Life in a zealot-free zone.

I was having coffee recently with a professor of gay studies at the University of Amsterdam when he made a comment that stunned me. "Dutch gays," he said, "have achieved just about everything legally that we set out to achieve." Can any gay American easily imagine a time when we might justifiably say such a thing about our own circumstances? Yet it's true--the Netherlands (where I'm living for a while) has everything from openly gay soldiers to gay-friendly sex education and recently became the first nation on earth to recognize same-sex marriage.

What next? "Now," added the professor, "comes the question of social acceptance." Of course, gay men and lesbians already enjoy far more acceptance in the Netherlands than in most countries. Yet the same Dutch populace that has given a thumbs-up to gay marriage has never really had the sort of national conversation about homosexuality that we Americans have been having ever since the advent of AIDS.

Part of the reason for this may be that they've never needed such a conversation. There's admittedly some work left to do: Amsterdam's racy reputation to the contrary, the Dutch are by nature highly conservative, tradition-bound, hardwired for social conformity, and averse to risk and adventure. (As one gay Dutch writer joked, no Dutchman would ever sell his apartment and move to a distant country, as I have, simply because he wanted to see what that would be like.) The more you get to know the Netherlands, in fact, the more remarkable it seems that it has, with astonishingly little social agitation, addressed the same gay-related issues we have and has, time after time, made the right decisions.

How can this be? The answer is complicated, but one obvious distinction stands out: America has a zealous, well-organized, viciously antigay religious right that spreads around money and influences politicians to do its bidding, and the Netherlands (like most other European countries) doesn't. There may be pockets of hate, but there's no organized hate movement presenting itself as the defender of family and faith. This makes an immense difference. With no Christian Coalition or Family Research Council breathing down their necks, Dutch legislators have been able to respond seriously and maturely to gay activists' calls for reform and to pass good laws.

By contrast, in the United States--the fountainhead of democracy and the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement--democratic reform has been warped by a malevolent theocratic movement that views politics as a holy war. On the day the House voted to impeach President Clinton, a Washington Post writer described the vote as the climax of "a decade of destructive partisanship, personal attack, and win-at-all-costs politics." What he avoided saying flat out was that that kind of politics, once a rarity, is a direct consequence of the religious right's mentality.

To be an American in the Netherlands is to be reminded constantly of the differences that proceed from the absence of such a mentality here. While Pat Robertson and his ilk have been nipping gay-friendly curricula in the bud, a generation of Dutch people have been educated by such curricula and have grown up never heating gays abused in the media, from the pulpit, or at the family dinner table. Hence, homosexuality is to them a nonissue. Most of my gay Dutch friends came out in their early teens; none got flak from friends or family. They can hardly believe the travails many American gays endure.

Yes, the Netherlands does have churches, but they're overwhelmingly liberal. In any case, few Dutch people are religious. "In America, people rely on God," a University of Amsterdam grad student told me. "Here they rely on each other." What more stinging indictment could there be of America's religious right, which too often preaches not love but hate?

To be sure, the Netherlands does have a tiny antigay religious right, but it's an import made up of Islamic fundamentalists from places like Indonesia and Turkey. So far this movement enjoys none of the power of its U.S. counterpart. And let's hope it stays that way--for we need at least one nation to show us how democracy can work when it's not in shackles.