GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

In recent weeks supporters of an end to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” have pointed to the military magazines of England and Israel, which have featured openly gay soldiers on their covers. England’s official magazine Soldier featured a gay servicemen next to the word “Pride” on its front. Israel’s army magazine earlier this year showed two soldiers hugging on its cover.

The idea is supposed to be, “Look at these other countries, how easy the transition has been to including open gays in the military.”

I take a different message away from it: that once the military accepts open gays, the next step will be for it to celebrate them. We should be able to have fair employment policies without the United States government putting its imprimatur on homosexuality as something to brag about.

I support ending DADT for non-combat positions because I think such a step will help the military in its mission to fight and win wars. But I don’t have any illusions that that step won’t also lead to the gay community asking for more and more and more. I don’t want Navy ship captains to be performing same-sex marriages between sailors. I don’t want the government to offer servicemembers partner benefits available only to those the person in question is having gay sex with, and not others who might be equally worthy of benefits. But we’ve seen in the non-discrimination and gay marriage debates that the gay community will say, “Oh, we’re only looking for this little thing,” and pretty soon they’ll use that as a wedge to foist different policies on an unwilling public.

I have a piece in today’s Buffalo News on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” that’s scheduled for Monday’s Philadelphia Daily News in a slightly different version. A shorter piece appears as a letter to the editor in the International Herald Tribune. An excerpt:

While gays and lesbians are clearly capable of heroic service, heroism is not enough to merit serving in the military, which is a privilege, not a right. The military has legitimate concerns about unit cohesion, morale, good order and discipline that it must explore thoroughly before introducing openly gay individuals into our troops.

But there is another way. I propose that Congress repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” for non-combat jobs immediately, and then consider extending the change to combat positions in five years, after the initial repeal has been tested….

Indeed, the push to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is just one manifestation of what I like to call Equality Mania, the attitude by gays and lesbians that nothing is more important than complete and total equality — not the welfare of children, not religious freedom, not even national security.

But equality isn’t everything. There is literally nothing more important than a strong military. While I’m sympathetic to gays and lesbians who want to serve their country, Obama and Gates are right that we have to be very careful before making a change that can hurt the only mission to fight and win wars.

I have a piece in today’s Jerusalem Post explaining exactly where I stand in the gay-ex-gay continuum. I coin a new term, “Delta,” which is explained in detail in the essay, which I have excerpted below:

I have a suggestion. Instead of gay or ex-gay, those of us who have stopped thinking of ourselves primarily as same-sexers can emphasize the fact that, whether we’re celibate or in opposite-sex relationships, we’re ‘Deliberately Living Traditionally.’ The handy acronym Delta corresponds to a Greek letter representing change; it can be a rival to the use of the letter Lambda to represent all things gay. Delta can serve as a new identity and community for people who are making or have made that tough transition. (Perhaps the Hebrew version will be known as ‘Dalets.’)

The ‘Delta’ idea correctly focuses on how people behave and organize their lives rather than what their sexuality bar codes are. Such an attitude, by the way, is consistent with Torah Judaism. By contrast, the ‘ex-gay’ approach accepts the gay community view that all of us have an innate sexual orientation, merely adding that those orientations can be changed through ‘reparative’ or other therapy….

People who are unhappy with their homosexuality will almost certainly find it much easier to try ‘deliberately living traditionally’ than to somehow transform their inner make-up. After a few years of living celibately, or perhaps in an opposite-sex relationship, such people might find their same-sex attractions have decreased or at least become less important to them. This is parallel to the Jewish concept of ‘Naaseh v’nishma’ ¬ the idea that actions precede what is internal. Also, the Talmud says with regard to King David that the libido is hungry when satiated and satisfied when
restrained.

Of course, some gays and lesbians will accuse Deltas of ‘not being true to themselves.’ But who decided that our libidos and hearts represent our true selves, even when they’re in conflict with our minds, consciences, and spirits? Shouldn’t each of us get to decide who we truly are?

Indeed, whereas the gay community celebrates National Coming Out Day, and some ex-gays have commemorated National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day, the Delta community could mark National Choose Sexual Behaviors and Family Structures Consistent With Your Values Day (We can work out the acronym later).

