Ignorance is death.

February 18, 2010 by Pastor Dan.

When did the gay rights movement run out of gas? Yes, it did run out of gas. I’m only asking when did it happen to us. Last week I passed my 40-year mark as a gay/Christian activist. Didn’t get a pin or a T-shirt, though.

When did the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender rights movement run out of gas? One answer is that it was when we had buried about half of our activists who died of AIDS.

Or is that we ran out of energy when we got half a loaf? When people were able to have some quality of life in some of our larger cities, and when we could use Damron’s guide to clubs worldwide or take gay or lesbian cruises and sail the seas under our own flag?

Clearly, we need a source of renewable energy to replace the gas we used to have. And that really means recruiting. Not recruiting straights to become queer. If you’ve ever tried that, with a “bi boy” or “straight-but-curious type” you probably had your heart broken within a few weeks. Recruiting no more works than praying-away-the-gay or getting reparative therapy.

No, we need to recruit the young who are already out and LGBTQ. What they need to be recruited to is to get off the couch, unplug the latest iPleasure, and zoom in from outer cyberspace. We need fresh recruits for many things, including the gathering of signatures to repeal Prop 8. But, even more basic, we need recruits to pay attention to what our right-wingnut enemies are doing out there.

American society may appear to be relatively tolerant right now (if you live in the coastal zones or in a city bigger than, say, a quarter million people). The 20-something generation, in most bigger communities, do not have homophobic issues with “the gay thing.” Everybody under 30 seems to know somebody who is gay or bi or trans or queer. It’s become a non-issue.

But at the same time, extremely backward and weird neanderthals are organizing, marching, writing, phoning, blogging and amassing money that could completely yank away the few civil rights we have patched together.

I have talked repeatedly about Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, and the case could be made we’re at the tipping point now. LGBTQ rights could win the entire culture war, or the entire war could be lost because social attitudes, homophobia, and small-mind electoral muscle simply tip things backward again.

The late Dr. John Boswell researched and lectured persuasively that Europe was relatively tolerant up to the 11^th century or so. And then a lot of medieval factors including fear, xenophobia, war and disease began to “tip” the needle on social tolerance against homosexuals (and I think Jews and Gypsies, etc.) The visceral attitudes of an entire continent began to look for someone to blame for current social ills, a scapegoat. Gay people became the scapegoat. And within about a hundred years’ time, social tolerance for gay people not only evaporated but the death penalty for same-sex acts became the law all over Europe.

Given modern communications, what took a century 900 years ago could take only a few years in our time. Think Uganda, think Fred Phelps, think Sarah Palin and other tea party boobs.

I am not Chicken Little here, crying that “the sky is falling!” When I look up, in fact, I am hopeful. But the muck at my feet is likely to pull me under if I do nothing.

Thanks to Ali Davis on 365Gay.com for alerting me to a Washington Monthly article on how simpletons from small town Texas have hijacked the entire national system on what goes into our nation’s textbooks. The article, “How a group of Texas conservatives is rewriting your kids’ textbooks” by Mariah Blake is more horrifying than any Hollywood horror film.

People in the upcoming generations are not being dumbed–down by inattention and electronic toys alone. They are being dumbed-down by the already-stupid who have been conspiring in plain sight to make sure the young will not be able to think.

I wish I remembered who said this to me a few years back: “There are uneducated people and there are ignorant people. The problem is that the ignorant are teaching the uneducated.”

In the meantime too many of us are doing white parties, etc. If we are not vigilant, the next Burning Man event may be staged by the Hateful Right.

—Pastor Dan

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