by Dan Savage
No, NOM fights same-sex marriage. Period.2
Brown is NOM’s second president, after Gallagher, and he earns more than 500,000 dollars a year defending “traditional marriage.”3 Born and raised in California, Brown got his undergraduate degree at Whittier College, and then went on to study philosophy at Oxford. While at Oxford, Brown, who had been raised a Quaker, converted to Catholicism. In a blowjob in The Washington Post—excuse me, in a profile in The Washington Post in August of 2009—Brown claimed that he was attracted to “Catholicism’s traditions of social justice and work for the poor.” (Quakers, as everyone knows, roam the streets after their meetings setting homeless people on fire.) Despite his stated reasons for converting, Brown has never worked to advance social justice or alleviate the suffering of the poor. He’s held just one job prior to taking a position with NOM: at the Family Institute of Connecticut, where Brown fought to keep condoms out of schools. (Working to drive up the rate of sexually transmitted infections among teenagers ≠ social justice.)
Brown has a stocky build and a large, square head. He has a vulpine smile and tends to shout when he speaks. After making a bigoted statement, Brown has a revealing habit of shifting his gaze to the left and then the right with a look on his face that is equal parts aggression and insecurity.
“You know I’m right about this,” the look on his face says. “And I am right about this—right?”
Brown’s demagoguery on the issue of marriage equality is sometimes breathtaking. Under Brown’s leadership, NOM has linked—or has attempted to link—marriage rights for same-sex couples to child rape and crafted a plan to “drive a wedge between gays and blacks,” according to internal NOM memos obtained by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). (“One of NOM’s goals is ‘fanning the hostility’ between the LGBT community and the black community,” HRC’s report on the memos read.) NOM under Brown has skirted campaign finance disclosure laws, misrepresented attendance at their rallies (the organization got caught claiming that a photo of a 2008 Obama rally was a photo of a 2011 NOM rally), and—discredit where discredit is due—led successful campaigns to ban same-sex marriage in numerous states. A NOM-backed organization recently warned parents against allowing their college-age children to have gay friends.
Brown may be the most loathed anti-gay activist in the United States. Not for nothing did prominent gay blogger Joe Jervis dub him “Brian Brownshirt.”
Even John Corvino, perhaps the nicest, calmest, and most measured advocate of marriage equality in the United States, has a hard time concealing his dislike of Brown. Corvino, a gay man in a long-term relationship (and a professor of philosophy at Wayne State University), coauthored the book Debating Same-Sex Marriage with NOM’s Maggie Gallagher. Corvino tells me he likes Gallagher personally, even if he finds her political views objectionable. He can’t say the same about Brown.
“I have a kind of visceral negative reaction to Brian Brown that I don’t have to Maggie,” Corvino wrote in an e-mail. “Of course, I have a personal relationship with Maggie, whereas I hardly know Brian. But something about him just rubs me the wrong way, beyond the fact that I sharply disagree with his moral stance and his politics.”
So, yeah, Brian Brown isn’t exactly a friend of the family. So how did he wind up coming to our house for dinner, along with a four-person camera crew and Mark Oppenheimer, the religion columnist for The New York Times?
It’s a long story.
In October of 2011 the local chair of the Washington Journalism Education Association sent me an e-mail begging me to give the keynote speech at the 2012 National High School Journalism Convention. (I’m not going to give his name here, as he’s doubtless suffered enough, so I’ll just use his initials.) S.M. had e-mailed me three times already, and left a couple of phone messages, yet I had somehow missed his earlier e-mails and calls. But I got his third e-mail and it worked like a charm: “I feel like we are on a first-name basis already since, starting last August, I have sent you three e-mails and made two phone calls to get in touch with you,” S.M. wrote. “In a few days I need to sign a keynote speaker for our high school journalism convention. I had hoped that speaking to 4,000 teenagers might interest you, given your awesome work with the It Gets Better Project. Maybe not. After all, the pay stinks—it’s all but a volunteer gig. It probably won’t get a lot of national attention.”
