God's Country

A Case Against Theocracy

Sandy Rapp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136581373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: AIDS & HIV

Explore the influence of religion on the privacy rights of U. S. citizens in this controversial new book!Here is a compelling and controversial new book that explores the enormous political influence that some religious groups currently wield. God's Country focuses particularly on the issue of personal privacy rights and the strategies and rhetoric these religious groups are using to diminish those rights among select segments of society. Author Sandy Rapp, a grassroots activist, shares her experiences in one-on-one debates with religious fundamentalists who have been on opposite sides of the social issues for which she has so passionately fought in recent years. Topics in this fascinating book include:

• privacy rights
• individual's rights as stated in the constitution
• AIDS and homophobia
• the abortion choice
• global population crisis
• gay and lesbian reporductive rights
• effective strategies for lobbyingSandy Rapp traces the patriarchal premises which underlie the twentieth-century crusade against homosexuality. She integrates various personal and professional perspectives and provides a challenging and comprehensive examination of the physical and psychological devastation inflicted upon women, lesbians, and gay men due to religious and political control over such personal decisions as the expression of one's sexuality, the use of birth control, the choice of abortion, and privacy rights. God's Country poses some provocative questions that are certain to spark debate among enlightened religious professionals, professors, and students of political science, government, women's history, human sexuality, and religion:
• Does the government have the right to impose mandatory childbirth upon women?
• Should a gay or lesbian person's sexual orientation weaken his/her civil rights?
• Can, in a free society, the religious beliefs of one denomination or group be imposed on all citizens?
• If freedom for all is to upheld in the United States, shouldn't the separation of church and state be maintained?

CHAPTER 1

A GAY MALE EXPERIENCE

“Cocksuckers,” demurred Yale Biology Professor Alvin Novick, MD, to an AIDS and Civil Liberties forum in Bridgehampton, New York on August 21, 1987. He took in a scattering of thin lips, tightened as the more conservative audience members reacted to the word. “Cocksuckers,” he repeated, and expressly identified himself as a gay male. “It's your word — not mine, you know,” he added to emphasize that such terms did not originate in the lesbian/gay community. Dr. Novick went on to lambaste the heterosexist orthodoxy imposed upon impressionable young people who are encouraged, nay required, to despise sissies: “We are all enrolled in a course one might call Bigotry 101, so that when some of us first experience longings for other men and boys we think that it can't be so because we know we are not those despicable sissies, fags, and cocksuckers we've been beating up for years…”

By no stretch of the imagination does Dr. Novick exaggerate society's stigmatization of lesbians and gay men. In fact it would be wholly impossible to overestimate the extent to which the cultural deck is heterosexistly stacked. Lesbian poet Judy Grahn traces the term “bad” to its origins in the Anglo-Saxon “baedell” meaning “hermaphrodite.” She remarks that the “very word used to judge whether something is to be acceptable or not acceptable is a word that once meant ‘Gay’.”

Profound unacceptability is certainly the message most lesbian and gay youth get about themselves. Because the essential years, which acclimate heterosexuals to the rituals of romantic relationship, become for young gays a torturous eternity of deception and facade. “What does this do to one's relationship with oneself?” asks Dr. Novick. “What does it do to one's relationship with others? … Society does not allow us the usual growth pattern of respectful relationship and the stigma makes sex a thing to be experienced secretly and briefly.” One case in point is Brad, a PWA or person with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

AN EXAMPLE

Brad's family was comfortable and well-educated. Neither religious fanaticism nor overt neglect informed his upbringing. Yet his entirely ordinary, albeit somewhat privileged, midwestern U.S. childhood precipitated a life-long proclivity for truck stop and rest room sexual encounters.

Brad's siblings experienced the usual process of acquiring societal and relationship skills vis-á-vis “dating” in an atmosphere of reasonably comfortable interaction among family and friends. His sisters would often invite their boyfriends over. Congenial, if stilted, conversations would ensue, with the father's commenting about football or blustering about driving too fast. The brother's girlfriend was a fixture at family barbecues and frequently appeared for joint homework efforts.

Because he was gay, Brad's familial experience was the categoric opposite of his siblings'. While he maintained the obligatory heterosexual charade, at one point escorting a prospective nun to reduce the likelihood of romantic encounter, Brad's staggering isolation simply metastasized.

A WIDER VIEW

Statistics ground this perspective. For example, at Manhattan's Hetrick-Martin Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth, 21% of the clients have attempted suicide by the time they get to the facility. And the Institute's co-founders, Emery S. Hetrick, MD, and A . Damien Martin, EdD, report that every child involved cites “feeling totally alone with no one to talk to” as a reason for the attempt. The sickening depth of this isolation might be conveyed by the fact that some of the gay male and lesbian youngsters, who upon the circumstance of their suicide attempts had undergone treatment in non-gay facilities, had not told their therapists about their sexual orientation.