Gays in the military is in the news at the start of a Democratic president’s term again. Fox news had a headline “Obama to End Military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Policy” which is pretty silly since Obama doesn’t have that power; Congress has to change the policy since Congress passed it. I wrote an opinion piece last September about what I feel about this subject, although I didn’t find a home for it. I thought maybe GaysDefendMarriage readers would like to see the relevant part of it. To be clear, I would like to see gays and lesbians serving openly in the armed forces, but only when the experts determine it won’t undermine the military mission:

The U.S. military exists to fight and win wars. Period. Yet in the last 40 years, various groups in society have tried to use the armed services to further their social agenda. Given that our very freedom could be at stake, the military should have no tolerance for decisions about its personnel that focus on anything but the military mission. The two most significant examples are gays and affirmative action in the military.

In my mind, the problem with gays in the military is not homosexuality but the smooth functioning of the armed forces. I know that most of the gay community (a group I’m a part of) believes that nothing is more important than equality for gays and lesbians. But the people we fought in World War II and the people we’re fighting now have far harsher plans for gays should they win a total victory than simply not allowing them to be open in uniform.

The notion that everyone should be able to serve, no matter what the social attitudes of the rank and file and the military brass, becomes silly when considered historically. Should women have been able to serve equally during the American Revolution? What about blacks (remember Glory?) serving equally in the Union army in the Civil War? In those cases, social engineering in the military would have impaired morale, unit cohesion, and the military mission. In the case of the Civil War, a Union victory was more important to freed slaves than being integrated and serving in the main ranks.

I have spoken to gays and lesbians who have said gays should have been allowed to serve openly during World War II. Given the attitudes at the time, that would have made it harder to successfully win the war effort, and I don’t have to tell gay men what the Nazis thought of them.

I discussed this issue with a scholar of issues relating to gays in the military, Dr. Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He cited historical evidence that some gays did serve openly in World War II, and said “I don’t think there’s any evidence that the policy even as far back as World War II was necessary to preserve cohesion. The question has always been, will leadership stand behind integration or not?”

I personally have a hard time believing that even the best leadership could lead to unit cohesion at certain stages in history.

Contrary to popular opinion, President Truman’s 1948 order to desegregate the military did not, in fact, desegregate the military. It took the contingencies of the Korean War a few years later, and military leaders like Gen. Matthew Ridgway finding efficiency, logistical, and morale problems in a segregated military. Due to such circumstances, the military was completely integrated by the end of the fighting in 1953.

So the questions are, when is social progress sufficient for integration, and who gets to decide? I don’t know the answer to the former question, but the answer to the latter is Congress and the president, in consultation with military leaders. I hope they decide to end “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” but only when they think such a move won’t hinder our ability to win on the battlefield….

I believe that employment equality – including for African-Americans and gays and lesbians – is a good thing. It’s just that there are other goals that are equally important or more important. Surely, fighting and winning wars is one of those goals. 

Since I published my “Phantom Gay Past” essay arguing that being gay is a recent innovation that doesn’t go back more that 150 years, I have been accused of stretching the truth and misrepresenting the scholarship. So I did a little survey and found that more than 85% of gay historians and anthropologists (n=28) disagreed with the following statement, which I believe is widely shared in the gay and lesbian community. I call it the Essentialist Credo:

Being gay is pretty much a naturally occurring sexual orientation that has existed throughout history. Every society and culture has always had a minority of gay and lesbian members, whether they come out or not.

I will be writing about the implications of this consensus among gay historians this April in a Jerusalem Post column entitled “God didn’t make me gay.” But for now I thought I would share some comments from these historians, in a page above entitled “Nine Scholars.” My conclusion from the idea that being gay is a recent, not a timeless, state of being is that God didn’t make me gay and therefore I have to reject the following gay-Jewish attitude: “God made me gay, so of course He expects me to express it, no matter what His laws say.”

I believe people have and develop all kinds of sexual impulses and attractions. As we grow, we organize them in our minds and our public lives, almost always in ways consistent with the sexual matrix of the society we live in. In ancient Greece, I probably would have had sex with a younger male lover and a wife (if I was a citizen). If I was a Native American a few centuries ago, I might have cross-dressed and had sex with both men and women. In contemporary Morocco, I probably would be married and maybe would have sex occassionally with younger men, although always playing the dominant role. Today, I organize my sexuality in a way that can be fairly called “gay,” although in my case I’m celibate.

Since I realize that this way of organizing my sexual impulses, desires, attractions, and fantasies is so contingent on living in the modern West, I can’t accept that this way is “true” and “essential” and “eternal” and all other people who had same-sex love, sex, and relationships were “ignorant” of their true selves or could not “come out.”

