Letters to the Editor
Anything
But...
Wayne Besen's (Anything But Straight)
determination to expose the fraud, ineffectiveness, and political agendas
of the "ex-gay" movement is certainly a boon to our communities,
as writer Bob Wolff attests
(February OITM, "Troubled Souls, Fooled Again").
However, Besen uses some of the same techniques
he decries in the ex-gay movement. In his zeal to kill the ex-gay movement,
or at least to inoculate the rest of us against its allure, he uses a
machine-gun approach that does not serve Besen or the community well.
As Wolff mentions, Besen uses gay stereotypes
(speakers "prance," an ex-lesbian greeter is "linebacker-sized,"
several men are "strikingly effeminate") to gratuitously trash
the appearance and personalities of the troubled souls who attend ex-gay
meetings.
He also does to the ex-gay testifiers exactly
what he says the ex-gays do to recruits: he takes one idea – not
even a "fact" – i.e., that ex-gay testifiers were "abnormally
suicidal" (compared to what?), constructs a theory around it (their
"normal" coming out processes were interrupted at adolescence;
if they had/would just come out, all their problems would be solved) and
uses it to explain everything. And
although Besen rightly critiques the bogus "research" cited
in much of the ex-gay and Christian right rhetoric, he cites equally bogus
authorities: the so-called "False Memory Syndrome Foundation,"
founded in their own self-interest by accused parents supporting a concept
never accepted by the American Psychological
Association or given credibility by widely accepted, peer-reviewed
researchers.
It's great that someone had the stomach
to examine all this material, but we should not overlook in our own authors
the egregious errors we criticize in our opponents. Just because Mr. Besen
is "our" zealot doesn't mean his methods are above reproach.
OITM and reviewer Bob Wolff should have taken a more critical look.
E. Lynn Lemont
St. Albans
Marriage
Minefield
As a lifelong "confirmed bachelor,"
I have never been a big fan of the institution of marriage and have no
plans whatsoever to get married now or at any time in the future.
Having said that, I am nonetheless
compelled to warn opponents of same-gender marriage that they are walking
into a dangerous constitutional minefield with their campaign to ban it.
Their argument that marriage can
be only between a man and a woman is clearly and undeniably grounded in
a religious doctrine. The opponents of same-gender marriage are under
the mistaken belief that the institution of civil marriage and the religious
sacrament of holy matrimony are one and the same.
Nothing could be farther from
the truth. They are, in fact, two totally separate entities. Indeed, civil
marriage was established in the early 19th century to get around religious
prohibitions against awarding the sacrament of holy matrimony to couples
of different faiths.
With the U.S. Supreme Court having
already removed the last legal justifications for de jure discrimination
against gay and lesbian Americans (Romer v. Evans, 1996 and Lawrence v.
Texas, 2003), it
is impossible for statutory and state-constitutional bans on same gender
marriage to pass First and Fourteenth Amendment muster.
It is obvious that they are every
bit as illegal under the 14th Amendment as the old racist Jim Crow laws
that banned interracial marriage – which the high court struck down
way back in 1967 (Loving v. Virginia).
More importantly, they also constitute
a government endorsement of an anti-gay religious doctrine that clearly
violates the establishment-of-religion clause of the First Amendment.
Neither Congress nor the states have
any constitutional authority to enshrine into law an exclusionary religious
doctrine that violates constitutional rights. They are denied that authority
by First Amendment, the Full Faith and Credit Clause (Article IV) and
by the Supremacy Clause (Article VI), which binds all elected officeholders
by oath to support, uphold – and obey – the Constitution.
Skeeter Sanders
Shelburne
At Witt's End by Leah Wittenberg
