How Can Evangelical Christians Love Their Homosexual Neighbors?

Opening Statement by Nadine Strossen

I'm especially happy to address audiences with negative or skeptical attitudes toward civil liberties, so long as the forum is a fair one. Believe me, it would be a waste of my time to do nothing but preach to the converted. But it would also be a waste of my time to preach only to the unconvertible. So I hope that what we have here is going to avoid both of those situations, and that we'll all come away with more understanding, respect, and tolerance for different points of view.

I was asked to give the civil libertarian answer to the following question: How should evangelical Christians love their homosexual neighbors? Here is my answer in a nutshell. From a civil liberties perspective, we don't ask that evangelical Christians, or anyone else for that matter, love lesbians and gay men. As I understand it, Christian values and Christianity do directly address why and how we should love all of our neighbors, even those who are not Christians, and even those whom Christians would consider to be sinners.

I look forward to learning more tonight about Christian views on brotherly love, which strike me as wonderfully idealistic. If those views could prevail, the world would no doubt be a better place for civil libertarians, for lesbians and gay men, for everybody else.

But as a civil libertarian, our aspirations are a bit more modest than yours I think. We don't ask that you love any of your fellow human beings. We simply ask that regardless of your feelings, regardless of your attitudes toward other people, you acknowledge that they are all entitled to basic human rights, including the right not to be discriminated against in such basic opportunities as jobs and housing. The fact that you may disapprove of someone's home life, or of his or her private sexual practices or personal beliefs or lack of beliefs, shouldn't be enough in our view to deprive that person of equal chances to participate in the political and economic life of the community. That principle holds true even if the majority of the community has these negative feelings or negative attitudes.

We have such an increasingly diverse country with people of widely varying backgrounds, beliefs, and lifestyles. Therefore, the only way that our local and national communities can continue to endure is if we overlook all of our differences and agree that we are all equal in this respect, in terms of our basic legal rights and our basic economic opportunity. Indeed, evangelical Christians themselves have a personal stake in this type of social compact. In many important areas evangelical Christians, I hope I'm not shocking you, but the surveys I've read, show that evangelical Christians are a misunderstood, unpopular, and controversial minority in many parts of this country. Public opinion surveys consistently show this. For example, a 1996 survey by Princeton Survey Research Associates, asked for an overall opinion of evangelical Christians. Thirty-eight percent of the respondents said their overall opinion was either very unfavorable or mostly unfavorable. And there are similar surveys.

Based on these negative popular attitudes toward evangelical Christians, should employers be allowed to deny them jobs, or should landlords and real estate agents be allowed to deny them housing? Of course, we civil libertarians would answer an emphatic "no" to those questions. And that is exactly the same answer we give to the same questions about lesbians and gay men. Negative feelings or attitudes toward them do not justify denying them equal opportunities in employment and housing.

Again, public opinion surveys are instructive. Fortunately, most Americans agree with civil libertarians that people should not be deprived of basic rights or equal opportunities, just because of their sexual orientation. I thought it was even more interesting as I was looking at the public opinion data, that even Americans who disagree with homosexuality specifically, and specifically reject it on religious grounds, agree that that should be no basis for outlawing it or discriminating against people with that orientation. So that is my bottom line, civil libertarian position on lesbian and gay rights.

I'd now like to explain in more detail some of the philosophical underpinnings of that position. First I'm going to outline two basic values that underlie all of the ACLU's work, including our work in this area. At the heart of all civil liberties are two core principals. First, the principle that liberty is a check on democracy, and secondly, that all rights are indivisible. Let me elaborate on each of these.

First, the notion of liberty as a check on democracy. There are two fundamental concepts that are reflected in our governmental structure, the principle of democracy and the principal of liberty. Unfortunately, the principle of democracy is far better known. Basically it is that in a democratic society, the majority gets to make virtually all policy decisions. However, the checking principle of liberty is that there are some rights that are so fundamental that no majority, no matter how large, can take them away from any minority, no matter how small, no matter how unpopular or misunderstood that minority might be. Our framers wisely recognized the potential danger of the tyranny of the majority, to use the phrase that James Madison used. That's why they enshrined certain fundamental human rights in our Constitution, in the Declaration of Independence.

