Defending the Undefendable II: Freedom in All Realms

20.

THE HOMOPHOBE

In October 1983, an appellate court in Los Angeles ruled that the Boy Scouts of America could not discriminate against homosexual Scout leaders.

This decision was widely hailed as a victory for civil rights by homosexual groups, by “human rights” associations—and by the homosexual Scout leader in question. Said the assistant Scoutmaster one Timothy Curran, “I’m very surprised and pleased with this court decision. I think the Boy Scouts will have a very hard time proving I’m immoral in a trial.”

Mr. Curran, who was twenty-one years of age at the time his case was heard, was also a senior majoring in English literature at the University of California at Berkeley. He was the assistant Scoutmaster of Troop 37 of the Mount Diablo council. But he was dismissed from his post when the council learned of his sexual preferences. In the view of the Boy Scout leaders in charge, even though Curran had attained the highest rank of Eagle Scout and was one of the most highly motivated scouts in the organization, a homosexual was not considered a good role model for the young boys in the troop.

Now, there are two schools of thought on the question of discrimination. According to one, that which is beloved of the “human rights” activists, discrimination is always and ever wrong, pure and simple. In this view, the California appeals court was quite correct in upholding the right of the homosexual, Timothy Curran, to maintain his position as an assistant scoutmaster. Troop 37 had discriminated against him and had to be stopped from such an egregious practice.

There is a logical difficulty with this view, however. For Curran himself, as a practicing homosexual, discriminates against all women as romantic attachments. The “human rights” movement is logically inconsistent here. It cannot, in the name of supporting anti-discrimination, take the part of a homosexual, a self-confessed discriminator if ever there was one. Rather, if it wished to be logically consistent, this movement should confine itself to championing the rights of bisexuals, people who will form romantic relationships with members of either sex. Only they are the true non-discriminators in sexual matters.

But we all discriminate on some grounds. We do so on the basis of honesty or beauty or talent or common interests or what have you. Even bisexuals are guilty of these practices. So it is entirely impossible to consistently adopt a policy of anti-discrimination.

In March 1998, the California Supreme Court reversed the appellate court’s decision, ruling that the Boy Scouts has the right to exclude homosexuals from its ranks. Two years later, in June 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a New Jersey Supreme Court ruling, in a case very similar to Timothy Curran’s, that the dismissal of a gay Scout leader had been illegal under the state’s anti-discrimination law. This is good news for the Boy Scouts, for if the California appellate court’s decision had been upheld at the highest level, the organization would have been doomed. How many heterosexual parents would want to entrust their young boys to the tutelage of homosexual Scout leaders?

A similar situation exists for the Big Brothers of Greater Los Angeles, the organization dedicated to matching fatherless boys with adult males who can guide, counsel, and advise them. At around the same time young Timothy Curran was taking the Boy Scouts to court in Los Angeles, the Big Brothers were named as defendant in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. Their sin against the “human rights” philosophy? They had had the temerity to exclude homosexuals and bisexuals, on the ground that they would be improper role models for young boys. The ACLU sued in order to end an act of blatant discrimination against its client, one Richard Stanley, an avowed bisexual.

Make no mistake about it. If litigants like Mr. Stanley and the ACLU prevail in cases of this kind, it will spell the death knell for groups such as Big Brothers. If these organizations can no longer guarantee the female heads of single-parent families that their sons will not be placed in an intimate situation with adult male homosexuals or bisexuals, they will soon enough be unwilling to have anything to do with the program.

But do not homosexual and bisexual men have the “right” not to be discriminated against in this matter? That is, do they not have the “right” to have innocent young boys placed in their tender care, against the wishes of their parents or guardians if need be? Even to ask such a question is to see the utter ludicrousness of it. No one has the “right” to impose himself on an unwilling victim. If anything, the bisexual man has more of a “right” to enter into a dating relationship with the boy’s mother, against her will, than into a Big Brother relationship with her son, without her permission. For at least she is an adult; her son is not. And of course, no man, of whatever sexual preference or practice, has a “right” to utilize the law of the land to force a woman to enter into a relationship with him. Even less so, then, can he properly use the courts to become Big Brother to her young son.

