Andrew Sullivan, a contributing editor and columnist for the New York Times Magazine, spoke on the Politics of Homosexuality in Gasson Hall last Tuesday.
During the course of his speech, Sullivan, who refers to himself as a “bad Catholic,” explained the four different factions of competing homosexual politics which exist in our society today. He also offered his “brilliant resolution” to the problem.
According to Sullivan, the four main political factions of homosexuality are roughly defined as prohibitionists, liberationists, conservatives and liberals.
In his first category, prohibitionists, Sullivan included the Catholic Church. “If you are a student at Boston College or have any relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, this is the politics that defines your life,” said Sullivan. Prohibitionism begins, said Sullivan, with the assumption that actual homosexuality doesn’t exit.
“Prohibitionists would claim that it is a wrong and sinful act that people choose to commit for wrong and sinful reasons,” said Sullivan. “They believe it is destructive to the person who engages in it, and of a society who tolerates it. The politics of prohibitionism implies that the government has the role and impeding duty to intervene into society to prohibit, prevent, deter, and stigmatize such behavior for the good of those people themselves, and for the society as a whole.”
According to Sullivan, prohibitionism has been around since the beginnings of the Christian era and is still the most powerful and prevalent political view concerning homosexuality on the planet. “If you ask in polling questions why people oppose homosexual equality or civil rights, the vast majority will answer that their main reasons are religious and Biblical,” said Sullivan.
Sullivan went on to acknowledge that in a “handful of places,” in both the Old and the New Testaments, homosexuality is said to be forbidden. This is the main argument given by many Protestant fundamentalist factions and, according to Sullivan, is the prevalent argument given by our society against homosexual practices.
Sullivan questioned whether the Bible could be taken literally or not. “There are many injunctions in the Bible, and many abominations in Leviticus that are equally condemned that currently we discard,” said Sullivan.
He cited the rule in Leviticus, which bans the mixing of different types of fabric in the production of cloth as an example of this idea.
For Sullivan and others, these literal prohibitions are not enough. “This is where the Catholic Church comes in; where for nineteen centuries brilliant scholars have tried to find reasons behind these biblical injunctions,” said Sullivan. The Catholic Church claims that these biblical restrictions are rooted in, and backed by, nature itself; Sullivan disagrees with this claim.
Sullivan claims that liberationists agree with prohibitionists in that they deny that homosexual people actually exist.
“It is an act of rebellion against the norms,” said Sullivan. “However, the fundamental difference lies in how one views the established norms. Whereas the prohibitionists think of them as natural norms, the liberationists think of them as oppressive norms. This is the politics of queer liberation.”
According to Sullivan, this political view doesn’t play a large role except on college campuses. In short, Sullivan disagrees with liberationists, for he believes that people are “gay first and queer second.”
The conservative politics of homosexuality, according to Sullivan, is the politics of “don’t ask don’t tell,” the politics of “the closet” and the “politics of “discretion.”
“They are perfectly happy with gay people in private,” said Sullivan. “They just don’t want to see homosexuality placed on exactly the same level as heterosexuality in the public sphere.” Sullivan said he thinks this is paradoxical.
Liberals, on the other hand, treat homosexuals as a minority group, Sullivan went on.
According to Sullivan, liberals strive to protect homosexual interests by creating special laws to protect them as a minority from the actions of the majority.
“The paradox of this position,” said Sullivan, “is that, in order to liberate people from the constraints of being homosexual in a heterosexual society, you actually have to define them more clearly and more firmly as homosexuals than any minority ever before.” The real problem, he said, lies in the fact that such legislation defines people as victims of oppression only.
Sullivan stated that he doesn’t want this stigma attached to homosexuals. His solution to this controversy, calls for simple and full equality for homosexuals under the law.
“This means the law will not make it a crime for gay people to have a relationship, which is what the law says in Texas, for example, and still many states in this country. It means removing any discrepancies or inequalities between gay people and straight people in the legal world. It means that a patriotic American who wants to serve his country should be able to do so if he or she is capable of doing the job, regardless of their sexual orientation, regardless of the fears and hostility of anybody else in that institution,” said Sullivan.
The lecture was sponsored by the Humanities Series/Lowell lectures.
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