Tag: religion

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Film Features Film/TV

When Fake Becomes Real: J.R. “Bob” Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius

“The World Ends Tomorrow and YOU MAY DIE!” So begins SubGenius Pamphlet #1, the mysterious missive that launched J.R. “Bob” Dobbs into the cultural consciousness. The story of the unlikely creation of the Church of the SubGenius and its sprawling influence is told in a new documentary by producer/director Sandy K. Boone.

The “church” was the brainchild of two friends from Fort Worth, Texas. Douglass St. Clair Smith had been voted “weirdest” student in his high school. Steve Wilcox worked for AT&T. They were both self-proclaimed outsiders in the straight-laced Texas of the late 1970s, so when they met, they became fast friends.

Slackers — Dr. Philo Drummond (left) and Rev. Ivan Stang come clean in J.R. “Bob” Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius.

The two were fascinated with all kinds of extreme beliefs and outsider art. They bonded over a common love of the psychedelic music of Captain Beefheart. This was the age of televangelists and the rise of Evangelical Christianity. Wilcox had been raised in a fundamentalist household and was intimately familiar with the culture, even though he rejected his parents’ religion.

The idea was to create a parody version of the pamphlets and flyers, such as the tracts from cartoonist Jack Chick, that littered public spaces in Fort Worth, so they created a fake religion that was supposed to seem just as insane as the kooky pamphlets they were satirizing. To do that, they needed a deity. Since their own artistic skills weren’t up to snuff, and they couldn’t afford to hire an illustrator, they turned to clip art, the open source IP of the day. In a book from the 1950s intended for use by salesmen, they found an image of a smiling white man clenching a pipe in his teeth. They named the image J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, and invented a backstory for him.

“Bob” (the quotation marks were mandatory) was a supernaturally gifted salesman who was contacted in the 1950s by a “wrathful alien space god from a corporate sin galaxy” who called himself JHVH-1. The mission of “Bob” was to bring Slack to the world. What Slack was, exactly, was left to the imagination, but in Wilcox’s words, “You know when you don’t have it.”

All religions need an adversary. The target audience for the pamphlet was defined on the front page: “Do people think you’re strange? Do you???” Since the two artists were in Dallas, conspiracy theories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy were fresh on their minds. Thus, the Conspiracy of Normals, intent on stealing Slack from the abnormals, was conjured into existence.

Smith renamed himself Rev. Ivan Stang, and Wilcox adopted the moniker Dr. Philo Drummond. The pamphlet included an address for the SubGenius Foundation with a pitch to send $1 in return for “Eternal salvation or triple your money back!” As Ivan Stang says in one of the many archival interviews in the documentary, “If Jim Jones convinced 900 people to kill themselves, we thought maybe we could convince 900 people to give us a dollar.”

Much to their surprise, they convinced a lot more than 900 people. Word spread quickly, and a network of artists creating copycat artworks sprang up around the country. “Bob” became an icon of ’80s counterculture. The first meeting of the SubGenius, which Stang dubbed a “devival,” attracted Devo founders Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale. A radio show called The Hour of Slack soon followed. “Bob” popped up in the oddest places, such as on the wall of the set of Peewee’s Playhouse. Baffled journalists didn’t know if the SubGenius crew was joking or not, and Ivan Stang, who took over running the ramshackle church, wasn’t about to tell them. The devivals became chaotic touring shows, with bands like Doktors for Bob pioneering what would become known as noise music.

As Boone’s insightful and spritely paced documentary reveals, the genius of the SubGenius was deconstructing the elements all real religions shared and reconstructing them in a funhouse mirror. But much to Stang’s dismay, he found that even a parody religion attracted sincere followers. At a massive devival in San Francisco known as The Night of Slack, Stang was accosted by a SubG who demanded to know where the real “Bob” was. Like any religion worth its creed, schisms developed, and people took the “us vs. them” narrative way too seriously. In the documentary, Stang says he decided to break character and tell the real story of the church in order to avoid creating a new Scientology after he’s gone.

In many ways, the SubGenius were ahead of their time. The church was an early adopter of the internet, and “Bob” is a proto-meme. Slack lives on as the name of a popular business conferencing app. But as the documentary points out in its closing minutes, cult-like organizations such as QAnon learned the wrong lessons from the SubGenius: No matter how nutty a group seems, if it gives them a sense of belonging, people are willing to believe.

