The campaign against gays is really a campaign against modern American society and against the freer women and men who populate and struggle in it. Gay rights attempts to structure that freedom with fairness so that we can get on with the business of building real and stable lives for all the different kinds of people and families inhabiting this country. Fairness is what this is about - not the sanctity of marriage or the "promotion" of homosexuality, but fairness.
American writer
What we do want is equal protection of the laws and all that implies, and we want our fellow citizens to acknowledge that our constitutionally protected choices about what is, after all, our own business should not disqualify us from equal membership in the multitude of American communities. We ask and deserve that our fellow citizens recognize our existence and accept us into the common life. This is neither begging for acceptance nor looking for approval. It is the corollary of the Bill of Rights that creates a nation of equals, equally free. The constitutional protections we are entitled to must go along with the effort to educate nongay Americans out of their hostile conditioning. Again, this is not to win approval, but to change perceptions enough to prevent majority prejudices from being acted out against us. In the end, acceptance does matter - acceptance not of the way other people live their lives, but of their right to live them. Stated generally, what gays and lesbians want is not very different from what most Americans want: to live as little disturbed by government as possible but secure in the knowledge that social institutions will serve them equally and that laws affecting them will be enforced fairly. We are demanding our basic rights, rights that Americans are not supposed to be deprived of without due process of law and that are nevertheless denied us, without due process, as a matter of routine. It would be nice if our families, friends, neighbours, leaders, and other fellow citizens could just get over their prejudices about us. It is really difficult sometimes to see what in the lives we lead should be a source of such interest to so many people. At the very least, public institutions should treat gay and lesbian Americans and their lives with the same respect they give heterosexual Americans. People's inclinations, orientation, preference, nature, and private lives should be respected, unless it can be shown that some harm to the public interest would result. This is the principle of equal protection under the law.
For many years, the single most potent weapon in the armoury of invisibility was the shame with which gay men and women were taught to regard their sexual nature. What kindles the fury of the antigay right at the gay and lesbian claim to equality and freedom is the implicit rejection of that shame. The energy released by that triumph over shame is what makes the movement so powerful. The gay and lesbian movement signals the existence of a people who have decided that they know more about themselves than what has been shoved down their throats by an ignorant and fearful society.
The emergence of an openly gay and lesbian population is simply the latest stage of the evolution of individual liberty, and a reaffirmation of American tradition. Gay men and women don't come out because it's fashionable, popular, easy, safe, mandatory, or conventional; they do it to be true to themselves.
The religious right is a counterrevolutionary movement whose purpose is to return society, and the individuals who make up society, to the social understanding and the roles that existed in the 1950s. In fact the religious right is a group of mail-order wizards and lobbyists tied to religious "media personalities" who spend millions to raise millions with the twin object of advancing their own social and political agendas and enriching themselves and their organizations. Acting out one's hatred of homosexuals is acceptable behaviour in the world of the religious right. Perpetrators of hate crimes against gays routinely cite religious reasons for their hatred of gays. Most of the hate mail we get cites religious justifications for the hate. The religious right rejects cultural pluralism and it rejects individualism. It sees its opponents not as fellow Americans presenting alternative views of what American society might look like; it sees them as conscripts in the army of Satan. The religious right aims to convert traditional principles of toleration and personal liberty to Bible-based precepts of "revealed" behaviour and comprehensive social order - "revealed", that is, to a few preachers and evangelists, and to their strategists, fund-raisers, and media advisers. There is no doubt that the evangelical attack on gay and lesbian rights is part of a broader strategy to impose specifically religious values on American politics and American bodies. Gays and lesbians make an ideal target for an evangelical coup because of the persistent fear and hatred of homosexuality in our culture. The Reverend Mel White bears important direct witness about the motives and purposes of his onetime associates: "These guys are not interested in biblical truth. They are only interested in proving through their interpretations of the text, their own prejudice." The religious right has discovered homosexuality as a marketing tool, and we may expect them to feature it, partly to intimidate homosexuals but principally to scare the freedom out of everyone. The aim of the religious right is to terrify people with the spectre of predatory homosexuality in order to assert control over public morality. Plainly, such an apocalyptic approach to social issues is principled in its unsusceptibility to reason and compromise, the basic tools of democracies; in this respect, the ideology of the religious right is profoundly antidemocratic. Such paranoic politics represent a grave danger to the Constitution and the society it informs.
In a pluralist society, people act according to their own views of right and wrong, except where their actions violate agreed-upon criminal codes. This moral diversity is precisely what the religious right objects to; rather than seek to persuade nonbelievers of its version of the truth, it would simply impose that version on them. Religion enjoys freedom, not a licence to interfere with other people's freedom. The religious right's complaint that Christian values have been left out of public discourse reveals either a basic misunderstanding of our constitutional system or an equally basic disregard for its principles and workings. Religious-based values are not banned from the public arena, but they are not vested with any greater moral force than competing viewpoints, nor are they exempt from rational examination simply because they originate in someone's notion of the divine. The religious origin of opinion does not, in our system, give the opinion any special status in public debate. In a contest between individual freedom and particular religious views, individual freedom must be preferred because it and its corollary, equal protection of the laws, are what the American constitutional system holds sacred. Scriptural views are not exempt from dispute and have no special status within our constitutional framework.
The common experience of being gay is deeply individual. You discover your sexual identity yourself, your closet is your own, your coming out is individual. Coming out represents a decision to transform one's life from the inside out, choosing the natural over the conventional at great personal cost. The process of coming out is harrowing, but it can leave in its wake an unshakable core of certainty of self. Coming out is more than an acknowledgement, acceptance, or even announcement of one's sexual identity. It represents a continuing process founded on an act of compassion towards oneself - a compassion, alas, seldom shown by one's own family or friends, let alone society. That act is the acceptance of one's fundamental worth, including, and not despite, one's homosexuality, in the face of social condemnation and likely persecution. Coming out is the process through which one arrives at one's values the hard way, testing them against what one knows to be true about oneself. Gay men and lesbians must think about family, morality, nature, choice, freedom, and responsibility in ways most people never have to. Truly to come out, a gay person must become one of those human beings who, as psychiatrist Alice Miller writes, "wants to be true to themselves". Each gay man and woman has to come to terms with his or her homosexuality, decide whether to accept it, deny it, or try to change it, and face the consequences of the choice.