Thursday, July 27, 2006

Gay Fetish of the Christian Right


By Austin Cline
Does the Christian Right ever get tired of complaining about and condemning homosexuality? The Christian Right has fetishized homosexuality: a fetish is an object that one obsesses about and treats as a symbol for a whole (with a foot fetish, the foot stands in for a whole woman). For the Christian Right, homosexuality "stands in" for all of modernity.
Katy McKy explains at The Raw Story that the “sin” of homosexuality is very important because it’s a sin that they can complain about with being concerned that they might commit it themselves:

[I]f one is straight and frames homosexuality as sin, it’s the sweetest sin, for it’s not one’s sin. This gives homosexuality an infinite shelf life. It’s never grows stale, for whereas it demands change of others, it requires no personal change. No sacrifice. So long as one is straight and heterosexuality demarcates purity, one is permanently pure.
Homosexuality is a better sin to complain about than sins like gluttony or pride because everyone might be guilty of sins like those. Homosexuality, however, can always be framed as a sin which others commit. Even if one represses same-sex desire, one isn’t “really” homosexual unless they engage in same-sex activity — and, even then, they can repent and feel clean. Homosexual activists, however, can forever be chastised and condemned:

On a personal level, the gay moral fetish distracts from Biblical adherence. As long as Rush Limbaugh rants about queer folk, he’s distracted from returning to his first wife, as the Bible demands. As long as [Janet] Parshall squawks about Brokeback Mountain, she won’t have to forsake her family and her fortune, as the Bible also demands. [...]

The homo-fetish also serves an ancient purpose. It’s no longer safe to publicly articulate racial hatred. But there remains a deep desire to define and elevate oneself by what one isn’t. With God’s green light, the fundy Right references gays everyday. However, with only 3 gay references in the Bible, and a hundred times that number of warnings against wealth, the arithmetic suggests that the real work of being a Christian is casting off wealth. Jesus told one story about a man going to Hell. That man was a rich man, a man who lived on the sweet side of a wall while a poor man suffered on the other.

But walking away from wealth would be Hell on Earth for those that love manna more than their fellow man.
The Christian Right needs homosexuality because they need some group to attack as part of their effort to restore the social, cultural, and political dominance of conservative Christianity in America. It’s not longer socially acceptable to attacks Jews, the previous scapegoat for Christian conservatives who hated everything modern. Gays, however, can be and are attacked in just about all the same ways that Jews used to be.

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