This is a response to a CRC-Voices discussion
So if you own a person on the basis of color you’re a bigot, but if you own them on the basis of debt you’re not? The use of the word “bigot” today is more or less a verbal hand grenade attempting to leverage the cultural moral weight of the civil rights movement in the service of the debate surrounding homosexuality.
Bigotry based on skin color was the result of a very long and complex social history. A fun quick read of the NYTimes review of “The History of White People” might raise a few eyebrows: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/books/review/Gordon-t.html?pagewanted=1
It is popular to construct a myth of progress narrative by which blacks, women, and now gays are emancipated from the bonds of cruel bigotry, with both sides finding justification in proof texting along the way or as is more popular today either throwing out the Bible or just getting very selective with it. You can only do this if you stick to a very broad, non-historical brush.
Slavery in Bible times had everything to do with debt and failure of your clan or people in warfare rather than skin color. That isn’t to say that skin color wasn’t an issue between groups, but rather that the issues didn’t relate to the specific history we connect with it. When groups are in conflict they will search for whatever is handy to use against their enemy: skin color, language, food, you name it. We do the same today. Ever hear ethnic slurs based on food or clothing? Were the Irish “darker” than the English? Using skin color or physical features in social combat is simply part of that warfare.
Today’s construct of gay and straight within the myth of progress is imagined to be “a given” but I believe will likely be overturned. Consider the following. In a culture that has fallen in love with the notion that everything around us is a social construct, yet the hard turn of the last decade or so on the “straight and gay” model has been to insist on a “baked in” orientation. “Sexual preference” has given way to “sexual orientation”. and a lot of the “God made me this way” language in a day when popular culture asserts that “God” outsourced all of his making to a long and complex string of evolutionary mechanisms.
We are more likely to see that expressions of human sexuality are conditioned by an enormous set of variables that include genetics, environmental factors (if industrial chemicals in the environment are impacting the sexual mechanics of frogs, fish, and other earth creatures are they not impacting us?), social factors, episodic factors, etc.
Recently an article noted that seniors are “coming out of the closet” after an opposite sex spouse has died. OK, but then the label thing comes into play. If someone lived 70 years in a heterosexual marriage and spent the last 10 seeking homosexual companionship on what basis do you derive the label? Which lifestyle was “the lie”? Right now the fashion is to label anyone who has had any history of same sex activity as “homosexual” often despite a history of opposite sex activity. To me how the label works in this fashion is a vestige of a history of strong bias against homosexual activity more than an actual descriptor or predictor of an ontological category that the person is participating within.
We hear it again and again that Ted Haggard is a gay man in denial. He might be, but do we know that or are our labels not quite the ontological givens our political conflicts need them to be?
This in a culture where increasingly identity is imagined to be a function of self expression rather than receipt. On nearly every other page of identity we are demanding the right to be episodic and expressive yet on this subject we assert sustainable ontological certainty. I doubt it will hold once the political pressure is off.
What we will likely see following the broader trend lines in the culture is a continuation of the larger theme of identity as self expression and therefore relationships continuing to be utilitarian and episodic. I connect with whomever works for me right now, of whatever gender I prefer or works for me in the moment. The broader cultural narrative will likely absorb the smaller conflict over sexuality.
In an interesting Salon interview on marriage therapy the interviewer dips his hand a bit in terms of his overall view of marriage:
I’m a 20-something gay man in New York, and I probably know more people in open relationships than in monogamous ones. To me, many of the marriages in the book sounded like torture, and as I was reading, my reaction was that they should either get a divorce, or figure out something more fluid that works.
See Andrew Cherlin’s comment on the difference between the gay rights struggle in Europe and America:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/books/20smit.html
This on contains this interesting line:
“Marriage is our battleground. Only in America, Mr. Cherlin says, are gay people campaigning so determinedly for the right to marry. Most gay men and lesbians in Europe, he maintains, view marriage as another oppressive heterosexual institution.”
