Old Do Ask Do Tell Manuscript

CHAPTER 4

MORALITY’S THIRD NORMAL FORM

“The Lord of Heaven triumphs while Satan whistles.”[1]

- 1 -

We always face moral choices

“Life” (and, consequently, morality) “is mostly about meeting obligations to others, with occasional moderate self-indulgence.” [2] But, in the Me Generation, greed is indeed “good.”

And, in Sunday School, we used to be taught, “Jesus first, others second, Me last.” Well, maybe “girls first.” Talk to an objectivist, of the Atlas Shrugged school, and he recoils in horror. A person is rightfully entitled to the results of his or her own personal effort, and no one has a right to take it away.

In my Baptist church of the Presidents, a new pastor announces that “a person is known as much by the way he accepts his limitations and by how he develops his talents.”

All of these little proverbs are attempts to characterize, morality, that which distinguishes right from wrong. We disagree, even within our own “family” of relatively free people, on good and evil. We need to explore our different notions of right-and-wrong, and, as a somewhat consequential discussion, our process for implementing these notions, including the appropriate role for government involvement.

When President Clinton announced his disappointing “compromise” on the military gay ban, my White House source told me something like this: “it really wasn’t about the barracks and showers or about sexual conduct. It was just the moral objection that too many people have against homosexuality. The United States government would be seen as condoning immorality.” Indeed, as I had found with the Dean of Men at William and Mary, homosexuality seemed to cross the line, and drop off into an unfathomable moral abyss. Similarly, in hearing before Senate on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), Senators were told by the Family Research Council that “many employers believe that homosexual behavior is immoral and they recognize it has been discouraged in every successful culture in the world.”[3]

I do take this personally. I am leading a “cultural” lifestyle, as Roy Varghese (from Campus Crusade for Christ) once told me in a Dallas restaurant, that allegedly constitutes an “intrinsic moral evil.” And the Catholic Church at one time calls the inclination to commit homosexual acts an “objective disorder,” even as the Church waffles in self-contradictory and disorganized babble trying to distinguish the individual, his sin, and his propensity to sin.[4] Even if homosexuality is biologically or genetically mediated, it is supposedly no more morally excusable than alcoholism.

People attack homosexuals because of their own personal insecurity, particularly about their own performance according to society’s previously accepted gender roles, and this insecurity makes people vulnerable to religious and political demagogues motivated by “greed.” Still, there must be substance to their “moral objections.”

People generally don’t articulate these very well. The “moral” objections seem first to be based on superficial understandings of their religious faiths, and of “natural law.” Then, homosexuality is seen as a vice, destructive to “the family” and to the social infrastructure and “sexual constitution” that is essential for society to work. At a supposedly deeper level, it seems to contradict the selflessness associated with the openness to procreation and future parenting implied by a sexual repertoire limited to procreative vaginal sexual intercourse within a monogamous, permanent heterosexual marriage.[5] Perhaps, it encourages a narcissism and upward affiliation which, if imitated by everyone, would leave all but the most attractive and intact members of society in want of others who will really care about them. The combination of all these processes supposedly creates a disinterest in or discomfort with marital commitments (especially by otherwise now-centered males) that destabilizes existing families and prevents new ones from forming. It interferes with the calming-down of male hormones, as if male domestication were at the heart of morality. The prohibitionist’s condemnation of homosexuality follows as a natural corollary of the old dictum, “no sexual intercourse before marriage” - or, even, no masturbation, no sexual excitement at all without the balloon-payment of procreation. It’s not so much the contemplation of same-sex acts that upsets some people, as the potential vitality of an adult life without marital commitments (and children) at all. Curiously, while homosexuality sometimes complains that gender roles are “oppressive,” it tends to celebrate the differences of the sexes; for men, it extols the ideals of masculinity, with all of their erotic contradictions, as an absolute good which shouldn’t be sundered in fungibility to serve female or communal interests. In the 1960’s, when I went to church off campus from the University of Kansas, I heard a Presbyterian minister give some funny sermons on James Bond movies and our fascination with “what it means to be a man,” and with all the contradictions that go with “masculinity.” The idea of sex between men offends some men’s idea of masculinity as would the body shaving associated with competitive cycling or swimming offend mine.

The leadership of the gay community has generally refused to respond to these clumsily articulated charges about “morals,” and have tried to portray gay men and lesbians as simply another oppressed “minority.” Homosexuality is excused as an immutable, biological trait, a notion for which there is some rather ambiguous, although very recently growing, evidence[6]. I can remember a Dallas Gay Alliance meeting around 1980 when a speaker bragged, “I didn’t choose to be gay!” The “liberal left” drops this argument in mid-sentence, leaving open the possible comparisons to schizophrenia, sociopathy, kleptomania, and pedophilia, let alone alcoholism. One scene in the 1996 film Jane Eyre[7] provides a complete metaphor to his kind of retort: a boarding-school girl is punished for letting her hair curl to show her “vanity,” when the curling is her “natural way”; the schoolmaster retorts that Godliness requires people to overcome their inborn vices. The obvious retort is that consensual, adult homosexual acts do not leave victims. Perhaps, this answer is incomplete in view of public health concerns. The immutability argument tries to remain silent on accountability for putatively harmful behaviors, and it insinuates (in a manner that reminds one of the Catholic Church) that homosexuality it fundamentally a negative trait. If the best we could do for gay people is to present them as an “oppressed” and handicapped class deserving deliberate and laborious protections in law, then I would want nothing to do with the “gay community.” Science may well show, however, that homosexuality, to the extent that it is genetically or biologically mediated, tends to occur with other psychological traits (such as sensitivity, “hyper-awareness” and independence) that are very good for the individual, if problematic for their impact on the group. Even so, moralists will argue that, as with alcoholism, the biological convenience for some kind of self-transcendent, short-circuiting behavior needs to be suppressed by “society.”