I think the best statement (and I know many Christians are fond of emphasizing this statement) is: "All men are created equal, they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, to secure these rights governments are instituted among men."

There are so many important human rights concepts in there. The notion that government does not grant us rights, laws don't grant us rights. We have rights by virtue of our humanity. They are given to us by our Creator, not by government. And the purpose of government, rather than to grant rights, is to protect them. That was made very clear in the preamble to the Constitution when it stated that one of the purposes of our Constitution was to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. And I want to emphasize, to secure the blessings of liberty, not to grant the blessings of liberty.

Well, the first principle then, if I can summarize it, basically is that democratic rule must be counterbalanced by protection for individual liberty. In our system of government, the federal courts including the Supreme Court are designed to be a special bastion of protecting that liberty against majoritarian prejudices. That important principle was set out in a very famous case that I think should be particularly important to a religiously oriented audience. It was a very important case involving religious liberty, called West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnett, decided in 1943, in which the court said the very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy. To place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote, they depend on the outcome of no election.

Now that very important statement of human liberty in general arose in the context of a then despised and hated religious minority, the Jehovah's Witnesses, who were forced against their religious belief to salute the American flag, when they believed that that was violating the First Commandment as they interpreted it. I think what is important about the Supreme Court's language is that it applies not only to religious liberty, but to every kind of liberty for every unpopular and misunderstood group in our society.

The Supreme Court said, in language that applies again not only to misunderstood religious groups, but also to the group we're talking about tonight, lesbians and gay men: "Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."

So that is the first fundamental aspect of civil liberties underlying all of our work, including in the area of lesbian and gay rights. In our society it should be easy to be free, and safe to be different.

Yes, lesbians and gay men constitute a minority, in terms of their sexual orientation. Yes, they are different in a manner that the majority holds to be very important. But that is no basis for denying their freedom. As the Supreme Court explained in Barnett, that is precisely why the courts must protect their freedom.

Let me turn now to the second fundamental civil liberties principle that is at stake here. That is the notion that all rights are indivisible. In other words, if the government is given the power to violate one right of one person or group, then no right is going to be safe for any person or group. That is why the ACLU defends all fundamental rights for all people, regardless of their politics, regardless of their beliefs, regardless of what societal groups they might belong to. We defend freedom for people who disagree with us on civil liberties issues.

An example came up among three of us as we were waiting to come down here. I don't think it is as well known as it should be that although the ACLU defends reproductive freedom, we also defend freedom of speech for those who take the opposite view on that issue. We have gone to court to defend their right to demonstrate and protest and exercise their First Amendment rights. History shows the truth of this insight, the indivisibility of rights.

I could cite so many examples, but staying with the example of free speech, people often wonder, why do we defend free speech for discriminatory speech? People are advocating discriminatory ideas when one of our cardinal tenets is anti-discrimination.

Well, the civil liberties principles that were established in a series of cases that the Supreme Court decided in the 1930s and 1940s in which they agreed that even hateful speakers who were preaching ideas of prejudice and discrimination, that the First Amendment protected their unpopular ideas. It was those same principles that we were then able to use in the 1960s in the civil rights movement to defend freedom of speech for Martin Luther King and pro-civil rights demonstrators in the South, because the southern communities where they were demonstrating, and some northern ones as well, considered their ideas to be dangerous and evil and offensive. So that's the second basic civil liberties principle at stake here.

