Exhomophobia
A story has been circulating about Obama’s incorporation of gospel singer Donnie McClurkin into his South Carolina tour. McClurkin was gay. He’s not any more. For him, homosexuality was not simply a lifestyle choice, but stemmed from deeper sexual confusion due to abuse as a child.
He’s taken a very public stand on the issue of homosexuality, stating quite clearly that 1) there are many gay men and women like him and 2) they don’t have to continue living a life that makes them feel guilty.
Suddenly, McClurkin is radically anti-gay and Obama is "[pandering] to anti-gay mania." Is this really homophobia?
First, let’s be clear - a phobia is an irrational fear of something. Crowds. Spiders. Simply disagreeing with the lifestyle doesn’t give an accuser the right to throw the "homophobic" epithet - and that’s what it is, an epithet - at the accused.
Secondly, McClurkin is far from "anti-gay". He contends that the lifestyle is wrong, but makes no claims about homosexuals themselves. How could he be, having once been gay himself?
This raises a host of questions.
- Why do those in the media consistently conflate a person’s single belief with that person’s identity? (Anyone remember the Strom Thurmon/Trent Lott incident?) Their logic runs like this: McClurkin is against homosexuality (but not gays, though they forget the distinction). Therefore, any news story that mentions him must identify him as anti-gay. In addition, anyone who associates with him must have an anti-gay agenda as well.
- Why do "gay rights activists" harbor such
hatredvirulent intolerance for those who leave the lifestyle? - How can you champion flexible sexuality if you ignore those who embody that very flexibility?
- How much longer until we realize that these rigid labels - "gay" "straight" - don’t do a good job describing sexuality? How many sexual encounters of a certain kind must one have to qualify? What of someone who changes their sexuality? Were they always one or the other?
Tolerance must be more than a one-way street.
2 Comments
Jason,
I’d agree with you that disagreeing about the rightness of X doesn’t make one X-phobic. But I think the answer to your question 2, sadly, is an obvious one: far (far) too often, disagreeing about the nature of homosexuality _has_ been associated with homophobia. I’ll be honest, I don’t know _many_ people who disagree with it who don’t at the same time have a real negative emotional response to it. I think people in the gay community are responding to that, and I can’t really fault them for it, to be honest. It’s just their experience. Until culture changes to the point where being anti-X doesn’t tend, on the average, to mean X-phobic, that’s the way it will be perceived.
CP -
I fully agree. History hasn’t made the distinction easy. That’s too bad, and hopefully with an open discourse about the issue, it can change.
Stories like this are a reminder, though, that it won’t happen soon.