Homosexuality and American Public Life.

Homosexuality and American Public Life * Edited by Christopher Wolfe * Spence * $29.95

This collection of essays, written by a conservative coterie and introduced by Weekly Standard pooh-bah William Kristol, amounts to a right-wing manifesto. Why publish this document now? As Kristol opines in his foreword, gays and lesbians are just too visible. A dignified conservative silence in response to gays in public and to all the attentions that they demand won't work anymore. So it's necessary to codify an official conservative stance designed to refute the claims of gay activists and to frustrate the goals of gay liberation. What's interesting about this collection, then, is not so much each writer's argument per se, but the way the book as a whole reflects current conservative thinking on gay rights and how that thinking is based on premises that are in many cases shaky or unproven.

The book's first section asks whether the cause of homosexuality is biological or environmental. Here the essayists want to show that gays have a vested interest in the biology of homosexuality--i.e., if it's biological, then it can't be helped and thus shouldn't be therapized or disparaged. So, say our essayists, gays and the liberal press exaggerate shoddy scientific results and trumpet the discovery of gay genes. While it's true that science has not yet proven that homosexuality is biological, neither has it proven that homosexuality is environmental. Without an answer either way, the argument on both sides is moot.

Moreover, our essayists are wrong to assume that gays want a gay gene. Most of them don't. Most of them (a la Judith Butler) don't even believe that sex and gender are biological, much less that sexuality is. They insist that all three are socially constructed.

Thinking they've shown that homosexuals are not born that way, in the second section our essayists want to show that gays choose to be that way or that distant fathers and child molesters make them that way. Homosexuality does not arise spontaneously in nature, they say. Therefore it is environmental, and environments can change. Furthermore, if homosexuality is not natural, then it is not normal. If it is not normal, then it is a disease, and a curable one. But the jury's still out on biology, and it's certainly still out on whether talk therapy can make you straight or just make you sublimate. Again, this doesn't hold water.

The third section considers homosexuality and law--natural law, that is, whereby natural=moral and moral=legal. Conversely, unnatural=immoral=illegal. Or almost. In the book's conclusion Father Richard John Neuhaus doesn't insist that homosexual acts should be illegal, only that they be "socially tolerated but not morally approved" or legally sanctioned. At the very least this means no gay marriage, but it doesn't mean jailing consenting adults.

As I said, there's a logic at work here, albeit a flawed one. We've gone quickly from environmental homosexuality to gay public policy. But if you can't prove the nurture argument, or if you don't buy biblical truth and natural law, then the case falls apart. Thing is, most Americans do buy them. The good news is, though, that even so, the case for gay rights might still be made as a case for human rights. Apparently, this wing of the right wing has a message for us: You can still be gay, still live "freely" as a gay person, and still expect equal treatment under the law, but you can't expect a seal of approval for it in "public life," that is, from the church or the government.

Bottom line: If gays act up, then conservatives will act back, if only in self-defense. Still, even though the Right's never going to kiss you for being queer, they're not going to skin you for it either. Not yet, anyway.

Vincent is a staff writer for NY Press and has written for The New Republic.