J.R. “Bob” Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius is available on Amazon Prime Video and Vimeo On Demand.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

It’s Secular

The office of the president is a secular office in a secular government. There is not a word in the Constitution that authorizes the president or anyone else in the federal government to make a religious decision.

Why then are both voters and candidates wasting their time talking about religion? The personal religious beliefs of the candidates should be considered irrelevant. Furthermore, people should not forget that there are a lot more professors of religion than practitioners. What a person claims to believe and how that person leads his or her life are often quite different.

Laws are, in the final analysis, words on paper. They cannot and do not control human behavior. If they could, there would be no crimes. Americans, especially politicians, have developed the bad habit of thinking that there ought to be a law to cover every conceivable human action. Consequently, there are so many laws today that no human being can possibly know what they all are. This defeats one of the useful purposes of laws, which is to educate the public.

As for religion, people should recognize that all the world’s religions have failed to eliminate sin, and therefore no one should expect the government to do that. Christianity in particular is based on the twin concepts of sin and forgiveness. Governments are better at finding sin than at forgiving.

Religion has a legitimate role in our society. George Washington said religion is the best way known to instill virtue in masses of people. That is job enough for religion, and religion should stay out of politics as an organization. Religious individuals, of course, have the same rights and duties as any other citizen.

Religion itself has enough problems to solve. Christian Zionists, for example, are a heretical cult without any biblical foundation and with a political agenda. Other Christians have perverted the religion into a weekly course on how to be rich and happy. Christianity, in fact, teaches that it is easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Militant Christianity is a contradiction in terms.

If you are trying to find someone actually practicing Christianity, whom would you choose — a preacher with a six-figure salary, a limousine, and a private jet or, say, an actor like Brad Pitt, who has committed $5 million of his own money to build homes for people in New Orleans’ 9th Ward?

In judging human affairs, always look for actions, not words. What a person says tells you nothing reliable; what a person does gives you a better clue as to what kind of a person he or she is. At the same time, don’t forget the dual nature of human beings.

One can find faults with all religions. One should not forget, however, that the same can be said of all secular philosophies, ideologies, and institutions. Nothing human is or ever will be perfect.

As for the presidential candidates, people should be asking not what these people claim to believe about God, but what have they actually done? How do their lives measure up to their speeches? Do they demonstrate a belief in and a concern for the Constitution? Do they have a wide knowledge of the world as it truly is? Are they catering to special interests? Are they independent thinkers or followers?

The presidential race is, after all, a search for a secular leader, not for a pope or ayatollah. The United States is in deep trouble politically, financially, and economically. It will take a smart, sane, and courageous person to get us out. Opportunists and people who sell their souls for campaign contributions may well preside over our national collapse.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

The Preacher in Chief?

As we all know, the president of the United States is elected by and swears to serve all citizens of this nation by protecting and defending the Constitution, not the Bible or any other religious text. America — founded by men who in some instances proclaimed Jesus as their God — was created to assure the freedoms of religion and conscience without regard to an individual’s personal beliefs, creed, or worship practices.

The Republican Party appears to have abandoned any commitment to this tenet of the Constitution and is positioned to nominate a preacher in chief, whose first loyalty will be to the dogmas of Christian fundamentalism.

And they have a constituency. Across the country, sprawling corporate religious “lifestyle centers,” serving more as Christian country clubs than as houses of worship, have produced congregations who foster a blend of ostentatious piety, self-righteous intolerance, and unyielding arrogance. For these churchgoers, voting Republican is de rigueur.

Unprecedented amounts of wealth have been amassed in many of these churches, not in small part as a result of the wealth-redistribution policy of the Republican administrations’ faith-based government programs. The threat of losing this power and money may in fact be looming large in the selection of the party’s nominee and in the desperately pious tone, manner, and attitude of the Republican presidential acolytes.

Not to be outdone, the media, particularly cable television punditry and radio talk-show hosts, are reliably helping to advance the idea of establishing a religious “test” for candidates. Although the most recent Republican debate fielded questions created by viewers of YouTube, those questions were vetted and selected by officials at CNN. Thus, all Republican presidential candidates were asked by Wolf Blitzer if they believed in the inerrancy of the Bible. (Any guesses as to how the pack of them answered?)