Gay leadership has also largely ignored the older “moral” concern, rooted in religion, for the motivational example “open” homosexuals set for the values of the rest of society. If homosexuality is eventually destructive, especially to the integrity of societal “good order and discipline,” then, so the prohibitionist reasons, the homosexual must indeed “change” into someone else, be reborn as someone normal and no longer so special or individual. However, Reverend Don Eastman, at MCC Dallas, used to say, “homosexuality itself is morally neutral, but what you do with your homosexuality is very much a moral issue.” An inclination which seems at first bent on gratuitous, destructive sex acts and which seems to focus on superficial ideas of beauty, like the picture of Dorian Gray, turns around and engenders love and commitment that might be a model for the rest of society after all.

In the 1980’s, male homosexuality was becoming viewed as a fundamental threat to public health, and the association of male homosexuality with AIDS was getting to be elaborated into as evidence of homosexuality’s intrinsic “immorality”; but cooler heads, better science, and more compassion from the public has diminished the interest in connecting AIDS to moral failure.

In the 1990’s, American society has generally reached a state of “toleration” of homosexuality as long it is kept largely out of sight. This seems to be an acquiescence to the private aspect of adult homosexuality (notwithstanding the eventual public consequences) and to its moral ambiguity. The charge is often made that gay activists demand, not just “toleration,” but also “acceptance,” “promotion,” or even “celebration.” However, the gay community is right to respond that, there is no guarantee that society could not slip back into the darker days of blacklists and military-style witch-hunts. Furthermore, the mandate that gays “keep quiet” and the hypocritical, evasive behavior of straight society hides deeper moral debate, and keeps all people, gay or straight, from really understanding the significance of their own personal decisions about intimate attachments. People need to feel proud of their loving and loved ones, regardless of the biological gender of their adult partners. Part of that pride is experienced through public expression or celebration of what is physically and materially a private experience. This open counter-demonstration to self-dissolution of marriage disquiets some people enough that politicians in Houston, for example, will court them by mounting a “straight slate,” dressed like Men in Black.

What is needed, first, is to stop, set aside the concern with just homosexuality, and then review carefully the foundations of our inculcation of right and wrong. In simplest form, “wrong” would be harming or stealing from another human being or failing to keep a contractual promise. Such simple consequentialism, though, could not have gotten “Western Civ” to the point that it could to allow afford the autonomy that people like me assume every day.

- 2 -

MORE PERSONAL HISTORY

In 1980, two years before AIDS would challenge the stamina and forbearance of the gay community, there had been a smaller challenge: to house thousands of refugiados cubanos fleeing Castro, a large percentage who were said to be homosexuals escaping persecution.

There were calls for many of us to be willing to take them into our own homes, those of us with “spare bedrooms,” as if the security risk to taking in someone unknown and with questionable incentive to play by our rules, could be easily ignored.

I paid a visit to Catholic Charities, housed in a WWII-era brown brick building, somewhat out of place on Oak Lawn Avenue in Dallas.

I went into talk to one of their counselors about volunteering myself as a sponsor and housing him in the downstairs den in my condo. A Mr. Perez greeted me. Almost immediately, I “told.”

“The fact that you have told me you are gay, ends this discussion,” he said, without standing up. A few days after that in-your-face put-down from the Catholics, I went back to a small gay church over in East Dallas - not the M.C.C., but a spin-off from one of the inevitable ego battles.

No - MCC is for real - it’s not just “queers playing church” - any one who visits the Cathedral of Hope in Dallas today will find in it the inspiration that reminds one of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. But, in any church, anywhere, there are real people, and there is a need for people to feel important. That makes us human. So people move on.

MCC had brought up the need to shelter others had come up before. MCC sponsored “family groups,” and one man actually felt obliged to house another person in his group because, in our culture, the group had been defined as “family.”

The assistant pastor over in East Dallas had taken a personal interest in the refugee problem, and had recommended one for me to befriend, a twenty-year-old named Carlos. I got to talking about what that would entail, and soon found out they needed volunteers who could stay home all day (how to make a living, I’m not sure) to teach the refugees to get along in English. I was hardly ready to give my life up. So I backed out. I wouldn’t volunteering when doing so interfered with my other purposes.)

But, a few days later, on a warm fall Wednesday night, I walked into the service at the old Reagan Street MCC in Dallas, I saw a handwritten note on the bulletin board. It began with “Lost everything...”

I wound up taking in a young man who had been kicked out of a home in Arkansas and moved to the big city. He stayed in my condo for 3 months, before he moved on. He was tormented, with rejection by an older man, his “ex,” with whom he once carried on a soap opera in front of me in my own “arena stage” living room. I know the trip of “rejection” well enough myself. I learned from the experience. One day, when he was home in bed - in the living room, recovering from an anti-syphilis penicillin shot - his mere presence had prevented a burglary. But I was relieved when he moved on and I had my privacy back. I could claim I had supported someone besides myself in a self-giving manner. Years later, I would make that same claim as I made someone’s mortgage payments after a default in a simple assumption situation.

Recently, I stopped at a suburban strip mall on the way to a concert, and was approached by a man and son who actually wanted me to accompany him to by him and the son cheeseburgers. I declined.

---

This is part of my own morality play. Once I entered the adult world as a single man, I quickly sensed that morality, beyond accepting immediate responsibility for one’s actions, has something to do with meeting the needs of others, even when they don’t appeal to fantasies or personal goals. I haven’t done that much of that - just when it was convenient for me, like washing the dishes (after Saturday night potluck suppers starting with chicken aspic) at the Ninth Street Center in the East Village, or acting four times as a “baby buddy.” Once, I would be told at the Center that Person X, whom I had seen as so “passive,” was indeed “very disciplined” in remaining dutiful to chores and quiet as he came to terms with his femininity, and that I would do well to follow suit.

Our emerging freedoms demand that we take hold of our own moral sense, if we are going to get government out of our lives. Before we can negotiate public policy alternatives (with our ‘intellectual bodies’), we need to look back into ourselves our “emotional bodies”. to look at the validity of what we really care about.

- 3 -

DEFINITIONS

---

But what, after all, is “morality”?

“History teaches us that the decay of various civilizations was caused not by the iron law of fate, but rather resulted from human failures to establish such values as constant concern for individual self-realization, respect for the dignity and worth of one’s fellowman, and appreciation of the imperatives of social justice. It is, therefore, up to us as citizens to build a national community with a common moral language, which does not guarantee the elimination of evil but does assure the awareness of values which elevate and do not degrade.” [8]

This sounds like, “morality” is a benign concept which exalts the individual but is the responsibility of the community and even the state. It doesn’t sound like it has to cost anything.

