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Suzanne Pharr
Suzanne Pharr
Connecting the Dots of Oppression
by Peggy Luhrs
Shortly
after 9/11 I joined the peace vigil at the top of Church Street. My sign
read, "The antidote to terror is increased human rights for all."
So I was certainly ready to hear Suzanne Pharr's message at the University
of Vermont that human rights must be the standard for all progressive
movements. Pharr sees the LGBT community as vital to that forward motion.
Pharr is the author of Homophobia: A
Weapon of Sexism and In the Time of the Right: Reflections on
Liberation and a former director of the Highlander Research and Education
Center. Her talk was on April 11 at the Billings Theater. I'm only sorry
the theater wasn't full because Pharr gave us a road map of our likely
future under the neocons and some inklings of how we might forge a new
path.
Pharr noted that at least since
the abolitionists, there have been two divergent streams in American thought.
One constricted human rights – indeed it supported slavery –
and the other advocating expanding human rights – the abolitionists
and women's suffragists. One
stream expands democracy and the other contracts it and people's participation
in it. One strand represents slavery, the Jim crow laws, the Ku Klux Klan,
McCarthyism and Cointelpro. Cointelpro was the FBI operation that spied
on US citizens who were exercising their constitutional rights to oppose
the Vietnam War.
The human rights stream includes the
Labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women's liberation movement
and the gay rights movement. Pharr told the audience, "We in this
room stand in that stream of struggle."
She went on to give a brief
history of the rise of the Right since the Sixties, beginning with the
candidacy of Barry Goldwater. She noted that Richard Vigery began to work
to increase conservative voter numbers by using fear-based direct mail,
a tradition continued in the last election using the LGBT community and
the "threat" of gay marriage to mobilize right wing voters and
to solicit their money.
This "politics of resentment"
began with the Black civil rights movement and a sometimes overt and sometimes
barely concealed racism. Pharr outlined how the right has mobilized resentment
by funneling corporate money into think tanks that define the conservative
agenda. Many of these think tanks currently are referenced by news media
as if they were objective sources. The Republican Party has built an alliance
with the religious right. The Moral Majority of the Reagan era was one
of the first of these organizations.
She said the Right discovered the
best way to defeat women was to organize women against women. I've had
plenty of experience with that tactic. Phyllis Schafly was paid to travel
the country opposing the ERA, and she did that successfully in Vermont.
We now have Concerned Women for America and the repulsive Ann Coulter
to replace her.
By the same token (pun intended),
they use African Americans to defeat African Americans. Alan Keyes is
a good example. This is one tactic of the new "soft" racism
that also claims white people are victims and that uses conservative Christianity
to unite black churches with the Right's agenda.
The election of Reagan consolidated
gains for the Right and started the horrendous practice of putting the
fox in charge of the henhouse. Business was deregulated and industry shills
took over government regulatory agencies. An anti-tax strategy became
primary. Reagan gave us the image of the Welfare Queen, another racialized
slur.
Of course, during all this maneuvering,
there was resistance and progression in some parts of society. But the
2000 election really solidified power for the right. Those of us who are
paying attention notice that daily we are losing government protection
and constitutional rights while a creeping theocracy is supported by government
money handed out to "faith-based organizations," all of which
have been Christian.
Pharr noted that queer folks are used
as a direct target to instill fear, and that Vigery has told his readers
that LGBT people "have a veneer of goodness but underneath are trying
to destroy our churches." She sees the LGBT community as one of three
canaries in the struggle for a climate that supports human rights. The
other two canary groups are immigrants and prisoners.
But, she said, as LGBT people, we
"call the question of what it means to be human. We hold the possibility
of integrating identities. The Right would constrict the definition of
family while we expand it."
Pharr said our work is to expand possibilities,
expand the definition of family and create hope. We, the LGBT community,
are vital to progressive vision as people who incorporate multiple identities
and ethnicities. She sees us as people of hope who are at our best creating
space for the humanity of everyone. We need to counter the constrictive
vision that the Right promotes.
In the question period I noted one
of the things Pharr had not mentioned was increased militarization. She
agreed that was another part of the plan. I also asked her why she thought
it was so difficult to get out the incredible contradictions of the religious
Right. For example, they talk about family but their capitalist values
support no actual families, they talk about Jesus but practice a politics
of exclusion.
She said the short answer was "We
are reluctant to oppose things we need to oppose... capitalism, we are
reluctant to give up that material benefit." She looked for leadership
from the young and said it was coming mostly these days from universities
and that we need to support those places where liberation is nourished.
She suggested the important thing was to have our vision, and that we
how we make it happen might best be described by a book title from the
Highlander Center called We Make a Road by Walking. This is a
path we better get onto before we are absolutely bulldozed from the landscape
by the resentment politics of the Rapture Right.
Peggy Luhrs is a longtime peace, feminist, and lesbian activist in
Burlington.