LGBT Rights

I am very impressed by the 1999 book, “Identity and the Case for Gay Rights: Race, Gender, Religious Analogies.”

It delves deeply into subjects that I am profoundly interested and involved in: gay and lesbian rights, women’s rights, and religious liberation from moral slavery.

It is written by David A. J. Richards, professor of Law and director of programs in Law, Philosophy, and Social Theory at New York University.

He is a leading philosopher who has brought together in this book all the topics in the book title into one learned thesis. He develops an intriguing study of social hierarchy and moral slavery.

He argues that racist, sexist, and anti-gay issues all have in common the degradation of human identity and denial of the rights of conscience. And this is what he calls “moral slavery.” I find the invention of that term an absolutely tremendous breakthrough.

It is impossible to summarize this weighty book in short, but “in short,” it is a powerful defense of gay rights. [Footnote: unfortunately he comes from a mind-set which uses gay as a substitute for homosexual, thus including in his intention all LGBT people. That is not my approach, and I try to cover it up wherever plausible.]

The book is written in the “deepest” (most learned) academic language as if for advanced doctoral degree candidates.

My challenge is, first of all, to understand it myself, and then in this blog to present his powerful arguments and valuable insights in language we can all understand.

There are six (Library of Congress) research areas referenced in the book title alone. One blog could not do justice to even one of these topics: gay rights, gay identity, Afro-American civil rights, women’s rights, freedom of religion, identity (psychological).

This blog will only analyze one short paragraph, the final paragraph of the Introduction to the book. I will present professor Richards’ words (modified only enough to make shorter sentences). Then I will briefly comment on each sentence.

“The case for gay rights expresses a structural injustice common to extreme religious intolerance, racism, and homophobia.”

Comment: He develops the proposition that the very structure of American culture expresses the same kind of injustice against Blacks (racial minorities), women, and persons with same-sex attraction. He calls it structural injustice because it is the basis and foundation of societal behavior that reduces all those who are “non-conformist” (to patriarchal one-mold society) to a common pit of unjust treatment – which he later identifies as “moral slavery.” [Note: the book deals with American society. It would be interesting to have an authoritative “social scientist” report on the relevance of these issues to Philippine society. In my 16 years now as a Filipino, I unauthoritatively observe the same phenomena.]

“The analysis of the case for gay rights also advances general understanding of the two mechanisms by which such injustice is entrenched: its privitatization and stereotypical sexualization.”

Comment: He will, in his own words, demonstrate how injustices became so much a mold and pattern of society that not even the victims recognized that they were victims.

Entrenched means “dug in,” “firmly set in place,” “immoveable,” and unremoveable, as it were.

That was when women naturally knew that their place was in the home kitchen and the home laundry. Blacks knew their place was in the back of the bus. Gays and lesbians knew that they had no place, and were even unmentionable. Gays and lesbians would never to dare think of the “right” to marriage because they knew they did not have a right to exist, and no rights.

“These mechanisms enforce on homosexuals (as they have on religious minorities, people of color, and women) rigidly defined, hierarchical terms of identity, thereby unjustly reducing human complexity to the simplistic terms of a dehumanizing stereotype of abject servility and silence.”

Comment: These mechanisms – privatization and stereotypical sexualization – require whole chapters to explain.

In another era and another arena, we see the mechanism of injustice in Apartheid South Africa. Blacks had no right. Period. And that’s the way it was – entrenched. Nelson Mendala had no rights in prison for 20 some years – and came out to serve as a world-respected president of the country and a world-respected leader.

For centuries in America, in the Philippines, and around the world, gays and lesbians allowed themselves to be “as Blacks in Apartheid.” Reduced to dehumanized non-identity. He calls it abject servility and silence. He later explains an aspect of this as servility as “moral slavery” – the chaining of the minority (gays and lesbians, etc) to the moral whims (albeit traditions) of the majority.

It was all condemned to silence. “Don’t even think of rights – you have none.” And that is why same-sex marriage was not mentioned for centuries.

“Resistance to such unjust hierarchy clarifies and explains the legitimate grounds of contemporary expressions of gay and lesbian identity in the experience of an empowering choice and ethical demand of responsibility for self.”

Comment: Resistance ended Apartheid. Resistance ended “back of the bus” treatment of Blacks. Resistance gave women the choice of coming out the kitchen and laundry. Resistance brought recognition to indigenous people of the Philippines. Resistance brought “equal marriage” to all citizens of five countries of the world and recognition of same-sex relationships in many other places.

The book goers on at great lengths to explain the “legitimate” (lawful) grounds that gays and lesbians have for expressing their true identity (and humanity).

When I came to the Philippines (in 1991), I found that gays and lesbians in general did not realize there is an alternative to sex-negative theology, an alternative to “moral slavery,” slavery to the entrenched “morals” of the majority.

Richards fully explains there is a choice. Each person does the have the right to a natural and religious choice to be oneself and take responsibility for what the author will explain as “freedom of conscience.”

Thus the author ends the “Introduction.” He then devotes the book, four chapters, to “The Racial Analogy,” “The Gender Analogy,” “The Religious Analogy,“ and finally “Identity and Justice.”

My added comment: Why is this discussion of injustice and “silencing” and denying of identity of importance or value?

There may some among us today, still, in this day and age, gay or lesbian or whoever, who do not realize they have a right to advance from the back of the bus, if they choose; to come out of the closet of fear and shame, if they choose; to claim their rightful and just place in society, in church, in God’s embrace, if they choose.

And why should we never forget the injustice? Why should we never let the world forget? Why do the Jewish people, who lost millions of their fellow Jews in the Holocaust, build memorials and never let the world forget what happened in those extermination camps of dreaded memory? Can a world which remembers ever let it happen again?

Why was a symposium on the Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals, composed of survivors and historians, held in Washington DC on April 28, 2000?

How many people – gay, lesbian, or straight – know about the Nazi programs to persecute and exterminate homosexuals – because they were inferior, not “real” Aryan human beings who did not bear good strong Aryan children; and that they were subjected to medical experimentation. Lesbians were not targeted, but gay men, especially effeminate ones, were imprisoned, sent to concentration camps and forced to wear pink triangles. Sometimes they were given the option of volunteering for castration.

Six million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. No one knows for sure how many homosexuals were among the additional five million “substandard” human victims killed by gas, torture, and furnaces of fire.

Even after the end of the war and liberation of the concentration camps in 1945, many homosexuals clung to silence in their shame.

In the here and now we can take a cue from Barack Obama’s campaign message. He says it is all about change. It is the past against the future. For us that means it’s time for change from moral slavery to freedom of conscience. For LGBT people, it’s all about change from injustice to justice.

So why is Professor Richards’ study of silence and “moral slavery” important and valuable?