Let us move to a more hardcore “conservative” writer for a more challenging definition:

“Morality, rightly understood, is a set of propositions about human nature: who we are where we came from, where we are bound, how we ought to conduct ourselves on the journey. From these propositions flow the code or rules - guidelines for enacting our role as members of the human family. The rules point back to our nature, telling us in essence that if this is who we are, then here is what we must do about it...An action at odds with that nature - one that is dangerous or harmful to it - is wrong, That means that morality is never arbitrary, never the result of individual or local perception. Its roots lie deep in our nature.

“The commonness of that nature is what makes morality common. It is not yours, not mine, but ours corporately.” [9]

The author goes on to appeal to external authority, a religious faith which accepts absolute moral principles (if not state-supported theology), a willingness to put the faith above one’s own ends.

In its most innocent form, morality seems to be a set of ideas about how people should behave if they are to get along in some kind of mutual benefit. The fundamental conflict will be, is morality a matter of individual consequentialism, or is it based first on stability and social health for the group? If I think I’m right, may I rock the boat to get my way?

- 4 -

It’s in the Bible

“Morality” applies both to the actions and values of individuals (relative to the interaction between the individual and his community), and to the policies of societal formulations which, in numbers, motivate individuals to act in their own long term interest, and in the public interest. “Policies” may be instruments of governments or of other bodies with quasi-government influence, that is, the “corporate state”: employers, financial institutions, churches, even labor unions.

But we will maintain more focus if we think about individual morality first.

A generally useful definition of individual “morality” can be found in the Two Great Commandments, which are after all a reformulation of the Ten Commandments.

This has nothing to do with being “religious.” The Two Commandments do sum up what needs to be covered.

Take the Second Commandment. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” As a corollary, “do unto others as they would do unto you.” This does cover most situations, although maybe not completely. A suicidal person might not feel enjoined not to commit murder. But the Principle says to “love others as you love yourself.” The underlying meaning is to “love yourself” with some psychologically or spiritually appropriate perspective of who you are. Be able to say, “I am proud of who I am...”

The First Commandment is, to “Love God.” This can be expanded beyond the usual meaning of religious faith, where Christian, monotheistic, or not. The underlying concept is faithfulness to a set of principles which express who you are and which, if followed, will allow you to feel proud of the statement your life has made. Another formulation, is faithfulness to a higher “spiritual authority.” This might be seen as a corollary of self-concept. Psychotherapist Paul Rosenfels had expressed the notion that the “masculine personality” should make itself the locus of a coherent moral statement, whereas the feminine personality would administer this statement with the “work” of love.[10]

One can take the Two Commandments from the New Testament, and derive the original Ten as corollaries. For example, love of God would preclude “worship” of idols or heroes as a substitute for a healthy self. One can make some sense of all the details of Biblical law in the Old Testament, some of which are seen as onerous (especially to gays and lesbians) today. Most of these laws had a practical as well as spiritual purpose. For example, not eating certain kinds of meat probably prevented food poisoning in ancient times; today, dietary laws would probably stave off heart disease and cancer. In this substance, religious people and commentators (like Murchison) see a need to find “moral absolutes” in religious teachings and for society to enforce these absolutes. Some of the “laws” may have been conceived more as protecting the welfare of a particular group or tribe (in the Old Testament, the Jews), with the necessary constraints on the psychological space of the individuals.

Unquestioned obedience to religious laws seems, to many people, to construct a moat which will guarantee personal morality. Some people feel that only religious faith can protect them from themselves; many convicts become “born again” to Christ in prison. Anytime I have “spied” on a Sunday morning service of a “fundamentalist” church, I hear in the sermons a need to find authority for everything in one’s life in the Bible rather than in some more personal notion of individual ethics. I once had a supervisor who followed Orthodox Judaism, and who left work before sundown Fridays regardless of what was happening. (I covered for him on his Sabbath but I never asked anyone to cover for me regularly.) I asked him why, and he just said, “this is the law, you don’t question it.” Associated with this unwavering adherence to law is a humbleness about one’s own purpose; only God knows everything. The insistence that public schools teach “Creationism” as equally plausible as “Evolution” - that is, that religious explanations should compete equally with scientific ones rather than transcend them - demonstrates this authoritarianism. This tendency in some religious peoples, whether Christian, Jewish, or Moslem, tends to lead to an abdication of all sense of personal moral responsibility to government or to some “extremist” religious “liberation” instrument. At a group level, governments, with their buildups of weapons of mass destruction and their various oppressions, seem, with only “mammon” to guide them, seem about as moral as the individual people who populate them. Modern political terrorism (whether Communist, Islamic, or Aryan Nation) becomes so dangerous that it seems to argue for a more individualized definition of morality, even among or more conservative religious groups (particularly the Baptists and the Roman Catholic Church!), and this presents them with a difficult paradox to resolve, between individual initiative and religious authority.

Religion has a way of circumscribing one’s ambition. One is supposed to have faith in a theology that gives the knowable universe a certain finiteness; yet, at the same time, most established religions speak of places and events every bit as miraculous as UFO’s. The essential thing is “faith,” that one will believe in some principles without proof, and without one’s own control. One will accept limits on one’s reach, as evidence of faith, put presumably for the practical benefit of future definitions. A “doubter” is seen as someone lost in his own unfulfillment. Faith may subsume the obligation to propagate the “good news” to others, even forcibly through the political area, as a prime motivation in living. On the other hand, modern religions generally respect a unique place for every individual who respects the limits and discipline of his faith. The impulse to convert others to one’s faith may become ingrained as another apparent moral imperative; but it may just disintegrate into unwelcome intrusion into the privacy of others.

One seeks a formulation which recognizes freedom, both to worship and to achieve, and the pursuit of happiness (if not the result) as essential moral values.