The concept of “sexual orientation” isn’t rocket science. It’s not like the fact that 5th-century people didn’t understand that electrons orbit the nucleus of the atom. They could have come to the conclusion that some people were oriented toward men and others toward women and others toward both. But they didn’t, because that wasn’t true to their own experiences, not because they were too primitive to understand it.

I recently received the following E-mail:

Thank you very much for your work. Far too often the defense of marriage as a union between a man and a woman has been associated with homophobia. It is refreshing to see an openly LGBT person of faith argue that same-sex marriage is not a boon for gays or straights. It is especially outstanding to see someone speak prophetically about the problems of the socially marginalized members of our community, especially in prisons. You are a real son of Moses and Isaiah.

We’re in somewhat similar situations. I am a bisexual (Kinsey 2 or 3) person of faith. I’m in the junior reaches of academia, and am doing research in gender studies and intellectual history. I am working on translating my academic knowledge into something useful for popular debate.

Anyway, I hope this doesn’t sound like a strange email, but sometimes we end up in “queer” situations.

When I told Wayne Besen I didn’t expect him to actually apologize for accusing me of “misleading” people that I’m getting paid for writing op-eds even after he finds out that I am, in fact, getting paid for writing op-eds, I told him I’m aware that “being gay means never having to say you’re sorry.” He responded: “That is a really hateful and ignorant statement. I demand a public apology for such propaganda” which kind of underscores my point. Wayne, in typical gay fashion, won’t apologize even when the facts are clear that he falsely accused someone of lying. Yet he will demand “a public apology” for anyone who criticizes LGBT people, no matter how deserved the criticism.

But I’ve been thinking about it. I’m just as gay as Wayne is. And I’ve never apologized for any of the terrible things gays and lesbians have done in recent years. So I’m going to devote this blog post to apologizing for LGBT misdeeds – not on behalf of the gay community, because I think it’s clear I have a very small constituency here at GaysDefendMarriage.com. But I will apologize on behalf of myself. To my knowledge, no prominent gay person has ever apologized for any of the five things listed below. I’ll be brave enough to be the first, and I encourage other members of our community to join me in having the strength to express regret for hurting innocent people.

In order to keep this post of manageable length, I won’t be able to fully enumerate the LGBT wrongs related to any of the topics below, nor to propose appropriate amends to atone for our misdeeds. But if people are interested perhaps I can do so in future posts.

1) Heterosexual AIDS

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, gay activists insisted that a wave of “heterosexual AIDS” was just around the corner in the United States, even though no data existed proving that was going to happen, and even though HIV spread through heterosexual sex has always been and continues to be a small percentage of the American transmissions of the virus. Out of fear that Americans would not devote energy to treating and curing a disease spread mostly through gay sex and drug use, AIDS activists consciously lied about the size of the miniscule threat to Americans who did not use drugs or have gay sex. As a result, huge sums of money were spent to educate about and prevent a “coming health epidemic” that would never materialize. People made major lifestyle changes to protect themselves from what was essentially a phantom menace. Now, I wasn’t openly gay until 1989, but I do remember raising a ruckus about “AIDS is not a gay disease,” despite the overwhelming evidence that AIDS was, and is, pretty much a gay disease, at least in America. I’m sorry. I was wrong.

2) Sexual Molestation

Whenever a Boy Scout leader is caught diddling young teen Scouts, or a priest is sued for fellating choir boys, the professional homosexuals trot out and declare that most child molesters, including the accused in that particular case, are “not gay.” Oh, please. Most such cases are not pedophiles who equally victimize little boys and little girls. These dreadful predators tend to be ephebophilies – men who are attracted to adolescent boys, and who coerce them into sexual activities that are precisely the same as the ones gay and bisexual men do in bedrooms, bathhouses, parks, and piers with each other. When two penguins or monkeys are found to be engaging in those same activities, the professional homosexuals rush to the microphones and announce the animals are “gay.” If a lizard who can’t speak or count to ten is “gay” when it sodomizes another same-sex lizard, what exactly is “not gay” about a Scoutmaster who does the same thing to a 12-year-old? The fact is, the gay community should apologize for and take steps toward preventing future cases of same-sex molestation. I’m really, really sorry people who enjoy the same sexual activities I am inclined toward have been hurting so many young men and boys.