Now I'd like to address how those principles apply in the particular context of lesbian and gay rights. I've already said, we believe the system of government we have reflects this idea, that all people are entitled to certain fundamental rights just because they are human beings, period. People may not be denied these rights because they belong to a certain subset, where society may pigeon-hole them as falling into certain socially defined categories, such as they belong to a certain race or gender or religion or ethnicity, or a certain sexual orientation. From a civil liberties perspective, all of these socially constructed classifications are completely irrelevant. People are no more or less human, regardless of what these labels society might affix to them. Accordingly, they are entitled to no greater or lesser human rights.

In the end, I think that even many people who are very active in the anti-gay rights movement recognize the potency of this equal rights concept, because the theme of so many anti-gay rights crusades has been not that we want to deny equal rights, but we want to deny special rights. No special rights for lesbians and gay men after all was the theme of the campaign in Colorado in 1992 which resulted in the adoption of the infamous Amendment 2, which would have prevented anti-discrimination measures from being passed by any level of government in Colorado. But that campaign, no special rights, was completely inaccurate. Given the rampant homophobia in our society, unfortunately we need anti-discrimination laws merely to bring lesbians and gay men to equal status under the law. That is precisely the point that the United States Supreme Court made last summer when it held that Amendment 2 violated the United States Constitution in a lawsuit I'm happy to say was brought by the ACLU. I think it's also very interesting that the majority opinion in that case, a very forceful and eloquent one, was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is a conservative practicing Catholic.

As important a victory as that ruling was, we have to put it in perspective. It did not require that Colorado or that any local government within Colorado outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. It simply said that Colorado could not bar such anti-discrimination laws. So government officials in Colorado and in virtually every other part of the country still remain free to choose not to pass such laws. In other words, free to allow discrimination against lesbians and gay men and to practice such discrimination themselves. Therefore, every year we see thousands of Americans being denied job opportunities, denied access to housing, denied access to public accommodations, and denied even custody of their own children, just because they are lesbians or gay men, or because they are perceived as being such. That rampant discrimination is completely inconsistent with the basic principles of unalienable, Creator-given rights from the Declaration of Independence that I already cited.

It's also completely inconsistent with a very eloquent statement of this principle that was set forth by the great playwright, William Shakespeare, through the poignant words of his character Shylock, in "The Merchant of Venice." Shylock of course was a Jew and he therefore spoke on behalf of Jews who were a despised minority at that time and place, as in so many others. But he could just as well have been speaking for any despised minority group, anytime, anywhere. For example, as you listen to this passage, each time Shylock uses the word "Jew," mentally substitute the word "homosexual." The point is exactly the same. He said:

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?"

At its heart -- and I use that word advisedly -- at its heart the lesbian and gay rights movement is about nothing more radical, and nothing less essential, than the right to love. So we get back to the theme of loving that was raised by the title of this forum. But as I already stressed, my point is not that evangelical Christians should be required to love homosexual people, rather it is the entirely different point that homosexual people should not be barred from loving each other.

This point was made in moving words by a man named Leonard Matlovich who died in 1988 of AIDS. Having joined the Air Force at age 19, he served for twelve years receiving exemplary ratings. He bravely did combat duty in Vietnam, earning both the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. But when Leonard Matlovich revealed his homosexuality, he was discharged. He wrote the epitaph for his tombstone in Washington, D.C. It reads:

"Here lies a man who was given a medal for killing two men, and a dishonorable discharge for loving one."

Larry Kramer, the gay rights activist and writer put it this way:

"We are denied the right to love. Can you imagine being denied the right to love? Put that starkly, I don't understand how anyone can oppose the lesbian and gay rights cause, much less do so on the alleged basis of Christian beliefs, given the message of love that pervades the Christian tradition."

That point was made forcefully by the Reverend Peter J. Gomes, an American Baptist minister, who is Professor of Christian Morals at my alma mater, Harvard University. Criticizing the so-called religious right's homophobic reading of the Bible as "dangerously skewed," and these are his words, not mine, I pretend to no expertise here. He wrote:

"The same Bible that on the basis of an archaic social code of ancient Israel, and a tortured reading of Paul, is used to condemn all homosexuality, also includes metaphors of redemption, renewal, inclusion, and love. Principles that invite homosexuals to accept their freedom and responsibility in Christ and demand that their fellow Christians accept them as well."