And this has nothing to do with the question of whether or not the homosexual or bisexual will use his Big Brother status to seduce the youngster. Rape, and other abuse of position, is certainly not unknown in the heterosexual world. Our conclusion follows solely from the fact that in a free society all relationships should be based on mutual consent. Every person thus has the right to ignore or boycott or discriminate against those whom he would rather avoid. This emphatically includes the many individuals and private organizations, such as the United Way and various corporate and charitable foundations, that have withdrawn their financial support from the Boy Scouts in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling. And in turn, those of us who favor the right of the Boy Scouts and other such groups to discriminate against homosexual leaders should be free to boycott the United Way.

In the society we live in, however, our right to discriminate against those we would rather avoid is not protected by government; in fact, one can be punished by the state for exercising that right. If the case of the Salvation Army may be taken as illustrative, one can be punished for far less than actually engaging in unlawful discrimination.

The Salvation Army found itself in hot water in New York City. The municipal government was threatening to renege on $5 million dollars worth of contracts already signed with Sally Ann, mainly to manage daycare and senior citizens’ centers. The Big Apple’s complaint? The Salvation Army had refused to sign a pledge saying it does not discriminate against homosexuals.

According to Salvation Army Lieutenant Colonel Roland Schram, his organization did not want to discriminate against homosexuals in its employment practices. However, as a fundamentalist Christian group, it takes a strong pro-family-life position and doesn’t want to be seen as—or actually be guilty of—undermining the institution of the family.

But discrimination is discrimination, no matter what the motive in any particular case. And the Salvation Army’s hiring practices had run afoul of New York City’s Human Rights legislation, which bans discrimination against homosexuals and numerous other groups of people. In the years since, Sally Ann has found herself in similar trouble on the West Coast and elsewhere in the United States. So the real question is: Does the Salvation Army, or anyone else for that matter, have a right to discriminate against homosexuals?

If they don’t, what becomes of the human right to religious freedom? Do not fundamentalist Christians have the right to practice their calling according to their own principles? The $5 million contract in New York City is only the tip of the iceberg. More to the point, the Salvation Army and other religious groups, such as the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Jews, are guilty of violating the human rights proscription of discrimination against homosexuals in hiring. For none of them will ordain homosexuals as ministers or rabbis. Should the general of the Salvation Army, along with the pope, the cardinals, the bishops and the rabbis, be sent to jail? Hardly. Yet this is the logical implication of our extremist, hysterical and ill-founded human rights legislation.

Let us consider one last example of “human rights” riding roughshod over the human right of free association. The online dating service e-Harmony was started in 2000 by Dr. Neil Clark Warren, a clinical psychologist and former dean at Fuller Theological Seminary. He launched this company in an explicit attempt to promote his religious and pro-family philosophy by encouraging marriages for single males and females. In 2008, very much against its will, it agreed to settle a lawsuit brought against it by New Jersey’s Civil Rights Division. It did so by launching a new dating website for homosexuals. To add insult to injury, in 2010 it was again forced to undertake another initiative: to bring together under one roof its previously separate heterosexual and homosexual websites and to better promote the latter. We have gone from an era when gays were (totally unjustifiably) brutalized, to one where they had as many rights, no more, no fewer, as anyone else, to the modern epoch where they are allowed to rend asunder the institutions of other people who are themselves innocent of any real crime.

All of this has been accomplished under the banner of nondiscrimination. But this legal philosophy is dead from the neck up. Even its advocates do not take it seriously. If they did, this law would not be applied so haphazardly, and, yes, discriminatorily. For example, if a Chinese restaurant were to ban Jews from entry, this would be summarily brought to a halt by our forces of law and order. If a Jewish eating establishment refused to serve Chinese people, the same fate would befall them. But, if Jewish diners refused to patronize Chinese restaurants, even kosher ones, and Chinese people declined to eat at delicatessens, both sets of vicious and blatant discriminators would escape scot-free from the clutches of our politically correct policemen. Why impose this law on eateries, but not customers?

Similarly, there is simply no justification for imposing these draconian interferences with the right of free association on people in their commercial roles, but not in their private lives. There is simply no case for forcing people to associate with one another against their will in business, but not in other aspects of life. For example, if it is against “human rights” to discriminate against others in hiring, university admissions and “public” accommodation such as restaurants and stores, why not, also, with regard to friendship and marriage? Should we not have compulsory mixed marriages? Of course, no one, that is, no one, advocates any such thing, even the most fervent supporters of “human rights.” Why ever not, hypocrites?