Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [30]
Same-sex marriage opponents are particularly obsessed with slippery-slope arguments because an increasing number of Americans don’t view homosexuality as morally abhorrent, and it’s difficult to come up with other reasons why homosexual men and women shouldn’t be allowed to marry one another. According to an October 2009 poll, 39 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage and 57 percent support civil unions.8 Even those who disapprove of homosexuality may not be sufficiently motivated to combat a practice that does not directly affect their lives. For instance, 92 percent of Iowans polled six months after the Iowa Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage concluded that the ruling had brought no real change to their lives.9 In the face of such apathy, right-wing leaders commonly promote frightening visions of social disaster, not to mention bizarre human-animal pairings, in order to scare their constituents into action.
This approach is not entirely new. In 1872, the Supreme Court of Tennessee refused to recognize an interracial marriage performed in Mississippi out of concern that “we might have in Tennessee the father living with his daughter, the son with the mother, the brother with his sister, in lawful wedlock, because they had formed such relations in a state or country where they were not prohibited. The Turk or the Mohammedan, with his numerous wives, may establish his harem at the doors of the capitol, and we are without remedy.”10 Tennessee’s anti-miscegenation laws were finally overturned in 1967. So far, the state has managed to avoid recognizing incestuous and polygamous marriages.
In Jerry Falwell’s critique of Brown v. Board of Education, he fretted that school desegregation would lead to interracial marriage. In this prediction, he was correct. But Falwell also predicted that interracial marriage would mean the destruction of the white race.11 According to reports, the white race is still hanging in there.
The Gay Agenda
But the white race and Tennessee’s marriage laws never had to contend with the fearsome power of the Gay Agenda. As with secular humanism, the gay agenda is an empty nondoctrine invented by right-wing Christians. In 1992, a small fundamentalist church produced a graphic video called The Gay Agenda about the deviant sexual practices of homosexuals. In the video, a white-haired and distinguished Dr. Stanley Monteith informed viewers that average homosexuals had between three hundred and five hundred sexual partners in a lifetime and regularly ingested fecal material.12 He enlightened them concerning the exotic arts of “rimming,” “fisting,” and “golden showers.” The video, which should perhaps have been titled Gays Gone Wild, featured explicit scenes from a gay pride parade as well as a march by the infamous North American Man/Boy Love Association, with a voiceover that announced, “Homosexuals have a long history of focusing on youth.”13 The lurid footage and gross-out descriptions of disturbing sexual practices offer a textbook example of Richard Hofstadter’s description of conspiracists’ preoccupation with illicit sex.
James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and Pat Robertson’s 700 Club distributed the video to evangelicals eager to witness homosexuality in the flesh. Pentagon officials and congressional leaders reviewed it while evaluating Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. They might have been surprised to learn that Dr. Monteith was a former member of the John Birch Society.14 Monteith would later declare that AIDS was a “genocidal program” developed by the New World Order to kill blacks and Latinos in