You may have noticed that I used the term "so-called religious right." I very strongly dislike that term, and myself prefer to use terms such as "radical right," or "extreme right" precisely because the views that are usually ascribed to the "religious right" are not shared by all religious people, or all Christians, as the Reverend's statement makes so clear.

I also do not like the implication that I disagree with views because those who are criticizing the views of the so-called religious right, disagree with the views because of their religious nature. Nothing could be further from the truth. I fervently defend the First Amendment right of people to free exercise of religion and to free speech and to petition their government and to bring all of those together. To lobby the government, to vote, to demonstrate, to write letters to the editor, to try to get our government officials to adopt policies that are consistent with your religious beliefs. That is a very important right. It is just the nature of the position that's taken by what I will now call the extreme right that I disagree with.

The extreme right has really made a cause c‚lŠbre of attacking gay rights. I think it has become a way of attacking rights more generally. It's the flip side of the ACLU's recognition of the interconnection among all rights. And the interconnection among all rights violations as well, is vividly shown by the various bars on sexual or marital relations between members of politically dominant groups and members of despised minority groups.

Throughout history we have consistently seen that these laws have been a potent weapon to subordinate minority groups, denying their basic human rights and indeed denying even their very humanity. Throughout history down to the present day, campaigns against minorities to stigmatize them, and to make them into something subhuman have stressed the following common charges. Sexual immorality. Animal behavior. Spreading disease. And molesting children.

Certainly, all of these defamatory allegations are leveled by today's gay bashers. What I think is less well known is the extent to which all of these charges have also been used against all hated minorities, including Jews in Europe and blacks in America. For that reason, for example, after the rise of Christianity, European Jews were subject to laws that treated them as sexually depraved and bestial, and protected others from the corrupting effect of sexual contact with them. For example, a thirteen-century French law expressly equated sex between a Christian and a Jew with sex between a human being and an animal. A similar law in England condemned to death those who had intercourse with Jews, animals, or persons of their own gender. There's a lot of interesting historical material I could go through here which always does include sodomy as an act that is equated with bestiality at a particular time in our history, having sex between Christians and Jews.

We see a similar theme in the United States if you look at the history of laws that until shockingly recently made it a crime to have marriage between blacks and whites. Again I'm very proud that it was an ACLU case in 1967 in which the Supreme Court finally held that that was unconstitutional. So to me these are all part of a similar pattern. And today's chapter of outlawing homosexual sodomy, or sodomy more generally, or marriage between people of the same gender, has to be looked at in this historical context. Now from the twentieth, almost twenty-first century vantage point, we can turn back and I hope most of us will say those laws criminalizing those other kinds of sexual contact were wrong and immoral and perhaps even un-Christian.

I hope that without too much further progress in historical time, we will look at the current bars against homosexual love and homosexual marriage and relationships, and see it in the same light. So I'm going to end now. I think the best way to do it is to emphasize again the theme of indivisibility among these rights. That we have to defend rights for other people, not only because we care about those other people in terms of their basic human dignity, but also in terms of purely self-interest for our own rights and those of people like us.

I want to quote Charles Sumner, a senator from the Jim Crow era, who decried, he made this point by attacking the terrible consequences that racial segregation had for white children. Obviously it had terrible consequences for black children. But he talked about the terrible consequences for white children. He said:

"Their hearts, while yet tender with childhood are necessarily hardened, and their subsequent lives will bear enduring testimony to this legalized uncharitableness."

In conclusion then, no matter what our religious beliefs are, I think we should all support lesbian and gay rights, not only because we care about the rights of people of homosexual orientation, but also because we care about our own rights and those of all human beings. Thank you very much.

[applause]