Here’s a tip: Want me to show up at your event and give a speech? Insinuate that I’m only interested in money (“the pay stinks”), lay a guilt trip on me (“I had hoped that speaking to 4,000 teenagers might interest you”), and suggest that I’m a media whore (“probably won’t get a lot of national attention”), and I am so there. I wrote S.M. back and told him I’d give the keynote—and hey, the convention was taking place in Seattle, just a few blocks from my office, so no need to send a car, much less pay me. I offered to walk down.
But the speech I gave before four thousand high school journalists at the Washington State Convention Center on Friday, April 13, wound up getting a little national attention.
ANTI-BULLYING SPEAKER CURSES CHRISTIAN TEENS (Fox News)
DAN SAVAGE STANDS BY COMMENTS ON “BULLS**T IN THE BIBLE” (CNN)
“IT GETS BETTER” CREATOR OFFENDS CHRISTIAN STUDENTS (The Huffington Post)
SPARKS FLY OVER DAN SAVAGE’S COMMENTS TO STUDENTS ABOUT BIBLE (The Seattle Times)
DAN SAVAGE OFFENDS WITH COMMENTS ON CHRISTIANITY (The Washington Post)
DAN SAVAGE ACCUSED OF BULLYING (New York Daily News)
CHRISTIANS: SAVAGELY BULLIED (Townhall.com)
DAN SAVAGE VS. THE BIBLE (The Atlantic)
ANTI-BULLYING TZAR BULLIES CHRISTIANS (The American Catholic)
PARENT OF KIDS WHO WALKED OUT ON SAVAGE: “WHAT A PIG” (Breitbart News)
DAN SAVAGE IS A BAD, BAD MAN (Wonkette.com)
Before I gave the speech, I asked my handlers from the National Scholastic Press Association and Journalism Education Association if they wanted me to pull my punches. Despite the It Gets Better Project’s touchy-feely-up-with-people aura, the project is an act of cultural defiance. The It Gets Better Project is about LGBT adults talking to and talking with isolated and bullied LGBT youth—whether their parents, preachers, and teachers want us to or not. (Not all LGBT youth are bullied or isolated, for the record. The project, however, is targeted at LGBT youth who are bullied and isolated.) I warned the organizers that my remarks about the project can be confrontational, even aggressive—like the project itself. I don’t just talk about how it gets better. I talk about who is making it worse and why they’re making it worse. I was told not to dial it back for the students. They didn’t want me to patronize their student journalists.
So I delivered my usual It Gets Better remarks. Those remarks include a section on the role religious bigotry plays—and the role certain passages from the Old and New Testaments play—in the bullying of LGBT children by their peers and, most destructively of all, by their own parents. When I first mentioned the Bible, a small number of students rose from their seats and started to walk out. When I got to the end of my remarks on religion, I invited the students who’d walked out to come back in. (Fun fact: The hall in which I was speaking was so large—there were four thousand students within its walls—that I had concluded my remarks on religion before anyone had managed to get all the way out of the room.)
More than a month after the event a video of my remarks was released. It wasn’t the entire speech. Here’s a complete transcript of the video:
The Bible. We’ll just talk about the Bible for a second. People often [claim] that they can’t help it. They can’t help with the anti-gay bullying because it says right there in Leviticus, it says right there in Timothy, it says right there in Romans that being gay is wrong. We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people the same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. We ignore bullshit
in the Bible about all sorts of things. The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads during the Civil War. And justified it. The shortest book in the New Testament is a letter from Paul to a Christian slave owner about owning his Christian slave. And Paul doesn’t say, “Christians don’t own people.” Paul talks about how Christians own people. We ignore what the Bible says about slavery because the Bible got slavery wrong. Sam Harris in his book Letter to a Christian Nation points out that the Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong: slavery. What are the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong? One hundred percent. The Bible says that if your daughter’s not a virgin on her wedding night, if a woman isn’t a virgin on her wedding night, she shall be dragged to her father’s doorstep and stoned to death. Callista Gingrich lives. And there is no effort to amend state constitutions to make it legal to stone women to death on their wedding night if they’re not virgins. [LGBT youth] are dying because people can’t clear this one last hurdle. They can’t get past this one last thing in the Bible: about homosexuality. One last thing I want to talk about is—so you can tell the Bible guys in the hall they can come back now because I’m done beating up the Bible. It’s funny to me, as someone who is on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible, how pansy-ass some people react when you push back. I apologize if I hurt anyone’s feelings, but I have a right to defend myself and to point out the hypocrisy of people who justify anti-gay bigotry by pointing to the Bible and insisting we must live by the code of Leviticus on this one issue and no other.
