Date: Thu, 2 Jan 1997 14:12:51 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: M-G: Dr Sendepause & Klasberries posting again!



I'm disinclined to pursue this, as I think that Martens' loathsome views
are not shared by anyone else on the list, and besides it makes me very
angry, but a few comments.

There are two different issues here. One concerns equal treatment under
law. The other is the ethical appraisal of homosexuality.

The first seems a fairly simple issue. Even if Martens disapproves of
homosexuality, he also disapproves of persecution of gays and lesbians.
But denial of equal rights is a form of persecution. To deny gaysa nd
lesbians the right to marry and enjoy the legal and social benefits
accoerded to straights is no different in principle from forbidding Blacks
and whites from marrying. (Many states in the US had such laws up until
Loving v. Virginia, 1967.) That was a form of persecution of Blacks and
motivated by animus. There was not even a rational basis for it, no
conceivable grouns for treating Black-white marriages differently from
Black-Black or white-white marriages, except to say that Balcks were
unworthy of marrying whites. It's the same with gaysa nd lesbians. Denying
them the right to marry--in America this is a fundamental right, which
means that attemopts to regulate it get the toughest judicial
scrutiny--reflects nothing more than the moral judgment of bigots that
gays and lesbians are perverts. It is driven by sheer hatred and animus,
nothing more.

Martens mentions as a possible non-bigoted basis for such a policy the
idea that it's good for people to have children. But in that case the
policy is not what American law calls narrowly tailored to its end. It is
underinclusive: many straights do not want to have children, and the
policy of the U.S. and I think Sweden too,a s with most advanced
countries, is to allow and encoureage this by legalizing contraception and
abortion. It is overinclusive: at least some and perhaps many gays and
lesbians might well want to have children. (I know that my sister's
partner does, or did, so want; my sister didn't, so that settled it.) 

Martens, in lines that could have been written by the most right wing and
homophobic Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia, and probably
will be written by him when the Hawaii gay marriage case gets to the
Court, sets out a parade of horribles. What about incestuous marriages?
Polygamous ones? Paedophilia? Necrophilia?  Bestiality? These cases,
polygamy apart, are not comparable. Polygamy is illegal, but it shouldn't
be. With incest, there are well-grounded basis for preventing such
marriages, having to do with both the likelihood of genetic damage to any
offspring and with the discouragement of incest in general, since that
typically involves sexual abuse. Paedophilia, even more than incest,
involves sexual abuse and advantage taking, and, moreover, the children so
abused are too young to marry. Necrophilia, well, you can't marry the dead
anyway. Ditto with bestiality. You can screw your sheep, but you can't
marry it. Gay and lesbian marriage, by contrast, involves consensual
relations among adults who happen to love members of their own sex. 


What it comes down to is that Martens thinks that homosexuality is sick,
immoral, and perverted, which is why he lumps it together wuith activities
like necrophilia, bestilaity, and paedophilia, which are in fact sick,
immoral and perverted. But he can offer no reasons for this, because there
are none. It's sheer prejudice, hateful and raw. Look what Martens gives us:

1. A quote from Engels, indicating that Engels shared his view. And so?
Why should we believe something because Engels thought it?

2. Invocations of "normality." If "normal" means statistically normal,
homosexuality certainly is that. All societies have had it. Current
estimates, based on the Kinsey report, suggest that one in ten people are
homosexual (mainly or entirely erotically directed at their own sex). A
great many more people than that who are not self-identified as gay or
lesbian have had same-sex experiences. Any activity that that many people
engage in is "normal" in the statistical sense.

If what is meant, though, that same sex-activity is "abnormal" because it
doesn't fit into someone's conception of what sex organs were "made for" I
have news for Martens. Teleology is dead. Sex organs were not "made for"
anything. They evolved as they did because that maximized evolitionary
fitness, a fact that confers on reproductive use no moral authority.
Unless, that is, we want to say taht sex for fun is immoral, that it's
wrong to use contraceptives or have abortions, or for women to have sex
after menopause, or indeed for sterile men to have sex. Sex is good
because it's fun and sometimes expresses our deepest feelings of love for
one another, not because it makes babies. And boys and boys and girls and
girls can have just as much fun as boys and girls, and love each other
every bit as much.

Finally we have the assertion that homosexuality is a "symptom" of a
society in decline. I suppose that this right wing cliche alludes the
prevalevance of homosexuality in late imperial Britain, at least among the
upper classes and the decline of the Roman Empire (although homosexuality
was practiced throught the history of Rome). Right winger will say things
like: homosexuality _causes_ social decay, without a shred of evidence
beyong these sorts of examples; I suppoose taht Martens is materialist
enough not to go taht far. But the fact is that homosexuality is normal in
all societies and doesn't correlate with social growtyh of decay. Love
knows no laws, including the laws of history.