- 5 -

Morality plays the Modern Variation

There is a way to define individual morality with a much more “secular” (or “Ethical Culture”) focus. That is, you may engage in any conduct and self-expression as you choose, as long as you do not interfere with the right of another consenting adult to do the same, and as long as you do not cause harm or adverse effect on another person against his or her “will” or against a person who cannot give “consent” (a child), and do not recklessly endanger such a person.

The right to “become oneself” has been characterized as an invention of modern liberal thought. “By insisting that we are bound only by ends and roles we choose for ourselves, it (liberalism) denies that we can ever be claimed by ends we have not chosen - ends given by nature or God, for example, or by our identities as members of families, peoples, cultures, or traditions.”[11]

Personal autonomy is now the typical “libertarian” (rather than just “liberal”) approach to morality (and its implementation in policy); but really we need to look a bit deeper into the values beneath. Early in his discourse about his initiation at the Naval Academy, Joe Steffan writes “What can be better than allowing people to live their lives as they choose, to give them the freedom to take the limited time they have on earth and craft an existence that is uniquely theirs?”[12] Another way of putting this appeared in the Atlantic Monthly: “The central idea of the public philosophy by which we live is that freedom consists in our capacity to choose our ends for ourselves.”[13] Presumably, one wants one’s own “unique existence” to matter to others and exert influence over them; the need to be important to other people seems to be a uniquely human trait.[14] After passing through one’s own tribunals, one is left with the idea that one’s unique existence, and the right to have others recognize it, is predicated most of all on Honor. So Steffan writes: “Personal Honor is an absolute; you either have Honor of you do not. No one can take it from you; it can only be surrendered willingly. And once it is surrendered, once it is compromised, it can never again be fully regained.”[15] Joseph Steffan seems to have normalized the idea of “personal morality” into its most elementary possible form, beyond the Golden Rule of the Bible. His notion of honor as the proper consideration for personal autonomy focuses on autonomy and its limits as perhaps our most central moral controversy. At the same time, the military application from which he derived his notion of honor serves the purpose of an individual’s subordinating himself to the purposes of the group, for being absolutely dependable for the group in life-and-death situations.[16] Without honor, there is no freedom; there is only tribute to those who will protect you.

Honor means telling the truth, even when there may be immediate adverse consequences. My parents once taught me, “you’ll never be punished if you tell the truth” (even as they had once told me little white lies about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the stork, and then had “confessed” to these one at a time). “Scout’s” honor means, further, that if you know something is wrong, you won’t do it. So, an important corollary to the Honor Principle is that people keep their promises. A moral theory and associated public policy centered on individual liberty and personal autonomy must be predicated on holding everyone accountable to their promises, to their “contracts.” This is no small order, in a culture where people have grown used to being forgiven many of their obligations upon mere personal “inconvenience” when there is a government, mortgage lender, wealthier parent, or employer who can bail them out, and where people can rationalize small episodes of venial cheating (going back to plagiarizing term-papers from fraternity files) because “everybody does it.” Successful practice of individualized morality would seem to demand one more virtue: civility, that is, a willingness to do what is right by others, given the totality of circumstance, even if not required by law or “constitution.”

In my upbringing, religion actually did catalyze the notions of honor and accountability as components of personal pride as well as the more usual obligation to “God.” I recall Sunday school textbooks by the Judson Press talking about “responsibility for your own actions,” as a positive thing, not just an avoidance of sin. Despite their reputation for moralistic fundamentalism, Baptists are very good at presenting positive spin on personal morality. Another Sunday School lesson showed a board game, with a drawing of “bribery bridge”; I remember not understanding at first how it could be wrong to hand someone money. Giving into blackmail would be bribery, wouldn’t it?

All too often, being a good person really isn’t good enough. There are many people who try to control others merely to gratify themselves. Their self-indulgence and playing out of compulsions - the giving in to Biblical temptations to “just do it” and then deny reality - become their own ends. Some people do not seem to understand the moral constraints of karma or honor at all, and they are titillated by destructive, sadistic and mutilative behavior most of us find disgusting - we call these Ted Bundy-types “sociopaths.” Sometimes they learn “morality” only when it comes from a compelling and controlling belief system, particularly religious faith.

Or, men and women may learn personal honor by having other people to take care of besides themselves. Laura Schlesinger once said as much on her talk show, “it makes you a man, when you have a child and have to care for another human being besides yourself.” A few conservatives (notably George Gilder) have insinuated that men, with their innate biological wildness and risk-taking, tend not to become trustworthy and honorable at all until they have families to support - a constructive outlet for their recklessness, tamed by women. I guess, not all young men (like me) are so rambunctious to need to have children; for us, work itself (or chess) is good therapy. Who is really “responsible for responsibility?” - the state? the culture? the individual?

Our more benign (if smug) definition of personal morality seems to leave out a factor which chronically bothers us: that some people seem to have or “inherit” more than they can earn with their own efforts. So another major component of a more secular formulation of personal morality must be, that one does not make use of resources which can only be produced at the unwilling expense or exploitation of others.

There are many examples. Take child pornography, for example. Someone who buys a lewd photograph of a child does not harm the child directly, but is partaking of a pleasure or indulgence which could be sustained only if someone had exploited the child, so purchasing child pornography is clearly “immoral” by any reasonable secular standard. A more generic example comes from the traditional political Left. Most “upper middle class” people today enjoy a lifestyle that could not have been created without the “exploitation” of lower-class workers in the past (such as child labor or coal miners and factory workers doing dangerous, repetitive tasks.) An even more obvious example was the “plantation” lifestyle supported by slavery before the Civil War.

The claim of a right to express one’s own “unique existence” becomes a moral issue if this expression is achieved, not just through dishonesty, but only through the unreturned indulgence of others or through the sacrifices of others. The effect on others may be unintended and unanticipated. This makes the moral claim of individual autonomy a fundamental element, like a field in a table in a normalized relational database, in any discussion of how moral values should be reconciled in public policy. Homosexuality, particularly in men, is striking because the homosexual “lifestyle,” in modern culture, is perhaps society’s most visible expression of an intention to live one’s life for one’s own purposes, to define one’s identity first and only then live it out in relationships with others. Even if homosexuality is somehow intrinsic and immutable, homosexual men need to protect their autonomy and independence, even if only to float in a world of private sensations. Homosexuality tests the moral viability of cultural openness to living out one’s life for one’s own expressive purposes. There other paths to personal growth besides having children, even if they seem to thread among icons.

