not too much

In a Boston Globe column (13 Nov 06) , "War, religion, and gay rights", (13 Nov 06) James Carroll notes the cancellation of a gay pride parade in Jerusalem because of religious protests, ballots in eight US states -- seven of which passed -- repudiating the right of homosexual couples to marry, and the fuss over Ted Haggard's resignation. However, the Massachusetts constitutional convention ignored unusual political pressure from the state's Catholic bishops to support an anti-gay-marriage amendment there.

When public crises are defined by an immoral American war, universal cuts in social services, violence among young people, resurgent nuclear arsenals, rising global inequity, unprecedented jeopardy of the earth itself, why are the bishops obsessed with this particular question?

Same-sex erotic love is not the issue. Humans, including Catholic bishops, have long accommodated it. But that accommodation assumes denial and shame. What brings demonstrators into streets across cultures, and what shows up in the United States as "values" politics, mobilizing bishops, is the movement to bring homosexuality out of the dark. When gay people openly assert their identities as such, whether through parades or through the demand for full and equal social recognition, reactionaries cannot stand it. Why?

Two answers, one personal and one political. The open affirmation of gay identity can pose a mortal threat to people whose own sexual identity is insecure. The Haggard story is a cautionary tale. As it happens, I was present last year to hear Pastor Ted preach a sermon at his mega-church, and it included a digressive attack on homosexuals that was as venomous and it was gratuitous. He equated gay sex with bestiality. Even at the time, I wondered about the dark energy of his hatred. That it is revealed now as self-hatred comes as no surprise. One needn't draw a direct line from Haggard's behavior to the private morality of Catholic bishops to sense that the church's own deepening insecurity on all matters of sexuality, especially those surfaced by the still unresolved crisis of priestly sexual abuse of children, informs its exceptional opposition to gay rights.

And so in Jerusalem. The insecurities of male establishments, whose dominance over women is threatened, readily explode in contempt for any expression of gay pride. Patriarchy is at issue. There is a deflection here, and that points to the political use of gay bashing. At the end of the Cold War, when the Pentagon defined itself as the world's largest closet by decreeing "don't ask, don't tell," the issue of gays in the military was being used to deflect attention from the military's real problem: how to maintain Cold War levels of spending, and a Cold War nuclear arsenal, without a Cold War enemy?

The real "don't ask, don't tell" was "Don't ask us about our budgets and nukes, and we won't tell you about the future wars they will enable." All of the Sturm und Drang about gays in the military deflected American attention from the real issue of the moment, and it worked. The American Cold War ethos is still with us.

The human race is undergoing a massive cultural mutation. The meaning of sexuality is being transformed as biology revolutionizes reproduction. Women are demanding equality across the globe. Men are being forced to reimagine their familial and social roles. Gays and lesbians are at the center of these changes. Their refusal to be silent and invisible is one of the era's great resources, a magnificent sign of hope.

Are you listening John?

James Carroll was born in 1943, the son of an Air Force general. He received BA and MA degrees from the Paulist Fathers' seminary in Washington, and was ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1969. Carroll served as Catholic Chaplain at Boston University from 1969 to 1974 and then left the priesthood to become a writer.

He has published a ten novels, including three New York Times bestsellers. Carroll's essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Daedalus, and other publications. His op-ed page column has run weekly in the Boston Globe since 1992.

Carroll's memoir, An American requiem: God, my father, and the war that came between us, received the 1996 National Book Award in nonfiction and other awards. Constantine's sword: the church and the Jews: a history (2001) also received numerous awards. In 2004 he published Crusade: chronicles of an unjust war, adapted from his Boston Globe columns since 9/11. In May 2005, he published House of war: the Pentagon and the disastrous rise of American power, a history of the Pentagon, which the Chicago Tribune called "the first great non-fiction book of the new millennium."

Caroll is a member of the Advisory Board of the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University, a member of the Dean's Council at the Harvard Divinity School, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University.