In other words, young people who had already tried to take their own lives were too afraid of the system's reaction to homosexuality to even bring up their sexual orientations. And Hetrick-Martin is not alone in its experience with such phenomena. A 1989 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services “Report of the Secretary's Task Force on Youth Suicide” placed lesbians and gay males at substantially increased risk, with some research showing suicide as the leading cause of death among sexual minority youth.

SILENCE

These findings are sure evidence that the darkness surrounding this major area of human experience is immediately fatal to no small number of U.S. children. But orientation was never even mentioned in Brad's family. That heterosexuality was presumed permeated every nuance of cultural, social, and educational discussion. No one knew (or knew that they knew) a homosexual. And while “faggot” (meaning “kindling,” as derived from gay experience in burnings at the stake) was a playground epithet and “wimp” had its own grave implications, such subjects were simply beneath consideration in the respectability of adult middle class discourse.

Brief and quietly derisive allusion was once made to an “effeminate” acquaintance. It was concluded that, although he was “odd,” nothing was really “wrong” (meaning gay) with the man. Thus Brad sustained the inescapable impression that his stirring young heart rendered him far more contemptible than anything his family might even discuss.

“How Nice!” sings feminist composer Kristin Lems:

How Nice! Traditions have been carried.

Now the family's in a flurry —

Oh, it's such a happy ending!

With rings and vows and showers

They will certify their love,

With presents from the relatives

And blessings from above.

But if both of them were women

Or if both of them were men,

Who would congratulate them then?

[Lems 80]

For a time Brad assumed, as do many gay youths, that he was the only “one” on the planet. Then, as boyhood cronies “out-grew” the practice of mutual sexual experimentation, Brad became more, not less, attracted to his own gender. Later, it was through the gossip of those same old friends that Brad learned of a much despised counterculture which continued its male-to-male interactions beyond childhood and anonymously.

A PATTERN

This subculture Brad discovered reflects a pattern that sometimes surfaces among young men who might, in a more supportive social context, “date” much as do their heterosexual peers. The taboo on emotional male-to-male relations encourages a separation of sexual and affectional capacities in those youth who are already wrestling with the incongruity of society's heterosexual expectations and their own emerging sexuality. Dr. Betty Berzon, a psychotherapist who is herself a lesbian, describes a stage on the path to gay identity wherein some males “keep sexual contacts free of emotional involvement and avoid repeated contacts with the same person.”

The culture further compounds such patterns. Men are socialized to initiate rather than decline sexual adventure, leaving refusal to the discretion of women. But no such societal brakes are built into male/male relationships, and no non-sexual social environments are provided for these gay youth whose very existence the system refuses to acknowledge. Add to these elements the societal incentive for heterosexual facade (a permanent partner is an exceedingly difficult thing to hide), and a protracted no-strings sexual pattern is not an unlikely development.

It must be noted here that for many persons, of whatever orientation, enduring commitment is not a norm. Even in the rosy context of universal societal blessing, most recent heterosexual marriages end in divorce (New York Daily News 3/13/89). Nor does every commitment presume monogamy. The point is that such options are discouraged and indeed sometimes even precluded for persons so censured and vilified as gays.

Brad's romantic interests were channeled, thus, into a hitchhiking format: “I would stand, of an afternoon or evening, on the highway verge until someone ‘wonderful’ stopped.” When mutuality permitted, sexual relations were consummated furtively and with great haste in the vehicle. Sometimes no preliminary syllables were exchanged, not even first names. After the encounter, Brad would ask to be dropped off nowhere near home, lest a neighbor observe the association.

LEARNING TO HIDE

“We've distanced ourselves from them [gays],” continued Dr. Novick in Bridgehampton, “and we may even hate them as much as straight people do. But now we may begin to hate ourselves — or our potential partners.”

This distancing or “dissociation” often takes dramatic turns. Indeed such elaborate camouflage techniques are routinely adopted that Hetrick-Martin's Social Services Director, Joyce Hunter, MSW, reports with Dr. Martin that lesbian pregnancy and teen fatherhood are recurring problems among gay youth attempting to disguise their orientations.

Even more disturbingly, some closeted gays, to imply heterosexuality, join the ranks of murderous “queer bashers” for whom societal anti-gay rhetoric is as gasoline to a fire. In 1987 Nevada's 26-year-old Sean Patrick Flanagan murdered two men he perceived as gay. In a detailed statement, Flanagan explained that he hated his own homosexuality and thought he was “doing some good for our society.” This particular outbreak of homophobia (fear of things gay) manifested three fatalities. On June 24, 1989 the New York Times reported Flanagan's execution for the murders.

As Dr. Martin notes in “Learning to Hide: The Socialization of the Gay Adolescent,” the “dissociation stage may last late into adulthood, in fact may never be overcome, sometimes with tragic results.” And in another offshoot of this obscuration, closeted gay officials have been not infrequently known to lead the fray against lesbian/gay civil rights.

