How Do You Slice Up A Rainbow?

The CDC has come out with the declaration that "only" three per cent of the population are GLBT. That's interesting, but is it useful?

For one thing, sexuality exists across a continuum, and there's no guarantee that everyone places the markers for "gay," "straight," "bi," or any other demographic tag, in the same spots. It's like asking what portion of the rainbow is blue: Do you want to restrict yourself to the thin segment where you see Royal Blue? Do you want to include Sky Blue? Turquoise? Teal? Or how about purple? Or violet? How "blue" does blue have to be to qualify?

Then there's the question of self-reporting, which the CDC's study relied upon. Even in this day and age when GLBTs are becoming more a part of the mainstream, how many people with sexual and romantic attraction to others of the same gender are going to come out and declare it? Ne need only look at the number of "straight" men who regularly go out cruising for gay sex on the "down low" to start doubting the accuracy of the CDC's number.

Which brings up the fact that the CDC wasn't trying to make any sort of political point. Rather, they were looking "to remedy some of these gaps in our understanding of the role sexual orientation and gender identity play in people's health and in their lives," according to the Williams Institute's Gary J. Gates.

For certain elements, though, there is no such thing as nuance - and any statement about gays is fodder for an anti-gay propaganda machine that spews hate under the name of love, rejection under the rubric of acceptance, and marginalization under the gesture of brotherly embrace.

It's probably inevitable. Human beings like categories, and we like numbers. We have fingers, and we like to count, tally, and total. Numbers give us a mental impression of comprehension, even control, over a muddy world full of complex interrelationships that operate according to often-chaotic, sometimes even random, principles. Being able to index and categorize allows us the sense that we can put the house in order.

But human beings trying to index and categorize each other has always been a tricky business. As if in stark illustration of this, as soon as the CDC made its announcement, foaming bigots came prancing out of the woodwork. The American Family Association's Bryan Fischer, never one to let a media opportunity slip by, jumped on the news with what could only be called relish, crowing that sexual minorities had "bullied" the heterosexual majority.

"They are belligerent, they are intolerant, they are bullies," Fischer declared, as EDGE reported on July 16. "And we have been meekly capitulating to this tiny little cluster of belligerent bullies now for a couple of decades and it's time that we stop with all of that!"

Of course, what Fischer neglects to mention is how brutally the other 97% have treated GLBTs over a span of centuries. That's no surprise, of course; when a vitriol-filled panderer to prejudice seeks to buff and burnish his message for mass appeal, it's generally not the case that he includes all the inconvenient little facts that illustrate his own side's logical lapses and conduct unbecoming. That would include how gays have been tortured, executed, maimed, driven to suicide, forced into unhappy marriages, maligned, imprisoned, electrocuted, and lobotomized.

Now, it's long been standard practice among religious right-wingers to frame any and all progress by LGBTs as a direct assault on themselves: On the beliefs and liberties, that is, of people who yearn to physically, financially, emotionally, and legislatively persecute those whose sexuality falls outside some restricted, arbitrarily assigned, and fictitious definition of "normal." Even as gay and lesbian couples pop the corks of their wedding champagne and cue up the strains of "Here Come the Grooms," those who trade in faith-based apartheid in all its forms raise a hue and cry, declaring that their diminished legal and social latitude to inflict suffering and harm on sexual minorities constitutes an assault on their "deeply held beliefs."

But what do we perceive when we take a hard look at those beliefs? They sure do look like nothing so much as a system of bias. Do the devout really want to hold on so hard to a history of bloodletting and persecution? What's so marvelous about beliefs that have harmed so many for so long for the "crime" or the "sin" of being gay? Does "pious" really need to rhyme with "bias?"

It's a regrettable thing, but there is a certain status that comes with such faith-based systems of prejudice - not least because such systems build off self-congratulatory fairy tales involving a Magic Sky Daddy intent on rewarding people who are... hm, more than a coincidence?... just like those who adhere to such systems. It's a pretty sweet deal, overall. It offers automatic exoneration from the most beastly, bloody crimes imaginable; it promises automatic inclusion among God's Elite. Who wouldn't kill for something that sexily status-bestowing?

Meantime, Magic Sky Daddy is busily preparing eternal torment for everyone who isn't one of the Cool Kids - the ideologically different, the sexually nonconforming, the (let's just say it) queer. Oh, and just in case Magic Sky Daddy's omnipotence falls short of actually carrying out His (frankly malicious and inconsistent) will, His earthly followers are all too happy to help make this mortal coil as hellish for gays and lesbians as the anti-gay afterlife, with its lake of fire, it's pitchfork-wielding devils, and its shapeless, plus-sized leisure wear. (You didn't think the Damned went around Hell stark naked, did you? That would be pornography! We're talking about Hell, not the Folsom Street Leather Fair!)