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a proud member of God’s Own Party and an ordained Baptist minister, may be the most flagrant offender against the Constitution. Huckabee recently told a group of students at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University that his astonishing rise in the Iowa polls is an “act of God.” He has also received letters of endorsement from Tim LaHaye, author of the “Left Behind” series of novels which extol the Rapture as an imminent end-of-the-world phenomenon.

Huckabee has stated on the record that he does not believe in evolution and lists among the most urgent issues facing the country the perils of abortion and gay marriage, as well as threats to the unlimited rights of gun-owners. His frequent statements of religiosity are delivered with a jocular smile and a sense of humor — designed, apparently, to seem non-threatening to anyone who is not a believer.

And, as if this country hasn’t suffered enough division, enough religious hypocrisy, and enough self-righteous intolerance in the last seven years, now we have former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, an ex-moderate of sorts, hastening to join the ranks of Christian soldiers in the Republican Party and seeking like the rest to impose a religious obligation on political service. His immediate motivation, amplified by concern about rival Huckabee, is to gain the White House at any cost, but the ultimate result of his apostasy from reason is to further erode the wall separating church and state in this country — something most Christian fundamentalists believe is a myth concocted by God-hating secular liberals.

Prompted by Huckabee’s surge, Mormon Romney has ramped up his attempt to sway the fundamentalist crowds and seems determined to try to one-up Preacher Huckabee. He may indeed have trumped Huckabee with this mind-bending assertion: “Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom. … Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.” Can Romney really not know of the suppression, torture, and murder of heretics and infidels by Christians (and members of virtually every other religion) throughout history?

When candidates such as Romney and Huckabee ratchet up their efforts to destroy the separation of church and state established by this country’s founders, it requires those of us in the electorate to ratchet right back. After all, it is an election that will be held in America next November, not an altar call.

Cheri DelBrocco writes the “Mad As Hell” column for MemphisFlyer.com.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

MAD AS HELL: Keeping the Faith in God’s Own Party

As we all know, the president of the United States is
elected and swears to serve all citizens of this nation by protecting and
defending the Constitution rather than the Bible or any other religious text.
America, founded by men who in some instances proclaimed Jesus as their God,
was created to assure the freedoms of religion and conscience without regard
to an individual’s personal beliefs, creed, or worship practices.

The Republican Party appears to have abandoned any
commitment to this tenet of the Constitution and is positioned to elect a
preacher- in-chief whose first loyalty will be to the dogmas of Christian
Fundamentalism.

And they have a constituency. Across the country
sprawling corporate religious “lifestyle centers” serving more as Christian
country clubs than as houses of worship have produced congregations who foster
a blend of ostentatious piety, self-righteous intolerance, and unyielding
arrogance. For these parishioners, voting Republican is de rigueur.

Unprecedented amounts of wealth have been amassed in many
of these churches, not in small part as a result of the wealth-redistribution
policy of the Bush and Republican faith-based government programs established
in this century. The threat of losing this power and money may in fact be
looming large in the selection of the party’s nominee and in the desperately
pious tone, manner, and attitude of the Republican presidential acolytes.

Not to be outdone, the media, particularly cable
television punditry and radio talk show hosts, are reliably helping to advance
the idea of establishing a religious test. Although the last Republican
debate fielded questions created by viewers of You Tube, those questions were
vetted and selected by officials at CNN. Thus, all Republican presidential
candidates were asked by Wolf Blitzer if they believed in the inerrancy of the
Bible. (Any guesses as to how the pack of them answered?)

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a proud member of
God’s Own Party and an ordained Baptist minister, may be the most flagrant
offender against the Constitution. Mr. Huckabee recently told a group of
students at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University that his astonishing rise in
the Iowa polls is an act of God. He has also received letters of endorsement
from Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind series which extols the
Rapture as an imminent end-of-the-world phenomenon. Huckabee has stated on the
record that he does not believe in evolution and lists among the most urgent
issues facing the country the perils of abortion and gay marriage, as well as
threats to the unlimited rights of gun-owners. His frequent statements of
religiosity are delivered with a jocular smile and a sense of humor —
designed apparently to seem non-threatening to anyone who is not a believer.

As if this country hasn’t suffered enough division, enough
religious hypocrisy, and enough self-righteous intolerance in the last seven
years, now we have former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, an ex-moderate of
sorts, hastening to join the ranks of Christian soldiers in the Republican Party
and seeking like the rest to impose a religious obligation on political service.
His immediate motivation, amplified by concern about rival Huckabee, is to gain
the White House at any cost, but the ultimate result of his apostasy from reason
is to further decimate the wall of separation between Church and state in this
country–something most Christian fundamentalists disbelieve anyhow as a myth
concocted by them God-hating secular liberals.