It is this problem if second-handedness that tends to lead us back to more “authoritarian”, spiritual, or overtly religious definitions of morality, such as what Mr. Murchison proposes.

- 6 -

Collectivism once pretended to have all the moral answers

Actually, we can reach back further, and understand the “moral” basic of a lot of past radical thought (both Left and Right). In Communist ideology, the ‘Bourgeoisie’ lives off the labor of a working underclass; that’s “immoral” and must be overturned by revolutionary force, which will seek confrontation by tempting the ‘ruling powers” into even more repression. Before the Reagan years, we used to say, “it’s the Left (or Marx and Mao) that is so moralistic.” In right-wing “survivalist” thought (well put by Howard Ruff in the 1970’s but recently distorted by the militia movement), people who live in metropolitan areas in comfy white-collar jobs are depicted as vulnerable to external forces beyond their control and also as parasites on people in the countryside who do the “real work” of growing food. Amish culture certainly represents this elementary self-sufficiency at its Sunday best. Most recently, the “Unabomber” has attracted attention to these ideas with his “manifesto”, in which technology and political organization are depicted as over-socializing the individual and depriving him of real “freedom”, which he defines as “being in control of the life-and-death issues of one’s existence, food, clothing, shelter, and defense against whatever threats there may be in one’s environment.”[17]

In the early 1970’s, right before I came out, I had attended several meetings of The People’s Party of New Jersey, and became struck with the level of indignation felt by many “baby boomers” with the exploitation of the poor by the “system,” the notorious military-industrial complex so pilloried by Oliver Stone’s films. I had been sheltered from all the protests by my own peculiar stint in the Army. The Party came up with an outrageous platform, suggesting, for example, that the government confiscate income over $50,000 a year. “How many people in this room make over $5000 a year,” screamed one girl in an impromptu meeting in a Newark rowhouse. Their tactics ranged from the silly (lettuce boycotts) to dangerous (threats to use violence, that is, convert themselves into communism). Their arguments focused on people who “couldn’t afford to buy cars.” The racist, sexist, and homophobic ideology of the system supposedly kept the poor in an inescapable state if dependency and pseudo-slavery (which may be practically the case today with some migrant farm workers). People like me who had good jobs in the “establishment” were among the oppressors; working for a defense contractor in the 60’s was like working for a tobacco company (or an abortion clinic) in the 90’s. Their unstated assumption was that the welfare of society, particularly the naturally disadvantaged, preceded the well-being of individuals who comprise it; yet at other times their rhetoric directed blame on the “system” rather than particular people like me whom, however unreliability, benefited from it. A political system which allowed this to go on and oppressors to live in relative comfort while slaughter went on in Viet Nam or in the ghettos was, therefore, immoral. But, blaming “the system” for problems and calling for collectivistic “revolution” (indeed, in the manner of Shostakovich’s “October” Symphony) provided a convenient cop-out from looking at personal morality. Yet, it recognizes that some basic moral conundrums, such as racism, slavery, and later abortion, will surface in politics or even war before they filter down to individual choices. A 90’s transposition of this institutional approach would be the way many people now see the tobacco companies as propagating a “moral evil,” by hooking young people on nicotine when the companies know many people will not be able to help themselves out of a stress-reducing but severely life-shortening behavior, cigarette smoking. “Profit,” in the minds of some, has become an evil itself.

The left’s moral outrage at class and worker “oppression” contributed, during the late Sixties, to a loss of confidence on the family, which got to be seen as a transmitter of privilege through inheritance, and a feudal device to keep wealth in safe hands, all in the name of providing a “better future for one’s own children.” Today, we might see inheritance as a good thing, since we are rediscovering the advantages of the family, compared to both government and corporations, in teaching other fundamental moral values. What the Left is forgetting is that the State set itself up for grabs, to be “bought” as leverage for “ruling families” to use in keeping their competition at bay. Once the State subsidized discrimination, oppression, or outright slavery, the State would have to be empowered to reverse itself!

The parable of the Rich Young Ruler in the New Testament has been cited as a Biblical justification of a communitarian standard of morality, at least when it is superimposed on top of the personal accountability that would be shown in the behavior of anyone true to faith. Curiously, the willingness to distribute to others based on their needs without regard to their accountabilities seems to undermine the supremacy of personal responsibility as an individual moral teaching and suggests that, at least in a New Age “Christian” culture, morality may be much more a group concept than one which can censure individual moral choices. Yet, even in this religious paradigm, the morality of the individual is experienced through faith, the willingness to let go of things to deepen one’s faith and then do the appropriate good works of service to others. There is a yet deeper paradox in this parable: the Ruler is challenged as to his own confidence in his emotional attachment to Christ - “follow me!” - as if Christ really were a “Mr. Right.”

However, social, political. and economic “organization” - which started with primitive man’s family groups and leads to today’s information-oriented, expressive, pluralistic culture, arguably augments the importance of dynamic individual moral choices as opposed to those of the groups. A civilized and technologically advancing society enhances individual freedom because it gives the individual the chance to “specialize” in what he or she is good at. Psychotherapist Paul Rosenfels argued that, once adaptive needs are met, civilized individuals can even specialize in creative psychological processes regardless of gender.[18] This “character specialization,” always involves at least barter of skills, and the willingness the forgo certain expressions so one can do what one is best at, and meet the needs of others. And herein grows the central moral dichotomy of individualism, that one is defined in large part by one’s boundaries.

I have always been stubborn about accepting that I can become so vulnerable to external events which I cannot control. The remedies offered by religion are particularly haunting, and need revisitation and examination beyond the usual recitations of the “narrowness” of morality one hears in Protestant sermons. I would sit in MCC[19] Sunday evening services (well before AIDS) and listen to public prayers about sickness and job loss. I would wonder how oil shortages, mergers, and corporate downsizings would affect my own autonomy. Even more disarming would be for someone disturbed by my diffidence (and very much misreading my intelligence) to embrace me during a campfire while praying for me, or for another female minister from South Africa to preach, “the Lord wants your mind.” Curiously, most of the time, I would not be as concerned about the politics of gay rights or AIDS as it could affect me, even though I had already run the “mental illness” and security clearance treadmill; I did worry about how these affected a world that I wanted to listen to me. Surrendering all to “Christ” sounded like a copout for personal incompetence.

