Following the victory in Arizona, a brief look at 2,000 years of gay history
With the
defeat of Arizona’s
Bill-o-Bigotry, it’s a good time to reflect on the history and future of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.
Native Americans were fine with gay and trans people
Hundreds of years ago, when French missionaries traveled through
North America, they recorded their observations of Native American
culture.
Particularly fascinating to them was what physician-historian Dr. Francis Mark Mondimore described in his book
A Natural History of Homosexuality as “The Berdache Phenomenon.”
This refers to transgender and gay people within Native American
tribes who, far from inciting loathing, were “respected, even revered in
some Indian groups.”
George Catlin
(1796-1872), Dance to the Berdache. Drawn while on the Great Plains,
among the Sac and Fox Indians, the sketch depicts a ceremonial dance to celebrate the two-spirit person.
Enlightened western observers were rather aghast. After applying the
French word “berdache” to such Indian men and women, they described them
as disgusting “sodomites dedicated to nefarious practices.”
Native Americans tended to disagree. Their attitudes toward human
sexuality were by stark contrast “relaxed and accepting.” Regardless of
sexual preference, tribesman were treated with respect and dignity
(including women who, as Mondimore puts it, enjoyed a status that was
“much more egalitarian than among their European contemporaries”).
Within certain groups the berdache was even revered for a “special
connection with the gods and spirits.”
Clearly, the attitudes of Native American “savages,” as our ancestors
dubbed them, were infinitely more progressive and civilized than
Europeans of the time, and as the “religious freedom” debacle in Arizona
shows, they were more civilized than those of many Americans even
today.
With respect to the LGBT community, western culture often still
genuflects to judgment and ostracism as opposed to compassion and
acceptance. (Much debate is still had over
whether one’s sexual orientation is a choice,
as if that should affect how we treat gay people.) Even Native
Americans, hundreds of years ago, with no access to a modern education,
were above this cruelty.
And we know the Greeks and Romans had more permissive views than many today
As it turns out, a number of ancient cultures were rather tolerant as
well. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans had words for homosexuality,
though it was an accepted facet of both societies (reportedly, an actual
“gay” identity didn’t begin to arise until the late 1800s, or later).
In some ways, bisexuality was a social expectation for Greek and Roman
men,
within limits (
Caesar was reportedly dogged
by rumors that he was “gay,” to use the modern construct). It simply
did not pose the same moral dilemma for them then, as it does for us
now.
Isn’t it strange that while amorous or sexual relations among same-sex
Spartans were encouraged (it was thought that men would fight harder beside compatriots with whom they had had intimate relations),
Michael Sam’s
coming out has been greeted with anxiety by many within the NFL? The
Spartans, as we know, represent the masculine warrior ideal, not unlike
the spirit embodied by the game of American football. And yet primitive
bigotry makes what should be a non-issue into something the NFL “isn’t
ready for,” while a
GOP lobbyist (who has a gay brother, no less) claims to be drafting legislation to ban gays from the sport altogether.
Jon Stewart had the final word about that during a recent segment in
which he noted the violent criminal histories of several prominent NFL
players, whom the league apparently
is “ready for.”
A Dallas sportscaster recently noted the same.
When did ancient tolerance become modern animus?
There doesn’t seem to be a historical consensus about the reasons
why the change from tolerance to animus occurred, but there is ample evidence to show
when. In his insightful work
Christianity,
Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe From
the Beginning of the Christian Tradition to the Fourteenth Century,
historian John Boswell dates the beginning of the transition to the end
of the Roman Empire. And, perhaps surprisingly, he explicitly rejects a
view to which many likely subscribe: It was not, he thinks,
Christianity that fomented the tide of homophobia that came to pervade
Western culture.
The reasons for Boswell’s doubts about the origins of modern
homophobia are somewhat questionable; Mainly, he seems to think that
criticisms by ancient church leaders of homosexuality, viewed within the
context of their heedless attitudes toward other Levitical
proscriptions, requires the conclusion that it was
something more than religious doctrine that caused their homophobia. In other words, Boswell doesn’t think that early church leaders could be hypocritical
and
sincere, cherry-picking their offenses, which means Boswell probably
doesn’t give the religious imagination, modern or ancient, nearly enough
credit.
Regardless of the reasons, the fall of the Roman Empire (around
500AD) precipitated the widespread homophobia of the Middle Ages (an era
spanning the next thousand years or so). During this period, Boswell
describes a campaign of historical “whitewashing” by religious
authorities aimed at purging references to homosexuality in Greek and
Roman history. Some of the results are downright laughable, and are
certain to remind readers of what Darwin called the “indelible stamp of
[man's] lowly origins.”
Consider, for example, the fate of Alcibiades, a known gay-lover of
Socrates, when medieval Christian authorities retrospectively turned him
into a “female famed for her beauty.”
In the same mirthful vein is this gem, for which I will use Boswell’s unmolested description:
In a manuscript of Ovid’s Art of Love, for
example, a phrase which originally read, “A boy’s love appealed to me
less” was amended by a medieval moralist to read, “A boy’s love appealed
to me not at all,” and a marginal note informed the reader “Thus you
may be sure that Ovid was not a sodomite.”
Use here of the word “sodomite” to degrade highlights the historical
persecution embedded in Judeo-Christian tradition. That history is clear
and unambiguous, even if the
original reasons for the persecution are not.
Back to Arizona
Thankfully, Arizona
Governor Jan Brewer took a courageous step
in blocking the fanatical advance of the religious right in her state.
Because of that we can all celebrate a small victory in a
larger, ongoing war, which the forces of progress and human dignity seem to be winning. But where do we go from here?
In a recent Op-Ed, Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman reluctantly
concluded that the Arizona “religious freedom” law, SB1062, were it to
have become law,
would have been constitutional.
This is disturbing, but probably (I think) true. The Supreme Court has
yet to hold that under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection
Clause, laws discriminating against sexual orientation deserve “strict
scrutiny,” which is the standard of review the Court applies to racial
discrimination (but strangely not gender discrimination). The present
standard for discrimination against gay and trans people is called
“rational basis review” –t hat is, so long as a homophobic law is
“rationally related to a legitimate government interest” it will pass
constitutional muster.
Needless to say, this is a highly deferential standard. With four
conservative Supreme Court justices virtually guaranteed to meet the
challenge of any such law, by finding both a legitimate government
interest
and a manner in which said law is rationally related
to that interest, the fate of LGBT rights likely sits in the uncertain
hands of Justice
Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion striking down a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) last June, 2013, leading to a flurry of recent gay rights successes in a number of states.
This is all the more reason for progressives not to wait for the Supreme Court’s false pretense of
interpreting
the Constitution (which it has almost never done in US history) to
result in equal rights for the LGBT community. Gay and trans people have
waited long enough. I would argue that we need a constitutional
amendment granting not “the equal protection of the laws,” which is what
the Fourteenth Amendment says, but “the protection of equal laws” for
all Americans, regardless of race, gender, gender identity or sexual
orientation. This is the proper choice for a proud and free democratic
nation. Patiently waiting for the unelected Supreme Court is something
rather more obsequious. (I’ll likely expand on this proposal in a future
article.)
With the recent
striking down of Texas’ bigoted same-sex marriage ban, the
veto of Arizona’s ”religious
freedom” bill, and the gutting of DOMA only half a year ago, America is
inching ever closer (and ever more quickly) to civilization. Because
the ancient Greek, Roman, and Native American cultures, among others,
achieved sexual tolerance long ago, I hesitate to call these recent
advances “progress.” But sometimes there is progress in regression.
Make the jump here to read the original article
