God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence

4. Rights as Wrongs

4 Rights as Wrongs The Hate State Baldwin, Toomer, Crane, and Williams are perhaps a strange collection of writers to be considering some of the predecessors and practitioners of strategic political manipulations of the religious hate speech I describe in this book. But by taking us through a tour of these writers, I wanted to emphasize the necessity of thinking about the figurative in contemporary politic actions. My aim is to iterate that the insights garnered from theoretical and literary critical work have been, and will continue to be, critical for queer politics. In fact, I join Lee Edelman, who argues persuasively just how ironical, if not literary, queer politics can be if queers can “no longer disown but assume their figural identity.”1 So, in this chapter, I want us to consider the figural history of Colorado’s Amendment 2, and specifically the “like race” comparisons that fueled this religious, political contest. The various strategies that had to be developed in order to stall the sweeping denial of basic civil rights of queers in Colorado were less oriented toward articulating “real” injuries, “real” abuses that might indeed have occurred if Amendment 2 had ever taken effect. Instead, a critical history of these 114 political activities tells us much about how the queer rhetorical spin on religious hate has yielded at least one “success” in the fight over queer civil rights. The secret of this success might help us combat the current attack on queers in the early part of the twenty-first century. Let’s begin. The month following Colorado’s passage of Amendment 2 featured abundant commentary by the citizens who were trying to make sense of the fury they had sparked by denying claims of discrimination to lesbians, bisexuals, and gays. Colorado Springs, the birthplace of the voter initiative and the headquarters for so much evangelical activity in the United States since the early 1990s, defensively responded, angered that an international boycott had already resulted in the cancellation of a national conference of the nation’s mayors, originally scheduled to take place in the Springs. In the city’s daily paper, the Gazette Telegraph, conservative editorials, stories, and letters contributed the bulk of the amendment’s coverage. Even the very occasional condemnation of Colorado’s vote was always overwhelmed by at least twice as many affirmations of the initiative’s passage. This onesided response certainly reflects the extreme conservativism of the city’s population; but the commentary also reflects the effectiveness of Colorado for Family Value’s campaign tactics, especially its race language. In the Gazette’s December 20, 1992, editorial section, no fewer than two lengthy, angry responses to the amendment’s fallout are fluent in the speci fic kind of racial rhetoric generated by the religious right. Michael W. Rosen’s editorial, “Boycott Threats Will Only Harden Majority’s Conviction,” is particularly instructive: “Contrary to the hysterical ravings of gay activists , the passage of Amendment 2 was not an expression of hate. It wasn’t even an expression of intolerance. It was an expression of disapproval. These are important distinctions.” Important to these distinctions is that the line between disapproval and hate is a racial one, which marks the so-called social respectability that should not be given to queers. Rosen explains: In voting for Amendment 2, more than 800,000 Coloradoans also said that they don’t regard homosexual behavior as the moral equivalent of RIGHTS AS WRONGS 115 race, religion, gender or national origin when it comes to special protection under civil rights law. In effect, they’re tolerant of the homosexual lifestyle but they’re not willing to confer upon it the mantle of social respectability, something they should have every right to withhold.2 There are crucial words to note in this racial morality contest as Rosen explains his reasoning: the use of the words “lifestyle” and “behavior” rather than “orientation,” the preference of “tolerance” rather than “right.” Such words, and the lines of argumentation they draw, puncture all the political banter on both “sides” of Colorado’s homosexual question. The choice of these words points to the most crucial elements that made the passage of Amendment 2 both possible and, through the highest level of national judicial review, untenable: the politics, language, and laws of racial “civil rights.” Although “civil rights” does apply, of course, to a list including gender, nationality, religion, and other...