Scarified by Huckabee’s surge, Mormon Romney has ramped up
his attempt to sway the fundamentalist crowds and seems determined to try to
one-up Preacher Huckabee. He may indeed have trumped Huckabee with this
mind-bending assertion: “Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires
freedom—-Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.” Can Romney
really not know of the suppression, torture, and murder of heretics and infidels
by Christians (and members of virtually every other religion) throughout
history?

When candidates like Romney, Huckabee and others ratchet up
their effort to destroy the wall of separation built by the founders, it
requires somebody to ratchet right back. After all, it is an election that will
be held in America next November, not an altar call.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Ernest Withers

Ernest Withers, who died this week at age 85, was a giant of American photography. Like a real-life Zelig, Withers seemingly was everywhere — documenting the most pivotal moments of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the Negro baseball leagues, jazz and blues greats, scenes of Beale Street in its pre-tourist heyday, weddings, funerals, and parties. Withers captured African-American life in the South like no other.

He photographed Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, B.B. King, and Aretha Franklin, to name just a very few of his notable subjects. Withers was in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956, documenting the bus strike in the wake of Rosa Parks’ arrest. He rode buses with Martin Luther King Jr. His famous “I AM A MAN” photos of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike are in American history books, as well they should be.

Withers was a modest, soft-spoken man who tended to his large and loving family to the same noble degree that he did to his photography. And like many Memphis icons, he was probably taken somewhat for granted. But Withers never stopped working. In recent years, he could be seen moving through the crowd at social events, charging revelers a modest fee for instant photos of themselves. It’s likely that many of those who bought a picture had no idea they’d just purchased a piece by one of the 20th century’s greatest photographers.

He will be missed, like few others. His legacy will live on in the photos he created.

And if there are any biographers out there looking for a subject whose life could fill several volumes, we’ve got your man.

Another Mock Issue

In their zeal to oppose the reelection effort of 9th District congressman Steve Cohen, certain of his adversaries went out of their way to mischaracterize Cohen’s vote for hate-crimes legislation. The congressman was verbally flagellated as a would-be muzzler of ministers who might want to oppose homosexuality from their pulpits.

Fortunately, counsels have arisen within the African-American religious community to rebut the accusations against the bill and against Cohen. But now another campaign has been launched against the congressman — this time for his refusal to support a congressional resolution affirming that the Ottoman Turks committed genocide against an Armenian minority in the years following World War I.

We do not dispute the allegation concerning events that are now almost a century old. Nor do we contend that the lobbying effort on behalf of this resolution, led locally by one Dany Beylerian, an ethnic Armenian, is anything but sincere.

But, like Cohen, we find the resolution to be ill-timed. Why aim a provocative accusation at an American ally, Turkey, when that government, considerably evolved from its Ottoman past, is not known to be planning any such malice?

And why should a congressman from Memphis vote so as to insult a currently unoffending nation that is the 2008 Memphis in May honoree? Yes, Cohen, as a white Southener, sponsored a resolution apologizing for slavery. In the same way, it is up to the Turks themselves to acknowledge their darker history.

Categories
News

God Country

CREDIT: Creation Museum

With science and religion doing ever more battle in the classroom, public interest in creationism and evolutionary theory are at an all-time high. (At least since a certain trial about a certain teacher and certain monkeys, right here in Tennessee back in 1925, that is.) For the most part, however, creationism is found almost exclusively in churches (and now, on the Web), while evolution enjoys the freer domain of classrooms, textbooks, and museums.

Until now!

While there have been biblically themed science museums before, the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky (just outside of Cincinnati and a mere 490 miles from Memphis), is the world’s largest and — inaugurated in May — the newest.

Boasting 130 stationary and animatronic figures, 52 educational videos, a special-effects theater, a state-of-the art planetarium, and designs by the architect of Universal Studio’s theme park King Kong and Jaws rides, this facility is on par with some of the best museums in the world in terms of collection, resources, and size. But unlike almost every other museum at this level, this one not only insists on the factuality of Adam and Eve but suggests that they co-existed with dinosaurs. Think The Flintstones, though Adam probably did not use a brachiosaur as a crane or a ceratosaurus as a timeclock.

