Spokane and the oft-maligned 'Homosexual Agenda' posted by Ben

Spokane, Washington's Gays Defy Conservatives:

While Washington State is known nationally for being a state firmly in the Democratic, equal-rights-for-all camp, natives know a very different story. Because demographically, the state isn't that different from the rest of the country when viewed through the prism of urban and rural differences. Get out of the city and you're in Republican country.

In fact, Washington's split is even more dramatic than in many other states because of its geography. To the west of the Cascades is a green, rainy urban sprawl that stretches from Everett to Tacoma, with outliers in cities like Olympia. To the east, however, is a rough, dry expanse of desert and heavily irrigated farmland. This is an area that holds far more in common with Idaho and Utah than it does its own western half, especially politically.

One of the biggest cities in Eastern Washington is Spokane, a place that in many ways has been able to preserve a small-town country feel, despite having its own funky sine wave of economic growth and collapse over the years. Without that basic background, the full impact that the following story could hold for Eastern Washington care barely be understood.

"In Spokane... activists have embarked on a radical plan to create a gay business district in the heart of the city. It is a controversial idea in a region known mainly for political conservatism and the growing presence of evangelical Christians. But the idea's backers are determined. 'Bring it on. Spokane won't change without confrontation,' said Bonnie Aspen, a gay businesswoman and one of the scheme's architects."

[snip]

The main opposition comes from conservatives and evangelicals. One Spokane church leader, Walton Mize, bishop of the Christ Holy Sanctified Church, has warned of an 'underbelly' of gay culture that will attract sexual predators and be a risk to children. Other evangelical groups have distributed anti-gay literature to city officials claiming that gays will bring disease and mental illnesses into Spokane. Penny Lancaster, leader of an influential body of evangelical groups called Community Impact Spokane, has said the city risks becoming a 'gay Mecca'.

Talk about polarization! I'm surprised that they weren't blaming liberal Seattle for attempted cultural decimation of the Spokane ethic. Or maybe that particular explanation didn't make it into the article.

However, while there are a number of discussions that this story could spawn, I want to briefly focus on the evangelical response to the proposed plan. Once again, the church has chosen to associate homosexuality with pedophilia, disease, and mental disease. Despite decades of research disproving those assumptions about 'those scary gay monsters,' these church leaders have chosen to take their so-called scientific cues from the benighted days of pre-Kinsey theories about sex that scientists would scoff at in disbelief. It's amazing, there is such a serious regression taking place among the evangelicals and their approach to sexuality that I wouldn't be surprised if they again began advocating that all women have their clitorises burned with acid to prevent sexual response. (For an entertaining afternoon, look into the origins of Grapenuts and Corn Flakes.) But I digress...

The point is, these church leaders are using their so-called spiritual authority in order to lie to their congregations about what homosexuality is. They have adbrogated their responsibility to the truth in order to spread false fear and hate about people who, just like the rest of the world, should not defined solely by their sexuality, but by their full identity.

Is there any rhetorical difference between claiming that "because a man is gay, he must be a predator" or "because she is a woman, she much be intellectually inferior" or "because he is black, he is not really human?" This is the politics of division, labeling those who are different than "we" are in an effort to reduce them from personhood to monstrous abominations. Addressing just one of the evangelical's misrepresentations, to claim that most homosexuals are predators is statistically flawed logic (are all predators homosexual? are all homosexuals predators? is there any proof at all that one is linked to the other?) that reveals far less about gays than it does the hateful bigots who make these claims.

So I wish the businessmen and women in Spokane who originated this plan the best of luck. They'll need it. But they know a secret. It's much more difficult to demonize somebody who you see out in the open every day living a fulfilling, ethical life than it is the monsters whom we imagine are hiding in the closet.

(P.S. This was written from the gayest neighborhood in Ohio. I have yet to hear any complaints about gay or lesbian predators from the two daycares within a block of my house. In fact, there is a distinct lack of fear in the air. And it's a surprisingly friendly area. Of course, most of the modern evangelical churches are out in the stratified, fearful suburbs. Go figure.)