Okay, I could’ve said that better. I usually do say that better—I’ve given many talks about the It Gets Better Project—but I was honestly a little flummoxed when those students began to walk out. That had never happened before.
Presumably the person or group that taped my speech didn’t just capture those remarks. They got the whole speech on tape. But for some reason they didn’t release any of the other remarks I made about the Bible. So no one besides the four thousand students in the Washington State Convention Center that Friday the thirteenth got to hear me praise the activism of progressive and liberal Christians, or acknowledge the moral truths that can be found in the Bible. Nor did they hear me say that the Christian Bible can be read—and, in my opinion, should be read—as a journey from the harsher laws of the Old Testament (a proclivity for the stoning of disobedient children) to the more “Golden Rule” ethos of the New Testament. (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”) Though, it should be noted that the Golden Rule does appear in the Old Testament, in our old friend Leviticus, of all places.
If I may quickly dispose of a few falsehoods spread by Fox News and various right-wing blogs in the wake of Bullshitgate: I was speaking at a journalism conference, not a conference on bullying. (The theme of this conference? “Journalism on the Edge.”)4 I wasn’t speaking at a high school. I wasn’t speaking at a Christian high school. I’ve never met the president and I am not now, nor have I ever been, Barack Obama’s “bullying tzar.” I did not blindside the organizers. It wasn’t a “mass walkout.” (Unless a staged walkout by .0055 percent of an audience constitutes a “mass walkout.”) I received a standing ovation from the nearly four thousand students who were left in the room, almost all of them Christian, when I finished. And while the organizers of the conference praised the speech at first, telling Fox News that they “appreciated the level of thoughtfulness and deliberation” that went into my speech, they backtracked when the right-wing blogs blew up. (Breitbart.com: JOURNALISM CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS REVERSE COURSE, APOLOGIZE FOR SAVAGE INVITE.) The National Scholastic Press Association and Journalism Education Association accused me of having “veered from the topic” of bullying (sorry, no: religious bigotry is relevant to the topic of anti-gay bullying), “and for this our organizations apologize.” (Real profile in courage there, gang!)
Did I bully anyone? I certainly don’t think so; no one who has ever been the victim of actual bullying would think so. But I’m not an impartial observer. So I’ll let those left-wing radicals at The Economist defend me on that charge:
Bullying is the strong picking on the weak, not the other way around (the other way around is satire). One could make the argument that in the case of Mr Savage’s speech, he was the strong one, and the high-school students were “victims”, but that would be weak tea indeed. Mr Savage is one person, not a movement, and of course those students whom he gave the vapours were free to leave. Not everyone has such freedom. Gay teens, not Christian teens, kill themselves at higher rates than the general populace. Nobody calls Christianity an abomination. One blogger accused Mr Savage of “Christian-bashing” for pointing out the Bible’s position on slavery. A writer for a Focus on the Family site said that “using profanity to deride the Bible…is obviously a form of bullying and name-calling.” In fact it is neither: Mr Savage, however intemperate his language, was arguing, not name-calling. That is a crucial distinction, and one that too often eludes the showily devout.
Whatever else Brian Brown is, he’s a media-savvy guy. When Brown saw me being attacked on Fox News and right-wing blogs, he sensed an opportunity.
“Let me lay down a public challenge to Dan Savage right here and now: You want to savage the Bible? Christian morality? Traditional marriage? The Pope?”5 Brown wrote in a post on NOM’s blog. “You name the time and the place and let’s see what a big man you are in a debate with someone who can talk back!”
Debate Brian Brown? And I get to name the time and place?
Well, that was a tempting offer—in fact, it seemed like an offer that was designed to tempt.