If primates of all sorts, including homo sapiens sapiens (that's the taxonomic term for human beings, not Liberal Code Words for Same Sex Babylon), are hard-wired to seek status, this whole Religious Condemnation From On High thing is probably going to be with us as long as our species exists. That doesn't mean it's right, or even excusable. The least of its many egregious characteristics is that it's an insult to reason: It entails all sorts of double talk, denialism, and backtracking, folded-over logic. It also entails a good unhealthy dose of selective blindness: For all the human harm these rabid believers have perpetrated, you'd think they'd notice the bloodstains on their own hands.

Sure enough, Fischer really seemed to see one thing, and one thing only: The vast numerical advantage of those the CDC deems heterosexual. For Fischer and his ilk -- for whom spiritual enlightenment is indistinguishable from grunting force -- the claim that LGBTs comprise a mere three per cent of the population evidently sounded exactly like the phrase, "They don't matter."

Fischer's words, as quoted here in EDGE:

"It's time up and say... 'We love you, we care for you, we think you're capable of better lifestyle choices than homosexual behavior. This is sexual deviancy; we are not going to change our mind on that... [Homosexuality] is abnormal. God said that from the beginning, he's not going to change his mind.'"

Uh huh. You don't need to be a scholar in Biblical Aramaic to parse and interpret the language Fischer is speaking here. It's the same jargon that the beasts of the hetero wilding have always uttered: Gays are "wrong." Gays are "pathological," and the pathology is contagious so keep the kids away from them! Christian love is the only "cure" for such sexual "disease," and though those cures can seem downright sadistic ("Pear of Anguish," anyone? Public stoning? Burning at the stake? Castration?), well, really, they are offered with only the most tenderly Christlike concern. After all, those as aren't "normal" really shouldn't complain if they're treated like criminals, because to depart from script... or scripture... is by definition criminal, even in a land that cherishes freedom of religion - because freedom of religion doesn't mean freedom from religion.

The subtext to all this is a little more sinister:

If we want to kill someone - and we do, because we're human beings and therefore animals at heart - it might as well be fags. If we want to rape someone - and we do, because we're hominids and remain filthy beasts under our godly raiment - why not make it a "corrective" rape of lesbians? If we want to steal what someone else has earned, burn down what someone else has built, and bring terror and pain to those intimates whom someone else has nurtured, why not mark out gay and lesbian families and their homes as the sacrifices to be incinerated on our altars to Magic Sky Daddy? And if we want to accuse others of being filthy raging murderous animals, displacing our own primate instincts for violent domination onto our victims, why can't we just mouth the handy words from our Book of Ancient Justifications - "Their blood shall be upon them?"

In other words: We done the killin' but the victims take the blame because they had it comin'.

And anyhow, why not let the dehumanization and the frenzies of red rage fly? There's no reason not to, if you take up Fischer's line of reasoning: There are so few of them, what does it matter what horrors we visit upon them?

Well, I'll tell you what it matters. It's beside the point how many or few LGBTS there might be. Persecution of a single human being is as wrong as persecution of a thousand is as wrong as persecution of ten thousand is as wrong as the persecution of a million. Or six million. Or a billion. A difference in scale makes no difference in the character of the moral failure behind bashing gay and lesbian individuals and their families, whether that bashing takes the form of physical violence, economic malice, or legislative attack. For all that the Bryan Fischers of this fallen world like to cherry pick Biblical verses, the transcendent wisdom of all great religious and truth-seeking traditions boils down to the simple lesson that what you do to others - lots of others, a handful of others, one single other - you do to all. Indeed, you do to yourself. "Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers," the New Testament records Jesus saying, "you do that also to me." It makes no never mind whether you believe Jesus to be the Son of God (as in Magic Sky Daddy) or the Son of Man (in a humanistic sense). The message retains its power.

Not that the surly denizens of the religious right know very much about the New Testament, their eyes so lividly and lasciviously fixed to two or three sentences in the Old Testament's Book of Leviticus. But they might want to be careful: Even words of scripture can be taken out of context, misconstrued, and re-invested with meanings they never originally had. Such words can become planks in the eyes that incessantly behold them.

Meantime, violently enthralled, theologically excused adherents to anti-gay religious messaging continue, on a global basis, to terrorize, brutalize, and murder gays... or, as Fischer might put it in his exegeses of double standards, "bully" them. Fischer, and folks who cling to the spite-sticky narrative web he weaves, won't acknowledge it, but it's there for anyone with eyes to see: Every drop of gay blood spilled by homophobic thugs in Russia, in Uganda, and right here at home taints the entire rainbow of humanity -- no matter how you try to slice it.