piece yesterday, he brought out an idea I had not heard before. What we can call "Christian conservatives" have defined life to be a difficult thing to get through -- to oversimplify, you are not supposed to do a lot of things that you might like to do. This seems to me to be an important justification for their overuse of the word "family," as in Focus on the Family, American Family Association, Family Research Council, etcetera; for them, the concept of a family symbolizes the principle of resisting temptation, a family means building a monogamous relationship with someone, with offspring you love and protect, versus building ties to the world outside your household, a world that lures you with offers of sin and temptation. There is nothing wrong with families, please don't quote me as criticizing those ideals, I love my family and can think of nothing more important in the world than keeping a family together and happy. But in our day the word has become a code-word for a set of beliefs, actually a set of feelings, having to do with avoiding mundane temptation. Everybody is in favor of families, not everybody sees it the way the Family Blah Blah groups do.

The Christian right has a problem, they have a really pretty bad track record when it comes to living up to their ideals. We smirk and laugh over here in lefty-land every time another Republican gets caught having an affair, spending time with hookers, hitting on same-sex underlings, sitting with a "wide stance" in an airport men's room, because Christian conservatives have defined acceptable conduct in terms too narrow for themselves to stay within the boundaries. They talk like everyone else is weak and evil, as if the institutions of marriage and family are constantly under attack, but they themselves are not really that good at staying on the straight and narrow. Even with all the talk about resisting temptation, there is a lot of "hiking the Appalachian trail" among that cohort.

Yglesias comments that the United States is a country that’s “conservative right up until the moment that it costs us.”

I think this explains a lot about the appeal of anti-gay crusades to social conservative leaders. Most of what “traditional values” asks of people is pretty hard. All the infidelity and divorce and premarital sex and bad parenting and whatnot take place because people actually want to do the things traditional values is telling them not to do. And the same goes for most of the rest of the Christian recipe. Acting in a charitable and forgiving manner all the time is hard. Loving your enemies is hard. Turning the other cheek is hard. Homosexuality is totally different. For a small minority of the population, of course, the injunction “don’t have sex with other men!” (or, as the case may be, other women) is painfully difficult to live up to. But for the vast majority of people this is really, really easy to do. Campaigns against gay rights, gay people, and gay sex thus have a lot of the structural elements of other forms of crusading against sexual excess or immorality, but they’re not really asking most people to do anything other than become self-righteous about their pre-existing preferences. Social Conservatism Beyond the Easy Parts

This suggests a second motive for vehement anti-gay campaigning as we have seen in our county and elsewhere. The first motive, of course, is the need to suppress one's own tendencies, a man hates to find that he has "those feelings" and as he tries to deny them in himself he accuses others of failing to suppress their own feelings adequately. It must just kill some of these guys who are trying as hard as they can to live as heterosexuals, when they see openly gay people living normal lives, having friends, accomplishing things. That's gotta be hard to watch, and you can see why they'd be against that.

But this second motive is a little more subtle. With all their white-knuckle monogamy, the mandible-grinding difficulty of forgiving those who trespass against them, it must be a tremendous relief to be able to point the finger at sinners who are doing something that they themselves have no desire to do. It's easy for you not to have sex with members of your own sex, therefore those who do that are immoral beyond your capacity to imagine.

It's not an argument I have heard before: Campaigns against gay rights, gay people, and gay sex thus have a lot of the structural elements of other forms of crusading against sexual excess or immorality, but they’re not really asking most people to do anything other than become self-righteous about their pre-existing preferences. Good point.