It didn’t take me long to figure out what Brown was tempting me to do: He wanted me to accept his offer, pack an auditorium with angry gays and lesbians, and “debate” him in front of a booing, hissing crowd that wouldn’t let him get a word in edgewise. Being silenced by a hostile crowd would play into the narrative being pushed by NOM and the rest of the anti-gay right: They’re the real victims! By refusing to tolerate their intolerance, LGBT people are oppressing them. Because LGBT people refuse to tolerate being called sick and sinful and perverse, because we refuse to tolerate second-class citizenship, because we refuse to tolerate the bullying of LGBT children in their homes, schools, and churches, they’re the real victims of intolerance! I don’t think Brown really wanted to debate me. He wanted to stride into a coliseum filled with angry LGBT people. He wanted to be shouted down. Then Brown could upload the video of the aborted debate to YouTube and say, “See?!? They’re the intolerant ones! We’re the real victims!”
Yeah, right. Gay men are turned away from their partners’ bedsides during medical emergencies as a direct result of Brown’s activism, lesbian widows are losing their homes after losing their wives as a direct result of Brown’s activism, but somehow Brian Brown is the one who’s being persecuted. (It reminds me of a great political cartoon by Mike Ritter: A priest is nailing a young man wearing jeans and an “LGBT Civil Rights” T-shirt to a cross in front of an angry mob. “Quit squirming,” the exasperated priest says. “You’re oppressing our religious freedom!”)
I can be stupid. I’ve certainly done stupid things. (Using the word bullshit at a high school journalism conference, even one “on the edge”? That was stupid.) And I’m probably going to get stupider now that marijuana is legal for recreational use in Washington State. But I’m not that stupid.
I responded to Brown’s challenge on my podcast. “Sure, Brian, let’s debate!”—and then I named the place and time: my house, after dinner.
Here’s the deal. We can fill a room with my screaming partisans…but that will create more heat than light. So what I’d like to do is challenge you to come to my house for dinner. Bring the wife. My husband will be there. I’ll hire a video crew and we’ll videotape an after-dinner debate and post the whole debate to YouTube. The trick here is you have to acknowledge my humanity by accepting my hospital
ity, and I have to acknowledge yours by extending my hospitality to you.
Honestly I thought Brown would view my counteroffer as a trap—which is exactly what it was—and back out. (“I challenged you to a debate, Dan Savage, not a double date!”) Brown even had a perfectly legitimate reason to back out: His wife was pregnant with their eighth child, and the only date that worked for Brown’s schedule and mine was close to his wife’s due date. But Brown accepted and after a back-and-forth about details, the debate was on. (Those details: Brown, fearing “creative editing,” wanted to bring his own camera crew. Savage, fearing NOM staffers roaming around his house while he was trapped at the dining room table, said no way. Brown dropped his demand for his own camera crew after our moderator—Mark Oppenheimer of The New York Times, who had written profiles of me for the paper’s magazine and of Maggie Gallagher for Salon—offered to hire the video crew, oversee the edit, and upload the video himself.) We both agreed to keep the date of the debate secret to prevent protesters—pro-gay or anti-gay—from turning up at my house on the day of the debate: August 15, 2012. There was just one last detail to attend to…
Someone needed to tell Terry that Brian Brown was coming to dinner.
The Dinner Table Debate, as it was dubbed by bloggers on both sides, was something I should’ve cleared with Terry first, seeing as it’s his dinner table too. But I honestly didn’t think Brown would accept and so, you know, why make Terry mad and have a big fight about something that probably wasn’t going to happen anyway?
And I knew Terry would explode when I told him the news. And my husband—like a lot of people’s husbands (including my husband’s husband [follow that?])—is scary when he’s mad. And if there’s one thing Terry hates, it’s having to be civil to people who view him as sick and sinful and perverted and covered with poop.6 While I enjoy arguing with anti-gay bigots, Terry, who grew up in Spokane, Washington, has a low threshold for hatred in faith drag. He had his fill of anti-gay bigots—and black eyes—as a teenager. He would sooner jump in a swimming pool filled with stale piss than attend CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference), the annual meeting of far-right-wing political hacks, religious fascists, and Republican presidential hopefuls. Me? I’ve been to CPAC twice and I would go every year if we lived in Washington, DC. (I’m surprised more Democrats don’t go to CPAC. It’s like watching the Republican Party lie down in a bathtub, slice open a vein, and drain itself of whatever support it might have among women, gays, Jews, immigrants, Hispanics, and scientists.)