Yet, faith, a certain humility and capitulation to group values all seem to connect directly to our moral debate, particularly over the “sinfulness” of homosexuality. Once, a particularly articulate Dallas MCC pastor, David Day, reminded us that the root of immorality is the desire for “Knowledge of Good and Evil.” This knowledge is like the body of scientific evidence for evolution, which is to be humbled and then replaced by a faith in literal interpretations of the Bible. Or “knowledge” may portend of full public debate on sensitive issues, like sexuality, which many “conservatives” think should remain hidden, for the sake of the kids and probably those easily tempted husbands. Day followed that sermon up with another dilly, “E.T. Phone Home!” Or, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming!” One should not stake out a claim in the world without God’s help. Nor, without the involvement of others. It just won’t work. Similarly, other New Age moralists like Richard Kininger[20] have argued against maintenance of “attachments” (as to material possessions) as an impediment to real moral and spiritual development. A few of the more extreme cults (like the Unification Church) will admonish their flocks with, “no more concepts!” These views perceive homosexuality (particularly for men) as a kind of Faustian fascination with self-perception through vicarious association, and an unwillingness to give up something of oneself in order to progress into higher “union” and procreation. The best of homosexual men - likable, athletic, gifted, and articulate, like so many in the military - are seen as clones of Mephistopheles, defying the commitments required to true “Christians,” like the character in Boito’s opera as he angrily whistles while Faust is taken from him up to heaven. (Indeed, the congenial Satan is covets personal control over “good and evil,” so that the “Witches’ Sabbath” is the opera’s best scene; indeed, Boito knew why today we would have “witch-hunts.”) The proscription against sexual activity (not just sexual intercourse) before marriage is, in fact, designed as an instrument to force men to reconfigure their heads for monogamy and parenthood before initiation into legitimate adulthood and societal participation; after all, almost everyone (except, in some religions. “priests”) at least masturbates or experiences wet dreams. The organization of society around nuclear families with ukase to marry as a first obligation of manhood[21], seems to have arisen with the Torah, to enhance the “unit cohesion” of the Jewish “chosen” people as a group; then, loyalty to tribe and its Jehovah would supersede any claim to a separate and special “unique existence of one’s own.

The “ex-gay” movement may be understood as an appeal to “religious” communitarianism. Although aversion therapy and other horrors have been tried, most “ex-gay” groups are centered around simple rituals and “prayer.” Sometimes they really do succeed, with men who do finally get married and have children. I have known at least one person from such a group, and he had dedicated himself to service to AIDS victims through “Love and Action,” but he never tried to “convert” me. All these programs appeal to a desire to be accepted, to conform, to be less of one’s formal “selfish” self, to be more “like other boys.” One church-sponsored “halfway house” residential program in Kansas, documented in the 1993 HBO film Why Am I Gay? would not allow clients to leave the premises (other than to go to work) on their own, as if to deny the notion of living independently as a single person. Yet, even for the mature homosexual, personal growth (following the model of Rosenfels and the Ninth Street Center) requires a letting go of old inhibitions and fantasies and the passing through a communal experience, into a new sense of self where such experiences as falling in love with a sexually “unattractive” person become thinkable. On psychological terms, this is not very different from ‘ex-gay.”

A value system centered on individual specialization becomes morally viable when, in fact, persons first (as we indicated already) honor their promises and, also, recognize their temporal limitations and can focus on commitments that lead to meeting the real needs of others. In practical terms, this often means, being able to care about other people even when the work of loving them does not bring immediate “gratification.” It may mean washing the dishes or delivering meals before writing books. For the visually-oriented gay male, it may been openness to “falling in love” with someone less than perfect.[22] In the modern commercial world, individual specialization is justified by integrity and, especially, professionalism and commitment to personal customer service. But the creativity that comes from using psychological surplus to build new commitment patterns is, in this era of civilization, a particularly striking opportunity for gay men and lesbians and is indeed a justification for , not just for conventional “gay pride,” but for personal pride in self-image.

“Unconditional love” becomes the bridge concept, linking communitarian Biblical moral teaching (particularly the New Testament) with liberal thinking from the mental health community. And the “moral” objection to much of self-indulgent behavior that characterizes a lot of modern “self-expression” (or maybe “expressionism”) seems to weigh back to the possibility that the behavior (or craving for it) takes the person away from meeting the needs of others, at least with any enthusiasm or commitment. Character growth requires attunement to others, a balance between living openly and unconditionally (a mother’s love), and with a specific view to the results one wants to accomplish with the work of one’s Love (as with a father’s love).

In a society where there is a voluntary caring of individuals for one another, often through the family, the notion that some people are much more successful than others, and can leverage their success, seems more morally acceptable. The idea that people can really earn success and deserve to enjoy it becomes more popular, and the idea that wide differences in wealth is inherently immoral - as in the eyes of the “People’s Party” - becomes less credible. Still, much personal success could not occur without inheritance, or the previous self-sacrifice of others.

So, the homosexual, in conservative religious and moral thought, may indeed not only be at odds with “nature” but also has received benefits (from parents) he supposedly would not return (by having and raising children and by performing according to the expectations and limitations of gender role). Or, perhaps, by setting up a value-system in which only “attractive” men are valued by others - a tendency, which if repeated in general society, would tend to make the world very Darwinian indeed. The homosexual community often answers these charges superficially by emphasizing the “not choice,” putatively biological aspect to sexual orientation. The generous actions of the gay community towards those afflicted with AIDS would seem to rebut this assessment, as would the interest of some gay men and, more often, lesbians in becoming parents.

