The Dishonest Defense of Homophobia

I noted recently Ross Douthat's column in the New York Times that wrongly tried to defend Arizona SB 1062 and, like most who put their own religious beliefs above the civil rights of others (usually to avoid thinking for themselves and making true moral choices), Douthat made bigots out to be the real victims of same sex marriage in particular and gay rights advances in general.  A column in Salon does a terrific job of basically ripping Douthat a new one.  Here are column excerpts:

A married lesbian couple bring their children to a restaurant. The host refuses to seat them because, as he explains, interaction with gay people violates his religious beliefs. The mothers speak to the manager, who reminds the host of the restaurant’s non-discrimination policy and demands that he seat the family. Who is the victim? The mothers, who must explain to their children why their parents’ mere existence is, for some, a despicable sin? The children, who were forced to watch their parents shamed and humiliated in public?

None of the above, according to New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat: By his moral calculus, the host would be the true victim, the family the “victors,” and the hypothetical—which is far from fanciful—demonstrates not the continuing threat of discrimination in America, but, rather, the marginalization of devout Christians at the hands of bellicose pro-gay forces.

In his most recent column, Douthat strives to reframe the current debate about anti-gay discrimination (and even segregation) into one about sincere believers being brutally trampled by gay rights activists eager to bury religious freedom. It’s a failed effort, but a useful failure nonetheless.
Douthat’s column is such an effective piece of homophobic apologia that I expect many red state politicians to borrow from its playbook in the coming months and years. To make their job easier, I’ve laid out the most effective means of disguising raw hatred as religious liberty and rounding discrimination down to “dissent.”

If you’re thinking about introducing an anti-gay discrimination bill to your own state’s legislature, you should pay close attention.

Step 1: Put your tail between your legs.  Douthat’s piece is so self-pitying that he actually has to spend a paragraph explaining why he doesn’t mean to be self-pitying. This is a brilliant move. . . . This pity distracts us from the absurdity of his claims: . . . . G iven the horrifying ubiquity of LGBT workplace discrimination, the jarring lack of state and federal laws protecting gay people, and the continuing lack of marriage equality in most states, Douthat’s theory is ludicrous at best and insulting at worst. 

Step 2: Make homophobes the real victims.  Only a tiny handful of business owners have been sued under LGBT anti-discrimination laws in the minority of states that have them. Douthat, like most state legislators who have defended “religious liberty” bills, explicitly cites that infamous trio: a florist, a photographer, and a baker, who claimed their Christianity required that they deny service to gay couples. . . . . Never mind that the real victim isn’t the business owner who acted on his hatred, but the customer who suffered from his discriminatory policies. If you tilt the looking glass just right, you can reverse these roles, turning a bigot into a principled entrepreneur and a wronged minority into entitled bullies.

Step 3: Find an audience-appropriate euphemism for “discrimination.”   Douthat knows the typical Times reader is sophisticated enough to see past the hackneyed doublespeak of “religious liberty,” so he lands on a clever new euphemism for anti-gay discrimination: “dissent.” According to Douthat, the Arizona bill was just a way for “religious conservatives” to “carv[e] out protections for dissent.” . . . .   By rebranding anti-gay bigots as dissenters, Douthat transforms them from retrograde homophobes to virtuous objectors, unwilling to bend their beliefs to match public opinion.

Step 4: Dog whistle to homophobes.  How can Douthat distinguish religious homophobia from religious racism? He can’t, of course: As ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser explained, racists across America raised analogous—indeed, often nearly identical—objections to non-discrimination protections for blacks, which were definitively struck down by a near-unanimous Supreme Court in 1981. Yet Douthat scoffs at these comparisons, labeling them “mendacious and hysterical.”

By the internal logic of Douthat’s piece, homophobia is simply more defensible than racism. Nothing else could explain why denying gay customers is OK while denying black customers isn’t.