The $27 million Creation Museum is an extension of Answers in Genesis, a ministry founded by author/broadcaster Ken Ham in 1994 as a means of reconciling scientific questions and phenomena with, well, answers in Genesis. According to Genesis, and as illustrated in the exhibits of the museum, the Earth is only about 6,000 years old, not billions, as traditional science would suggest. The Earth was also created in a single day, as was light, the waters, the animals, etc. Noah did exist and did build an ark, and a globally catastrophic flood did occur roughly 4,300 years ago — as did the plate tectonics responsible for our continents and the fossilization of dinosaurs and other organisms.

Creation Museum

The compression of the fossil record from millions to thousands of years and the co-existence of dinosaurs and man will rile most scientists. Questions logically arise: How did a Tyrannosaurus rex and a goat peacefully live side by side in that big boat for so long? Where did Cain get his wife? Wouldn’t he have been marrying his sister? The answers are simple: All creatures were vegetarians until after the flood. Marrying your sister was okay back then, because there was no possibility of genetic mistakes; humans were perfect. (And besides, there wasn’t anybody else!)

For skeptics, a team of scientists from accredited universities is on hand to answer questions about geologic ages, carbon dating, mineralogy, and astrophysics. But make no mistake. This museum is a component of a ministry, and each exhibit illustrates sections of the Bible. And, while the ministry is scientific by nature, it is not to be confused with the recent Intelligent Design (ID) movement.

ID suggests that an intelligent designer is responsible for the creation of the universe but leaves open the question of who that designer may be: God, Buddha, George Burns, whoever. The Creation Museum makes no bones about it (pun intended): The creator is God, the father of Jesus, and the scientific record is inextricably linked to a literal interpretation of Genesis and part of a master plan that begins with creation and ends with the consummation of all evil and corruption. (For further reading, see the Bible’s exciting conclusion, Revelation.)

Open-minded visitors will be surprised by the respectful tone that is taken of traditional science. In fact, for each biblical explanation of a geologic event, the traditional scientific explanation is listed alongside, in precise and nonjudgmental language. And even critics will have to admit that the presentation of the museum’s materials is top-notch. The facility — at 60,000 square feet — is gorgeous. And while the robot dinosaurs occasionally move like — you guessed it — robots, you may easily find yourself creeped out looking into the eyes of a very real looking velociraptor. You may also be creeped out that that the same velociraptor lives in Eden and that Adam and Eve are skinny-dipping just a few feet away.

www.creationmuseum.org

Categories
News The Fly-By

When the Saints Come Marching In

The March 20th death of Church of God in Christ (COGIC) presiding bishop Gilbert Earl Patterson closed the book on the Memphis-based denomination’s first century.

Patterson delivered old-time religion from the pulpit while possessing the mass-media savvy to spread the word far beyond his local congregation. Broadcasts of Patterson’s sermons, produced in-house and distributed to three cable networks, reached millions of viewers worldwide. Today, COGIC is recognized as the world’s largest African-American Pentecostal denomination.

Bishop Patterson will lie in state Wednesday, March 28th, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. at Mason Temple, located near downtown at 930 Mason Street. The temple is the resting place of COGIC founder Charles Harrison Mason and the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s final public address, the “I have been to the mountaintop” speech, delivered April 3, 1968.

COGIC announced three more days of memorial events to be held at the Temple of Deliverance at 369 G.E. Patterson Avenue downtown. The local church memorial service is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday, March 29th, with the jurisdictional memorial service the following day at 7 p.m.

Patterson’s funeral begins Saturday at 10 a.m. All services are open to the public.

Bishop Charles Blake of the 22,000-member West Angeles COGIC in Los Angeles has been named interim presiding bishop, and he will officiate at the funeral.

COGIC expects thousands to attend, with saints — as COGIC members are known — flocking to Memphis from around the world. COGIC leaders are focused on this week’s activities but will soon announce a plan to install Patterson’s successor.

Patterson’s death and the subsequent leadership change could send ripples throughout Memphis. The denomination elects its presiding bishop every four years, with the next election scheduled for 2008. In a February interview, COGIC COO and second-in-command, Bishop Jerry Maynard said, “It is not in our minds to choose a person other than [Patterson] in 2008. In ’08, if there’s a Bishop Patterson, he will stay in the position.”