Other behaviors may be understood in terms of their apparent tie to self-indulgence and their preclusion of a life that leads to commitment to others. Drugs, for example, by providing internal, chemical self-transcendence, short-circuit the desire of a person to become “productive.” Legal abortion and euthanasia imply that we will decide which human life is “valuable” out of convenience to us, and encourage us to care about people only when they can care back or please us. Indeed, the postulated “gay gene(s)” may (or may not) be as difficult to verify as Close Encounters of the Third Kind; yet both may exist and someday we could find ourselves debating the value of a “gay” unborn child’s life. In the play Twilight of the Golds[23], one of the characters says about her unborn, “he will probably be very intelligent.” Let’s hope than sanity accompanies choice.

These varied questionable behaviors also have more immediate adverse consequences for self and for others. Sexual practices may indirectly endanger public health. Drug use (even legal drug use) will shorten life and may (in the case of use of hallucinogens) distort “reality” and lead a person to commit harmful acts that he or she cannot even remember. The self-destruction from drug use (including alcohol and tobacco) is more apparent in the “modern age” than in earlier times because people now live longer and don’t die as much of “adaptive” causes; preserving one’s body and youth for as many years into adulthood and even old age has become an important value. The “moral” assessment of drug abuse may have grown more disapproving with modernity rather than more tolerant or even accepting, as with homosexuality. Abortion may destroy human life that has already become sentient. All of these problems reinforce the notion that a behavior is simply “wrong.”

- 7 -

When am I my brother’s keeper?

The American people are developing the idea that morality is a process by which the individual reconciles his or her own desires with the needs of family, community, and society. Morality starts with the notion that the individual has intrinsic value, and government or community should get involved when the dignity of one person is damaged, directly or indirectly, by the actions or even the values of others. Discussion of morality leads eventually to the mechanisms by which government reinforces or damages the dignity of the individual.

But morality also invokes the consequences of “self-actualization” or “self-transcendence.” Many pleasurable experiences (whether sexual or spiritual) get to be elaborated as giving life ultimate meaning. This must be both tempered and reinforced by motivation and even obligation by individuals to meet the needs of others. Government should leave people alone to do this, yet government and society traditionally defines the human associations that are most successful for our kind of society - the traditional family. A creative process develops when one does this on one’s own, and enriches one’s identity in the process. At the Ninth Street Center, I was once aghast in a “talk group” when another very disciplined participant felt so good merely about being able to “care” about other people.

Of course, everyone agrees that parents must be responsible for their children and that they ought to stay together until children are grown. But when some people find self-fulfillment outside the obligations or traditional family - even people who never have children of their own - it seems that their public examples can undermine the guidance of “traditional values” that are so important to people growing up in less than optimal circumstances. Hence, gays and lesbians supposedly interfere with the transmission of “family values” as a stabilizing influence on the next generation. “Family” makes all our brothers’ keepers. But, as a whole, the “general pubic”, except when stirred up by opportunistic “right wing” politicians, seems more willing to view adult homosexuality as a private psychological issue rather than a moral one, than in any pervious period in modern history.

The inability to make human attachments does have very definite and bad effects. People, in their need to control the lives of others and enjoy “power,” may (if sufficiently sociopathic) create computer viruses (especially when they’re not old enough to be on their own), blow up buildings and kill people with bombs, or take over nations as tyrants and set up concentration camps and killing fields. This happens on both the Right and the Left. A society which drops the issue of family values (or, more generic human commitments) on the floor may not survive.

The main point of debating the gay and lesbian issue as a subset of “moral values” may be to frame the question, “when I am my brother’s keeper?” That is, “to what extent are we all one?”

- 8 -

Democracy must develop moral choices

To maintain a functioning and civil society, government is allegedly forced to take positions that amount to moral judgments, whether it wants to or not. To some, the essence of government is the setting of public priorities, which are just expanded “collective” moral choices. With respect to abortion, it must weigh the privacy of the mother against the sanctity of life for a developing human being, and any position is a moral judgment. In conducting war, it must weigh the lives of young men who are sent off to war, to “sacrifice” themselves - an imbalance that became intolerable during the Viet Nam years. Or, as in ending World War II, it must weigh the “value” of the lives of civilians who may die in the name of saving more lives later (or the “national security” interest in interring Japanese Americans), or for the purpose of a more stable political order afterwards. Indeed, the allegedly absolute sanctity of sentient human life is a moral value (although it is really not so absolute unless we reject not just abortion but war, and follow Benjamin Britten’s pacifism). Robert Bork writes, “there is, for example, no basis for worker safety laws other than the moral judgment that it is wrong to endanger workers’ lives and limbs in order to produce goods at lower cost. There is no objection to segregation or even to slavery other than moral disapproval.” [24] Bork could easily have said the same thing about abortion. All of these are moral calls, and they are relative; all fall far short of any absolutes that would be demanded of a higher moral authority.

Democratic consensus, where the people give consent to their elected representatives to develop and communicate shared values of virtue and civility in one’s general relations with others, sometimes turns to intangible notions of public morality. Majority rule, if sometimes oppressive, certainly offers more people a chance at a productive life that an autocracy running the system just for the privileged few. But this the reach of this “consensus” must not extend into private, self-identifying activities until they have a material, observable effect on others, and thus consensus must not be contrived to exclude people from full participation in society, on any grounds other than demonstrated conduct and merit. Remember Thomas Jefferson’s notions about the appropriate umbrella-reach of government. “The problem with government, as Jefferson saw it, was not to make people moral; that would be absurd, Jefferson believed, since the ‘moral faculty,’ the capacity for doing good to others, was inherent in man’s nature.” Morality as an issue does not go away just because government circumscribes its prerogatives in disseminating moral notions. “The problem of government, rather, was to maintain a social environment in which it was possible for individuals to be moral, to live harmoniously and benevolently together in society.”[25] John Stuart Mill, after all, had written, in a perfect world of “human beings in the maturity of their faculties,” “the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty or action of any of their number, is self-protection.”[26]

Still, it is naive to assume that government will not get involved in legislating the weights of various moral agents. “Government did this not by directing persons’ lives through ordering society from above but instead by providing the underlying structure that made it possible for society to order itself.” [27]Another way to put it: “Politics should not try to form the character or cultivate virtue of its citizens, for to do so would ‘legislate morality.’ Government should not affirm, through its policies or laws, any particular conception of the good life; instead it should provide a neutral framework of rights, within which people can choose their own values and ends.”[28] Still, we must consider the intrusiveness of various government schemes to do so, and weigh the policy implications, particularly the granting of privileges to one politically favored group at the expense of another, or of reaffirming “values” held to be important for societal cohesion. Hopefully, we can understand and encourage what Jefferson advocated, as a “limited government: a ‘wise a frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.’”[29]