FATALITIES

In 1989 Brad died of AIDS related complications. Perhaps the virus was passed along in the early years, when nothing could have been done to alert him. Or maybe he was exposed later in the epidemic, at a time when many could have protected themselves had the situation been publicized like a “Legionnaires' disease.” But no such openness graces same-gender relationships, and Brad went the way of so many in the young gay male community.

He departed after 40 years in an atmosphere where every iota of the support with which society provides its heterosexual youth is a heat-seeking missile meticulously programmed for attack and destruction of the homoaffectional heart. Throughout his life, Brad's psyche had been routinely brutalized, vilified, and demoralized by church, school, Hollywood, and of course, the family, whose a priori exclusion distinguishes the gay minority from every other discrete group in being. That is, even nuclear blood relatives are the agents of prejudice.

Such is the bare surface of a crisis which, based on the percentage at which many health professionals estimate lesbian/gay-male incidence, must involve at least 10% of this country's youth. This is the crisis which Dr. Novick attributes to the “deepest of all social flaws — to value the macho.” And it is Dr. Novick's profound thesis that, while the phenomenon of pervasive heterosexism has always been psychologically devastating, one must now regard “homophobia as a co-factor in the AIDS epidemic” by virtue of its impeding and preempting responsible relationships in a community where irresponsibility invites terminal illness: “They allow us no positive role models and then label us promiscuous and immoral. … “How bizarre,” he mourned. “They work their evil on us then call us evil. How bizarre.”

Brad's death was one casualty in a malicious societal routine which has, in the present accompaniment, turned genocidal. The homophobia which undermines gay relationships created a hotbed for sexually transmitted plague; and the government, in its coy reluctance to address matters homosexual, has resolutely exacerbated the situation. Under the tireless guidance of Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), Congress actually defunded AIDS education programs in direct proportion to their effectiveness, i.e., their gay male specificity. As the Senator explains in the Congressional Record: “We have got to call a spade a spade and a perverted human being a perverted human being …” (S. 14204 10/14/87).

That most gay men now practice a safer sex, which avoids the exchange of blood or semen, is almost entirely due to the efforts of the gay community itself, whose pioneer organizations like New York's Gay Men's Health Crisis mobilized a decade of exhaustive research and education. Of course, among the illiterate and non-English speaking, education is lagging and actively discouraged by Congress. Elected officials, it would seem, tend to regard pictorial sex-safety explanations as particularly “pornographic.”

At other administrative levels, endless delays and political considerations have obstructed research and implementation of such programs as are authorized. The fact that the solvent dying, for the better part of the epidemic, have been flying to other countries for experimental treatments bears witness to a profound indifference in the U.S. bureaucracy. This disease has brought new meaning to feminist Holly Near's anthem: “We are a gentle angry people, and we are singing, Singing For Our Lives.”

Yet, in many ways Brad was lucky as a youth. Because he was “closeted” (secretive) and able to “pass” for straight, he avoided a veritable gamut of pitfalls, including the heterosexual marriage “cure” and the incredibly destructive enforced reorientation attempts undergone by so many of our nation's young. Also, while some parents actually evict their lesbian or gay offspring, Brad's closet precluded this possibility. And Brad's encounter with police entrapment occurred late enough in life that he was able to avoid embarrassment in hometown media. For he had, like so many gays, fled his birthplace upon reaching majority. Consequently, it was a remote newspaper which reported his arrest by the police officer who had in fact solicited him.

But the biggest perk for the endless, invalidating, self-dividing deception of Brad's childhood was physical survival. For the Flanagan tragedy is but the tip of a very ugly national iceberg. At He trick-Martin, 40% of the clients have suffered physical attacks, including rape, as occasioned by their orientation [Hetrick 88].

In fact it was this persistent experience with peer-meted violence that inspired New York's Board of Education to co-initiate Hetrick-Martin's special off-site educational program. As the Institute's Joyce Hunter, herself a woman of color explains, many students experience the “double whammy” of racism and homophobia. For her role in co-founding the school program, Hunter received threats on the lives of her children (New York Newsday 9/15/88).

In 1988 the New York Governor's Task Force on Bias-Related Violence reported that “gays and lesbians may be the most victimized group in the nation.” The finding will come as a surprise to some, as the report also found such crimes were “systematically under-reported by the press.” Considering that cultural prejudice demands a substantial U.S. minority choose between physical safety and integrity of psyche, this is something less than a land of the free for lesbian and gay citizens.

PROSPECTS

The internalized societal-censure which impelled Brad to divorce his social and sexual lives made one-to-one relationships intensely precarious. Should his life have continued, however, he might have established the kind of long-term partnership he sometimes admired. A great many men and women of the gay community do form relationships every bit as ...