So what does “bigotry” mean in this debate? It seems a word of convenience used to assault the other side and not much more. pvk
Leadingchurch.com 
What's behind the fashionable use of the word "bigot"
This is a response to a CRC-Voices discussion
So if you own a person on the basis of color you’re a bigot, but if you own them on the basis of debt you’re not? The use of the word “bigot” today is more or less a verbal hand grenade attempting to leverage the cultural moral weight of the civil rights movement in the service of the debate surrounding homosexuality.
Bigotry based on skin color was the result of a very long and complex social history. A fun quick read of the NYTimes review of “The History of White People” might raise a few eyebrows: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/books/review/Gordon-t.html?pagewanted=1
It is popular to construct a myth of progress narrative by which blacks, women, and now gays are emancipated from the bonds of cruel bigotry, with both sides finding justification in proof texting along the way or as is more popular today either throwing out the Bible or just getting very selective with it. You can only do this if you stick to a very broad, non-historical brush.
Slavery in Bible times had everything to do with debt and failure of your clan or people in warfare rather than skin color. That isn’t to say that skin color wasn’t an issue between groups, but rather that the issues didn’t relate to the specific history we connect with it. When groups are in conflict they will search for whatever is handy to use against their enemy: skin color, language, food, you name it. We do the same today. Ever hear ethnic slurs based on food or clothing? Were the Irish “darker” than the English? Using skin color or physical features in social combat is simply part of that warfare.
Today’s construct of gay and straight within the myth of progress is imagined to be “a given” but I believe will likely be overturned. Consider the following. In a culture that has fallen in love with the notion that everything around us is a social construct, yet the hard turn of the last decade or so on the “straight and gay” model has been to insist on a “baked in” orientation. “Sexual preference” has given way to “sexual orientation”. and a lot of the “God made me this way” language in a day when popular culture asserts that “God” outsourced all of his making to a long and complex string of evolutionary mechanisms.
We are more likely to see that expressions of human sexuality are conditioned by an enormous set of variables that include genetics, environmental factors (if industrial chemicals in the environment are impacting the sexual mechanics of frogs, fish, and other earth creatures are they not impacting us?), social factors, episodic factors, etc.
Recently an article noted that seniors are “coming out of the closet” after an opposite sex spouse has died. OK, but then the label thing comes into play. If someone lived 70 years in a heterosexual marriage and spent the last 10 seeking homosexual companionship on what basis do you derive the label? Which lifestyle was “the lie”? Right now the fashion is to label anyone who has had any history of same sex activity as “homosexual” often despite a history of opposite sex activity. To me how the label works in this fashion is a vestige of a history of strong bias against homosexual activity more than an actual descriptor or predictor of an ontological category that the person is participating within.
We hear it again and again that Ted Haggard is a gay man in denial. He might be, but do we know that or are our labels not quite the ontological givens our political conflicts need them to be?
This in a culture where increasingly identity is imagined to be a function of self expression rather than receipt. On nearly every other page of identity we are demanding the right to be episodic and expressive yet on this subject we assert sustainable ontological certainty. I doubt it will hold once the political pressure is off.
What we will likely see following the broader trend lines in the culture is a continuation of the larger theme of identity as self expression and therefore relationships continuing to be utilitarian and episodic. I connect with whomever works for me right now, of whatever gender I prefer or works for me in the moment. The broader cultural narrative will likely absorb the smaller conflict over sexuality.
In an interesting Salon interview on marriage therapy the interviewer dips his hand a bit in terms of his overall view of marriage:
I’m a 20-something gay man in New York, and I probably know more people in open relationships than in monogamous ones. To me, many of the marriages in the book sounded like torture, and as I was reading, my reaction was that they should either get a divorce, or figure out something more fluid that works.
See Andrew Cherlin’s comment on the difference between the gay rights struggle in Europe and America:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/books/20smit.html
This on contains this interesting line:
“Marriage is our battleground. Only in America, Mr. Cherlin says, are gay people campaigning so determinedly for the right to marry. Most gay men and lesbians in Europe, he maintains, view marriage as another oppressive heterosexual institution.”
So what does “bigotry” mean in this debate? It seems a word of convenience used to assault the other side and not much more. pvk
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Husband, Father of 5, Pastor