This confidence in people to run their own lives according to libertarian political principles and without overriding governmental morality is still vigorously questioned today. One reader of National Review says: “The libertarians are logical and consistent. Government has no business intervening in voluntary transactions. But what to do if the libertarian society results in a nation of dopeheads and its young men refuse to volunteer for military service during national emergencies. Libertarians fiddle while America burns. Maybe that’s why they get 1 percent of the vote.”[30] But, libertarians will punish people for harm to or endangerment of others and for, essentially, breaches of “honor,” and see this as the only legitimate way o

Libertarian Party Candidate for President Harry Brown has a very simple explanation for the breakdown of moral order and explosion of violent crime in our culture. Government is diverted from catching real criminals and corrupted by this moralistic chase for perpetrators of vice, “victimless crimes,” where “no one has been assaulted, no one’s property has been invaded, no one has been cheated by fraud or broken promises, (and) there is no victim making a complaint.”[31] Of course, it is not so easy to identify victims in a complex world. What happens to people brought up without semblance of stable family, with no personal human values? Are they the castoffs of people who renounce deeper obligations?

Now, about those deeper obligations to set oneself aside for a deeper commitment, to family and even to country, again, there needs to be a culture of civility and of psychological commitment. Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol has articulated this concept as a “politics of liberty and a sociology of virtue.”[32] My next two chapters, on “family values” and on the workplace, will indeed extract from the notion of voluntary “virtue.” The libertarian approach does require a certain confidence (if not faith) in human reason and nature. Government has been the tool of the rich and powerful; then it pretended to be the guardian of the vulnerable, the guarantor of fairness and compassion, until we found out that behind the scenes it still serves the rich and powerful. The alternative to libertarian reductions in governmental refereeship is a corruptive barter of special interests bound outside of principle in unprincipled coalitions, followed by subrogation of the inevitable failures. For gays and lesbians, this means that there is no better reason to expect to be left alone and to escape discrimination than “immutability,” and this is really no principled reason at all.

Perhaps conductor Leonard Bernstein was communicating this when he conducted Beethoven’s Symphony #9 in Berlin on Christmas Day, 1989, soon after the Berlin Wall fell. The resulting compact disc was called “Ode to Freedom.”[33] This is a freedom where people, perhaps under the guidance of some kind of personal faith, build their own lives with minimal interference from government and voluntarily meet their obligations to others.

Still, we need a consensus-point on the proper place for marjoritarian legislation of “morality.”

- 9 -

So, the Courts now let the state “implement morality”

In 1980, shortly after I had moved to Dallas, there had been problems with police raid of gay bars, where men would be hauled off at random and charged with “public lewdness.” One rogue policeman was responsible for many arrests, and one man, a two-time loser, actually had to leave Dallas (by agreement with the D.A.) to stay out of jail.

Sometime during that year, I had a chat in the Throckmorton Mining Company with a potential “trick,” and he said something like, the police raid had happened because “it’s against the law.” How so, I would argue. It’s not against the law to congregate, and you aren’t going to get caught in the act if it happens in private. Why the big deal?

Wrong.

In 1986, the Georgia sodomy statute came before the Supreme Court, which upheld it by a 5-4 majority.

The historical facts are well known. In 1982, An Atlanta policeman had visited the home of a Michael Hardwick to serve a misdemeanor ticket, and observed Hardwick engaging in oral sex with another man. Hardwick was arrested for sodomy, a felony with a maximum 10 year sentence, and was loudly jeered by other inmates as he was carted off to jail. The District Attorney quickly dropped the charges, but Harwick sued anyway.

The notoriety and angry vehemence of some of the majority text, with its invocations of the Bible and historical tradition, shocked many of us.

“The issue presented is whether the Federal Constitution confers a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy and hence invalidates the laws of the many States that still make such conduct illegal and have done so for a very long time. ...No connection between family, marriage, or procreation on the one hand and homosexual activity on the other has been demonstrated...

Precedent aside respondent would have us announce... a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy. It is true that despite the language of the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which appear to focus only on the processes by which life, liberty, or property are taken, the cases are legion in which those clauses have been interpreted to have substantive content, subsuming rights that to a great extent are immune from federal or state regulation or proscription...

“Proscriptions against that conduct have ancient roots... Sodomy was a criminal offense under common law and was forbidden by the laws of the original thirteen States when they ratified the Bill of Rights.”[34]

It is clear that, in the majority opinion, “liberty” relates to prevailing moral notions of society and to the communal purposes (ultimately, parentage) for which these associated “deeply rooted rights are used. The Court went out of its way to emphasize that its analysis would apply to homosexuals only.

Finally. Justice Byron White's claims that “law often expresses moral notions, and if every challenge to a law under the due process clause were heard, the courts would be very busy indeed.” [35]In fact, in 1985, the Fifth Circuit, in vacating Baker vs. Wade, had commented that the 1973 Texas homosexual conduct law (21.06, a misdemeanor) had been drawn up for the purpose of “implementing morality, a permissible state goal.”

Hardwick thus denied that straightforward “Due Process” analysis could protect consensual homosexual sodomy because “homosexual sodomy” could not be a fundamental right (that government can’t take away without “due process of law”). Previously, some litigators had tried to find this “fundamental right” indirectly through the “penumbra effect” of the 9th and 10th Amendments. The focus of the opinion has since encouraged gay activists to explore more fully the notion of becoming a suspect class and using the Equal Protection clause in a manner similar to that afforded other groups already defined by the Civil Rights Acts of 1964. This is all very thoroughly presented in many legal journals; I recommend one from Tulane.[36] Chai Feldblum has argued effectively why gays and lesbians still deserve to be treated as a suspect class deserving “heightened scrutiny”; her reasons include the observation that sexual orientation is benign, does not affect competence, and has historically been the target of insidious (and often blatant