Martins says that homosexuality represents gay men's fear of women and
lesbian's hatred of men. I don't know on what basis he asserts this
absurdity. Even if true, it shows nothing about whether men who are afraid
of women or women who hate men are to be condemned and denied eqyual
treatment in their own innocuous preferences. If, hypothetically, I feared
red-heads or hated Italians (the latter would be a loathsome prejudice,
but that doesn't matter here), that would be no raeson to prevent me from
marrying a Black woman from Sudan, even if a main considation in my choice
was taht she wasn't a red-headed Italian. Or indeed, from marrying a Black
man from Sudan, same deal. 

In any case most of the gays and lesbians I know don't fear and hate the
other sex. They're just not sexually attracted to it. Or anyway not enough
to want to marry or make love to it on a regular basis. And what's wrong
with that?

Martens hatred of fags, queers, homos, and dykes puts him in the compnay
of some of the most reactionary forces in the world. The fag-bashers in
America are virtually uniformly right wing nuts who want women to be
barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen, niggers to be bootblacks and
maids, unions to be outlawed and communists and Jews to killed. Elsewhere
I think it's pretty much the same. The Nazis went loopy over
homosexuality, rounded up the gyas nd sent them to the camps. The FN and
Foraz Italia hate homos too. I don't think it's unfair to point out to
Martens the compnay he keeps.

Martens gets upset when I says that many workers who share his views about
homosexuality are also racist, sexist, and right wing. He says it ain't
so. I don't know what planet he lives on. Maybe it's different in Sweden.
(Although I gather that at least racism is very strong in the Scandanavian
working class.) But let me tell you from America that it's true. Never
mind communism or socialism, mild social democracy or even what is called
here in America "liberalism" is unpopular among the workers. Male workers
tend to vote Republican. (Union workers tend to vote Democratic, not that
that's a great improvement, but union density in America is about 15% of
the workforce.) The white working class is desperately racist here. I can
produce the statistics if you insist. Sexist, ditto. And my impression
>from living in England is taht while the working class there is of course
less right wing, being still (barely) majority Labourite, it is no less
racist and sexist than it is homophobic.

As evidence of Martens' views being driven by hate, consider that he
crudely calls homosexuality "buggery," in a quaint British expression:
here in America we say "buttfucking." This is analogous to calling
heterosexuality "fucking." (By the way, some straights go in for
buttfucking, boy and girl, I mean.) Andrea Dworkin and some radical
seperatist lesbian feminists would agree that this correctly
characterizes heterosexuality, although they might intest that
"fucking" is too weak; "rape" might be more to the poin. But just as
reducing heterosexuality to sexual intercourse, indeed, to a particular
sort of sexual intercourse, is a drastic and absurd reduction of the
range of boy-girl relations, even sexual ones, so characterizuing
homosexuality in terms of anal intercourse is a drastic reduction
of the range of even homosexual sexual activity, much less of homosexual
relations, which extend beyond the bed and include a gender that lacks the
equipment for it. 

Basically Martens use of this term shows that what bends him out of shape
about homosexuality, what he cannot stand, is the thought of someone's
dick up someone else's ass. At least if the ass is male. But since there's
nothing wrong with that, since indeed it can be fun and pleasurable and is
so for a lot of people, the thing to be said to him is taht if it doesn't
turn him on, he shouldn't do it. Not being turned on by it, in fact, even
being disgusted by it, however, is no reason to deny the fundamental
rights of people who are turned on by it.

Martens asks about which societies I maent that were more civilized than
ours in countenanceing homosexuality. I was thinking of ancient Greece and
Rome and possibly mod-medieval Europe (where, I gather, there were
same-sex m,arriages performed at late asd the 11th century). I do not mean
that they were more civilized tout court, just in this respect. I am aware
of the degraded position that women occupied in those societies and of the
existence of slavery, etc. But my point was just that in the ancient and
possibly the early or mid-medeival world of Europe, there was a sane
attitude towards homosexuality, the sanity of which is not diminished by
the bad practices of those societies in other regards. 19th and early
20th Century Britain, to which Martens alludes, was quite intolerant towards
homosexuality, despite its widespread practice among the upper class.
Oscar Wilde (a socialist, incidentally) was imprisoned for it: that was
the occasion of The Ballad of Reading Gaol. E,M, Forster, Ford Madox Ford,
Keynes and Virginia Woolf, homosexuals all, endured severe repression
because of reactionary British laws and attitudes.

I won't continue this any more, except to reinterate that homophobia is
antithetical to Marxism, which is about human liberation, gay and
straight, man and woman. 

--Justin Schwartz




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