3) Constitutional Amendments

The LGBT people who pushed the Hawaii and other lawsuits in the mid-1990s were fully aware they might provoke state and federal constitutional amendments to restrict the rights of same-sex couples. Indeed, 18 states now have constitutional amendments barring gay marriage or even civil unions. That means in order to get marginal benefits for same-sex couples in the super-pro-gay states of California and Massachusetts, couples in Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas, Virginia, Ohio, Georgia, and a dozen other states have been sacrificed and now have no reasonable chance of any rights at all barring a Constitutional amendment or a U.S. Supreme Court decision implementing same-sex marriage nationwide, two things nobody seriously expects any time soon. I did speak out publicly against the lawsuit strategy in 1996 when I was still a sexually active gay man, but I now regret that I did not do more to stop the selfish, short-sighted lawsuits. I am deeply sorry for the pain I have caused same-sex couples in Houston, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Columbus, Ann Arbor, and many other places who can’t even be sure they can visit the most important person in their lives in the hospital because gay leaders are so cruel.

4) Blocking measures to stop the early spread of AIDS

This is almost never talked about, but while I’m apologizing I might as well lay it all out. AIDS activists in the gay community have made a big fuss about blaming Ronald Reagan and Ed Koch and various other bogeymen for the early spread of HIV, but we should really be pointing our finger at ourselves. The gay obsession with equal treatment and sexual liberation meant that in the early 1980s, when AIDS really could have been slowed, nearly all accepted public health strategies for combating an epidemic were thwarted by a gay community that kept whining about its civil liberties. Well, if there’s an outbreak of West Nile or Ebola or Bird Flu, civil liberties should be the last thing people worry about, because new viruses carry the risk of wiping out huge swaths of the population. In the first years of the AIDS epidemic, there should have been contact tracing – with names – and major sites of transmission, like bathhouses, should have been closed. Even quarantine should have been on the table. Instead we had gay activists declaring that “the government will close the baths over my dead body” – activists who often died soon thereafter. I was not yet openly gay at the time of this tragedy, but I can at least apologize that I haven’t apologized sooner for the fact people like me blamed others for the terrible things we did ourselves.

5) Stonewall Rebellion

Since the early 1970s, I am apparently the only prominent voice in the LGBT community to have criticized the horribly immoral Stonewall rebellion, and especially the celebration of it in gay pride celebrations and the names of organizations like the Stonewall Democrats. But I do not think I have ever apologized for it. During my time as a sexually active gay man I certainly spoke approvingly of Stonewall and I attended at least 25 gay pride celebrations of the anniversary of Stonewall, as many as eight per summer in the mid-1990s. I realize now that the New York City cops and the journalist that the Stonewall rebels nearly murdered were innocent of any wrongdoing, especially since the Stonewall Inn was an illegal mafia-run institution. While violence is called for in extreme cases like torture or genocide, gays faced nothing like that in New York City in the summer of 1969, and nothing more than a little civil disobedience would have been appropriate. It is embarrassing to me that so many LGBT people take such joy in dreadful behavior by members of our community. To New York City cops and to journalists everywhere, I am sorry for what we did to you at Stonewall, and I am especially sorry for pretending like our unprovoked violent attack on you is something to celebrate. I promise never to do it again.

I got an unsigned letter in March from a father who got my E-mail address from a family friend of his. He told me that his daughter, while still keeping kosher and observing the Sabbath, now identifies as bisexual and lives with another woman. He said his daughter knows better than to bring the woman’s name up in his presence, but she does discuss her relationship with his wife, her mother. He asked for reading suggestions and queried “What can we do? How can we help her back on the derech?” (The derech is the “way” of Orthodox Judaism.)

My response is below, with a few translations added in parentheses. I’m not sure I handled it exactly right (and I hate corresponding with anonymous people anyway), but I did my best. Those of you who think I’m an ogre may be surprised.

From the data you have given me, I’m not so sure she’s off the derech. Unlike men, women have no requirement to marry or have children. Women may not have genital relations with other women, but do you really know your daughter is participating in the sexual activities (“nashim hamesolelot“) that are against halacha (Jewish law)? I certainly don’t advise you to ask her. It may make the most sense to have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about her bedroom activities.