COGIC is an incorporated entity, and whoever is elected presiding bishop also carries the CEO title and makes the organization’s business decisions.

Thanks to Patterson’s presence in Memphis, COGIC has made a significant local economic impact. The national convocation held here each November attracts up to 60,000 saints and generates an estimated $30 million in business revenue and sales taxes. In addition, the organization hires and trains local minorities in skilled positions while also attracting talent from outside the region.

Though COGIC has rate agreements in place with some Memphis hotels through 2012, the election of a presiding bishop in another city could shift the denomination’s power center and move the convocation. In recent years, Patterson and other church officials have suggested that the event has outgrown Memphis.

See the current issue of our sister publication Memphis Business Quarterly for an article on COGIC during Patterson’s lifetime. Check www.memphisflyer.com for updates on this week’s memorial activities and the Patterson funeral.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Choosing the Gay Option

The religious right has traditionally argued that homosexuality is a choice and that gays and lesbians can, and should, “change” (i.e., become heterosexual through reparative therapy or religious conversion).

In response, liberal advocates for gay and lesbian civil rights argue that homosexuality, or sexual orientation in general, is not a choice and that gays and lesbians should have civil rights protections because they are born gay or lesbian and cannot change their sexual orientation. Both of these arguments are misleading and oversimplify scientific facts and research on sexual orientation.

The argument that human sexuality is biologically determined is contrary to social scientific research, which suggests that sexuality is largely socially constructed. It ignores not only the sociological evidence against an innate, unchangeable sexuality but also the radical insight of Freud that humans are not born “heterosexual” or “homosexual” and that the development of an exclusive “heterosexuality” requires the repression of homosexual desire.

Even Kinsey, the much misunderstood and misquoted sex researcher, rejected the concept of an innate sexual orientation, preferring to categorize people based on their sexual behaviors.

Kinsey never argued that heterosexuals and homosexuals were two separate innate sexual orientations. Like Freud, he believed that all human beings were potentially bisexual.

Why do many in the mainstream gay movement argue that it is impossible to choose to be gay or lesbian? Many radical feminists argue that women can choose to be lesbian — that identifying as a lesbian is a social and political choice available to women to liberate themselves from patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality.

The early radical gay liberationists argued that gay liberation requires the sexual liberation of everyone from the socially constructed hetero/homo dichotomy. They believed that everyone could be “gay.” They rejected the scientific claim that homosexuality was a biological or psychological pathology or that same-sex desire was even “abnormal.” The gay rights movement created a modern “gay” identity.

There have not always been “gay” people, so it is erroneous to claim that people are “born” gay. Bisexuals are also left out of the “sexual orientation is not a choice” paradigm, since they can choose their sexual identity. If we base gay/lesbian rights on the argument that it is not a choice, then we exclude bisexuals and deny their right to choose.

Why all the focus on the question of can gays change? Why not ask, “Can straight people change”? Both questions focus on the same issue: If we could change our sexual orientation/identity, do we have a right to make that choice? This is the important issue.

The purpose of the “ex-gay” ad campaign (and the public focus on whether gays can change) is to undermine the central claim of the gay/lesbian rights movement that people are born gay or lesbian and that it is not a choice since no one can change their sexual orientation. The religious right is exploiting an opportunity handed to them by the misguided strategy of the liberal/mainstream gay movement.

We should focus the political debate on the freedom of people to be gay, lesbian or bisexual regardless of how or why they arrive at their sexual identity, not wasting time on the futile “nature vs. nurture” debate.

The argument for “gay rights” should not be based on questionable scientific claims of the biological immutability of  “sexual orientation” but rather on the right of gays and lesbians to CHOOSE their sexual identity! This argument sets aside the biological argument and bases gay rights upon the constitutional right to speak and the freedom of conscience guaranteed to religious groups.

Our right to be gay or lesbian or bisexual is the right to be free from religious and government interference in our private lives, to make our choices about who we have sex with and who we want to have intimate relationships with (as long as they are consenting adults). Let’s not let those opposed to sexual equality take away our right to choose.

To be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or straight involves making a series of choices. Those choices should be a right like any other basic human right and not dependent upon scientific opinion about how and why a person arrives at their sexual identity. Let’s defend the freedom to choose our sexual identity and quit hiding behind questionable scientific dogma.

Jim Maynard is a local gay activist. This piece is a modified and abbreviated version of a longer essay.