Campus Crusade for Ishtar

Here’s a new twist: Christian homophobes have begun complaining that rules against homophobic hate speech in schools violate not only their 1st amendment free speech rights (a thorny issue), but now their 1st amendment religious freedom rights. No one’s saying that these kids can’t wear “Jesus Saves” T-Shirts or pray during lunch—it’s the whole “it’s not OK to be gay” message that some find a little too offensive to be considered part of a healthy educational environment.

Look at it this way--using racial epithets in school was perfectly acceptable 40 years ago (as long as you were white). Today, these people can’t understand why their children might be punished for yelling “Fag!” or for letting their classmate know that both their mommies were going to burn in hell for their abominable perversions.

Over the past few decades, women have fought like hell for the right to work and learn in environments which are not pervasively hostile to who they are. GLBT kids deserve the same, but homophobic harassment clearly infringes upon their right to learn in an environment where they feel safe and supported. Ask any GLBT you know who was out in high school- -if you can find someone who was that brave- -and you’ll hear plenty of stories about being harassed, bullied, or even just too scared to even come to school.

At the same time, I am very sensitive to charges that people are being deprived their freedom of religion. Liberals have fought so hard to get the Christocentricism out of schools that they have succeeded in enshrining Freedom of Religion as a scholastic value. But consider a Baptist kid who comes from a congregation that teaches that homosexuality is a mortal sin (not to mention disgusting and anti-American), and that it’s their job to share Jehovah’s “Good News” (i.e., “Both your mommies are going to scream for mercy in the fiery pit for all eternity") with their peers. Doesn’t banning this kids homophobic comments to his “lost in sin” classmates infringe on his freedom of religion?

No, and substituting “God” for “Homosexuality” quickly shows the self-serving logic. Most of the cases I’ve heard about are relatively benign like wearing “Gay? Not OK!” T-shirts to school, or wanting to preach homophobia during your school’s Diversity Week (I said, “relatively”). But think about the Theocrats’ explicit agenda--not even their implicit one: they want to force my kids to listen to prayers to Jehovah, but their precious darlings can't hear that my Lesbian friends even fucking exist--much less that they are loving and supportive parents.

So, just for a change, how’s this sound: "I'm outraged that little Johnny's teacher mentioned Christians in front of him—Jehovah-worshippers lead a perverted and abominable lifestyle, and my children should not have to hear about them. Let’s keep that kind of filth in the gutter and out of the schools!”

By the Theocrats' reasoning, Odinist kids would have every right to say that being Christian offends the All-Father, and to remind their Christian schoolmates during class that they can expect to have wild wolves rip their hearts out in punishment. “It's not so-called hate speech,” others would explain, “We’re just expressing Ishtar's real--and extremely sensuous--love for every Christian in the world. To try to stop us is a violation of our freedom of religion.”

For that matter, if it’s about religion, why don’t these people defend anti-Semitic remarks? Most Christian sects (although they won’t say it out loud) hold that Judaism is just as evil as any other non-Christian sect—yet you don’t here anyone defending Christians’ right to say “All Jews will burn in hell,” or to wear “Being Jewish is a sinful and unacceptable lifestyle” T-shirts to school. Now do you?

The answer is that it not really about religion or religious freedom: it’s about homophobia and freedom of Christianity. “Freedom of Christianity” is the unacknowledged legal principle that allows Christians to run roughshod over other religions and ways of life, but howl like indignant victims if their children are even told that the other ways of life exist. Proof? How about the fact that people whose worship runs counter to Christianity’s vision of acceptable monotheism can't even get decent media attention when a judge fucking forbids them from worshiping with their child.

Yes, that’s right: although both the father and mother are Wiccan, the Judge apparently took it upon himself to insert a little clause at the end of the divorce decree that prohibited the couple from exposing their child to "non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals."

Can you imagine the outrage if the judge had been Pagan and he had decided--completely without evidence--that Christianity was harmful to the little boy, and had banned the parents from taking him to church? Would he have lived through the night? And if he had, how quickly would the fund-raising letters go out, crying that Christianity’s very existence was threatened in America?

What a joke. Christians attempting to claim victim status is a good candidate for chutzpah of the century. Their motto is on our damn money, they got “In God we Trust” added to the Pledge of Allegiance, (and they got Congress to embarrass themselves by all saying the pledge together on the Capitol steps and shouting out “Under God” like the most annoying kid in Sunday school), they still get to have prayer in school (no matter what the Supreme fucking Court says), they’re getting their creation myth taught in biology classes, and nearly half of all Americans think a Bronze-Age sky-god created humans 10,000 years ago FOR CHRIST”S FUCKING SAKE!!

Sorry.

Bottom line? Religious conservatives (including Theocrats) fail to understand the entire concept of oppression. Oppression is about power. You have to have power to oppress. No matter what they might preach in their fund-raising letters, Christians are still the dominant force in this culture. Christians don’t have to be afraid of GLBT folk. Christians don’t routinely get beaten up or killed just for being Christian in this country. Christians have the--unearned, unquestioned--privilege of raising their children in a culture where the vast majority of people share their beliefs, and where no one with any credibility runs around saying that they are deliberately destroying everything that is good and wholesome to satisfy their own disgusting appetites.

This is about Christian Theocrats perceiving (correctly) that measures taken to liberate GLBTs (and others) from Theocratic oppression are threatening hetero-Christian unearned privilege. That’s all it really is. Good old, garden-variety “Hey! That’s my unearned privilege you’re messing with there!” The same crap we heard from racists during the civil rights movement and from sexists during the Women’s Liberation movement. Oh, wait. We still hear both of those today.


Damn.