As far as I understand it, it is not against halacha for a Jewish woman to love another woman, live with another woman, and even share the same bed with another woman. While it is no doubt deeply disappointing to you as parents that she has not chosen to marry a Jewish man and have children with him, it is a legitimate Jewish choice. You would be mistaken to condemn her for doing something that is not against halacha. I think it is unfortunate that you have made it clear that she cannot talk about the woman she has chosen to share her life with. If she were discussing sexual immorality, I could understand it. But most likely she wants to talk about much more mundane things, some of which include this woman.

The most important thing you can do is express your love for your daughter, whatever her life choices. Particularly given that it appears she’s not flagrantly violating any halacha, I think it would be a mistake to use guilt or other incentives to try to change her behavior. Since she identifies as bisexual, not lesbian, and since female sexuality is particularly fluid, it is entirely possible that she will wind up with a more traditional Jewish family some day. Even if she doesn’t, you should be proud that you have instilled within her a basic religiosity that is expressed by her being, for the most part, shomer mitzvot (Jewishly observant).

The best book on homosexuality and Judaism is Rabbi Chaim Rapaport’s Judaism and Homosexuality: An Authentic Orthodox View. It’s mostly about men, though. You can also access my pamphlet on the subject by visiting www.isjudaismhomophobic.com.

My guess is I haven’t given you the kind of response you’re looking for. Believe it or not, I am a conservative Republican who opposes same-sex marriage and gay rabbis and thinks the halacha on homosexuality contains tremendous wisdom. But I see no need to demand that people go beyond the halacha with regards to how they structure their bedroom and family lives.

If you have further questions, let me know.

Best,

David Benkof

There’s a worldview that lies beneath the contemporary debate on same-sex marriage and other controversies related to homosexuality. More and more people have come to believe that being gay means membership in a naturally occurring minority in every society. The problem is, it’s just not true. However, explaining the scholarship (which has almost all been done by LGBT scholars) that proves being gay is a culturally bound phenomenon arising in Western society over the last 150 years is not easy to do in a paragraph or two – or even in an 800-word column.

So I’ve written a new permanent page – “Phantom Past” with a more than 3,000-word essay citing a half-dozen leading gay and lesbian historians and anthropogists, which meticulously refutes the errors made by people who espouse the widespread mistaken belief that a certain percentage of every society across space and time has been, is, and will be gay or lesbian.

The debate on same-sex marriage needs to be understood in the context of the role of both freedom and equality in the American gay and lesbian past.

Since sexual minorities began to organize in the United States the 1950s, gays and lesbians have experienced alternating periods – some emphasizing freedom, and some emphasizing equality. For example, during the McCarthy era, gays emphasized equality – not losing security clearances because of your sexuality, and not having the government stigmatize and even arrest you because of the way you have sex.

In the 1970s, however, freedom was more important. After all, the most visible gay organization right after the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion was the Gay Liberation Front. Liberation, of course, means freedom. And the lesbian separatist movement that promoted books like Jill Johnston’s Lesbian Nation and events like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (founded in 1976), by definition didn’t want to integrate into American society, but to have the freedom to build self-contained lesbian-feminist communities.

Today’s same-sex marriage movement has all the hallmarks of a return to equality. Most “marriage equality” activists are so focused on the current emphasis of the gay community that they fail to remember that the pioneers who started the gay liberation movement believed in freedom for everyone. Thus, many gay and lesbian activists I have spoken with say that once gay marriage passes, they want the government to force traditionally religious people to use the gay definition of marriage in their jobs and businesses or face punishment. And in both Massachusetts where adoption agencies cannot give even a slight tiebreaker preference to families with both a mother and a father, and in California where the Supreme Court appears set to force religious fertility doctors to violate their consciences and inseminate lesbians, few if any voices in the gay community have stood up and asked, “Wait, isn’t our movement about freedom?”

It’s time for everyone to accept that sometimes, gay people just aren’t equal. That’s not an insult, it’s a fact. Other groups seem to understand this. Women know they’re not equally qualified to be major league baseball players. Asian-American actors know they’re not equally qualified to play Othello or Lena Younger. Similarly, while lesbians may be terrifically qualified to be mothers, they are not equally qualified to be fathers.

Who knows how long the current gay emphasis on equality over freedom will last? If history is any guide, it won’t last forever – but then it will be back. In the meantime, is it really a good idea to make a radical social change that expands gay equality but limits everyone else’s freedom just because that matches the present priorities of the gay and lesbian community?