Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush have just given us an interesting insight into where the Republican party is headed. Romney’s position on marriage rights has always been that gays should have none; he supported a state amendment that would have granted them civil unions instead. But his party’s base is insistent that gays get nothing whatever, that they be kept shut out of the family and of any legal protections for their relationships. So he now backs a referendum that would ban marriage and civil unions – timed for the next presidential election year. Meanwhile, Jeb Bush, having been humiliated by the autopsy into Terri Schiavo’s death, wants to re-open ancient arguments about Michael Schiavo’s actions the night he found his wife unconscious. Has he lost all sense of perspective? The sheer immoderation of these people is staggering. But their base is adamant. They are now using arguments about gays – that they are diseased, and spread literal and figurative poison througout society – that were once echoed almost exactly by the most vicious anti-Semites against Jews:
Their passion comes from their conviction that homosexuality is a sin, is immoral, harms children and spreads disease. Not only that, but they see homosexuality itself as a kind of disease, one that afflicts not only individuals but also society at large and that shares one of the prominent features of a disease: it seeks to spread itself.
Ah, yes. The danger of the Jews/Gays spreading their disease throughout society, their enormous power despite tiny numbers, their ability to pass, their threat to children, their flaunting of their disagreement with the New Testament. It’s all so familiar. I think the arguments now made by some Christianists are replicas of the old anti-Semitism, peddled by so many Christians in the past: that Jews are to be loved, but loving them is dependent on their conversion to Christianity; that you can love individual Jews while disdaining Judaism; that Jews’ stubbornness in resisting conversion is evidence of their inherent evil; that such evil, at some point, has to be segregated from mainstream society as much as possible. Gays are not the new blacks. They’re the new Jews. And the Church, in both Catholic and Protestant variants, is dredging up its old anti-Semitism in new guises. The GOP is along for the ride.
The Dish 