In a story from my new hometown, a New York appellate court ruled recently that it no longer counted as slander to falsely accuse someone of being homosexual.  In this case, a woman spread a rumor that Mark Yonaty was gay in order to get his girlfriend to break up with him.  Yonaty sued and lost.  As the New York Times reported, the appeals court threw out earlier rulings in Yonaty’s favor, saying they were “based on a false premise that it is shameful and disgraceful to be described as lesbian, gay or bisexual.”

What does this mean for Fundamentalist America?  On one hand, it could mean that FA will find itself more marginalized if it maintains its opposition to homosexual sex and relationships.  Some conservative groups, for instance James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, emphasize love and care for those engaging in homosexual behavior or identifying as homosexuals, even while condemning all sex outside of marriage, especially including gay sex. 

Other FA voices keep up harder-edged language against homosexuality.  A recent article by Bryan Fischer, for instance, on Rightly Concerned, affiliated with the American Family Association, notes that America must discriminate against homosexuals not out of hate but out of love.  However, Fischer also compares healthy anti-homosexual discrimination to other healthy forms of discrimination:

We discriminate against adults, even priests, who have sex with children. We discriminate against teachers who have affairs with students. We discriminate against teachers who moonlight in the porn industry. We discriminate against students who engage in sexting. We discriminate against rapists. We discriminate against those who expose sexual partners unknowingly to the AIDS virus. We discriminate against those adults who commit statutory rape against minors.

If the recent ruling from Albany is a bellwether for the direction of mainstream American culture–and that’s a big if–then Fischer’s type of argument is swimming upstream.  If it is no longer an insult to call someone ‘gay,’ then it will make no sense legally, politically, or culturally to discriminate against homosexuality. 

There’s another lesson we can draw from this article.  At least one gay-rights activist has warned that this decision must not be taken as the end of discrimination against homosexuality.  As the UK’s Daily Mail reported, New York activist Jay Blotcher insisted that being identified as gay could still summon up “something akin to a lynching mob” in parts of the country.  “It’s still a thorny issue,” Blotcher said. “Bottom line, just because you have gay characters on television that make everybody laugh doesn’t mean that the entire country embraces gay people as equal citizens yet.”

Blotcher’s comments illuminate one of the most puzzling aspects of these kinds of “culture-war” debates.  Instead of celebrating the achievement of mainstream acceptability for homosexuality, Blotcher emphasizes the continuing persecution of homosexuals.  Like Blotcher, many voices from FA insist on their own status as beleaguered cultural minorities.  This tradition among American Protestantism has long roots, back to the seventeenth-century persecution of “Pilgrims” and “Puritans” that led in part to the founding of New England.  In the twentieth century, fundamentalist activists have often used Blotcher’s language of continuing discrimination to defend the borders of Fundamentalist America.     

To cite just one example, in 1965 in the wake of the US Supreme Court rulings against school-sponsored religious devotions in public schools, fundamentalist editor and publisher John R. Rice insisted that “White Minorities Have Rights, Too.”  In the pages of his Sword of the Lord magazine (volume 31, September 3, 1965, page 1), Rice asked,

“If Christian people do not have a right to have the Bible taught in the schools, then infidels have no right to teach infidelity in the schools . . . . Why not have freedom in America as much for one minority as another?  Why not observe the rights of white people as well as the rights of Negroes?  Why not observe the rights of nonunion workers as much as the rights of union workers?  Why not observe the rights of Bible believers as well as the rights of the infidels in the churches and infidels in courts or schools?” 

Just as Jay Blotcher warned not to remove homosexuality from the category of defended minorities, so fundamentalists such as Rice insisted that they be allowed to claim minority status.  One of the quirks of America’s culture wars is that both sides often claim the rights and privileges of both majority AND minority status.  If we hope to understand Fundamentalist America, we need to understand the continuing propensity of fundamentalists to do both at the same time.