Faith-based initiative

“It’s time to change the conversation” according to the HRC’s latest campaign that just showed up in my e-mail. “… you and I will get nowhere if we can't start really… talking to them in the language of values and faith. Until you can do that, we won't make a difference."

Exactly how that’s going to happen, I’m not sure. What exactly is “the language of values and faith.” ACT-UP wasn’t talking values when they talk—loud—about the prejudice that was and is still attached to HIV? Values are not the point when we pressure the boy scouts to stop stigmatizing gays and lesbians in their ranks, or when we protest violence against transgender folks? I really don’t understand what HRC is saying when they tell me we haven’t been “really” speaking in the language of values.

Faith of course is another matter. “for many of us at HRC, religion has not been a source of solace but, rather, a place of rejection and anger,” admits HRC president Joe Solmonese. Here’s what Solmonese tells me he’s already doing for me:

Finding and promoting the many equality-minded faith leaders like Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, Dr. Susan Thistlethwaite of Chicago [Theological Seminary], Bishop John Selders of Hartford, CT, and Rabbi Denise Eger of Los Angeles. It's time we heard their courageous voices in the media to counteract the closed-minded sound bites of extremists like Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Fred Phelps.

What are Solmonese’ poster-pastors for HRC saying? Rabbi Eger: “This movement for gay marriages is plain and simple about helping families protect themselves, using the mechanisms our society has created to protect families and to protect partners in loving relationships, and to have them live up to the rights and responsibilities that go along with that." (http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=12243) Underneath HRC’s campaigns is this message of responsibilities. We queers need to be more responsible if we wish to get our rights, or our message heard. We should give up our flamboyant behavior-- our leather, our feather boas, and our one-night-stands. We need to settle down and simulate responsible, monogamous, hetero-values.

Yes, hetero-values. You know them well: the values of adultriholic Rep. Bob Barr, Justice Clarence “pubic hair” Thomas, and Jimmys Baker and Swagart. (We’re not supposed to do as they do, mind you, but rather do as they preach.) The HRC wishes for us to do a lot more talking up hetero-values, and a lot less exposing them for what they really are. Solmonese proposes we embrace the hypocrisy that is at the heart of this “language of faith and values” so we can better converse with our hypocritical oppressors. Only then can he help us create a new, united, hypocritical set of values for America, a set that—in all likelihood will talk abstinence until (gay) marriage, will go to (gay) church every week, and will pine for a return to the days of (gay) Father Knows Best, as if those days ever existed. What Solmonese doesn’t seem to realize is that those feelings of “rejection and anger” he felt are rooted in that very hypocrisy, and his feelings of rejection and anger are shared by many, many folks who don’t identify as gay or lesbian because of that same hypocrisy.

Emma Goldman once warned: “If I can not dance, I want no part in your revolution.” If I can’t flaunt it, Joe, I want no part in yours.