by Dan Savage
The conversation went like this:
“Guess who’s coming to dinner?” (Because how often do you get to say that?)
“Tell me.” (Terry doesn’t play games, guessing or otherwise.)
“Brian Brown from the National Organization for Marr—”
BOOM.
Now some reading this are probably thinking, “I would’ve liked to have been a fly on the wall when Dan told Terry that Brian Brown was coming to dinner!” No, you wouldn’t have. My eardrums barely survived the volume at which Terry screamed, “WHO?!? WHY?!? WHEN?!?” If there were any flies on our walls—if there were any flies within earshot—the shock wave struck them dead.
Breaking the news to D.J. was a little easier. When our son—adopted at birth by two gay men—was informed that the nation’s most prominent anti-gay activist was coming to dinner, D.J. shrugged and said, “Whatever.” (A three-syllable response from our teenage son? A small triumph.) D.J.’s only objection: The Dinner Table Debate doubled the number of times he would have to wear a collared shirt in a single calendar year—once for his annual picture with Santa, and once during dinner with Brian Brown. (IT WASN’T FAIR! STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! SLAM!)
It was Terry who recognized that our preparations for Brown’s arrival mirrored our Christmas routine. We were stocking up on wine, planning out a menu, and cleaning the house from top to bottom. In addition to the film crew, a photographer from The New York Times was coming. We dusted the fucking baseboards.
“Worst Christmas ever,” Terry said, as I was mopping the kitchen floor the morning of the debate. “Ho, ho, ho. It’s Bigot Christmas.”7
Since Brown uses the Bible to defend his opposition to marriage equality, and since it was my remarks about the Bible that led Brown to challenge me to debate the Bible with him, let’s go back to the high school journalism conference for a second—the walkout and the fallout.
After watching the video I apologized for describing the walkout as a “pansy-ass” move. I wasn’t calling the handful of students who walked out pansies; I was describing the walkout itself as a pansy-assed thing to do. But that’s a distinction without a difference—like that “love the sinner, hate the sin” line. Fundamentalist Christians who don’t enjoy being thought of as hateful are often shocked when their gay friends and family members are upset by their “compassionate” attempt to make a distinction between a gay person (lovable!) and a gay person’s emotional and sexual connection with another human being (hateful!). But gay people feel insulted by “love the sinner, hate the sin” because it is insulting. Likewise, I recognize that my use of “pansy-ass” to describe the walkout was insulting. And I apologized for it. But I didn’t apologize for saying that there was “bullshit in the Bible” then, and I’m not going to apologize now. Because guess what? There’s bullshit in the Bible.
Merriam-Webster defines “bullshit” as “untrue words or ideas.” And I’m sorry to say—no, wait: I’m not sorry to say—there are untrue words or ideas in the Bible.
The bullshit artists on Fox News accused me of saying that Christianity itself was bullshit. But I didn’t attack Christianity, the faith in which I was raised. I attacked the argument that gay people must be discriminated against because it says right here in the Bible that homosexuality is an abomination. I attacked the argument that efforts to address anti-gay bullying in schools must be blocked, or exceptions must be made for teenage bullies who are “motivated by faith,” as lawmakers have proposed in numerous Southern states, because it says right here in the Bible that homosexuality is an abomination. I used colorful and, yes, inappropriate language to point out that the same people who claim they can’t ignore what the Bible says about homosexuality—or what the Bible seems to say8—somehow manage to ignore what the Bible says about a great deal else, from menstruation to masturbation, from circumcision to slavery. I was not attacking Christianity. I was attacking hypocrisy.
Here’s a much more famous—and, yes, much more talented—American writer on the subject of the Bible:
It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.
I’m not guilty of saying anything that Mark Twain didn’t say a hundred years earlier and a hundred times better. For what, in contemporary vernacular, is “bullshit” but “upwards of a thousand lies”?
I’ll give this to Fox News: They sure know how to blow up a guy’s Twitter feed and e-mail in-box.9 Elderly people who enjoy feeling outraged tune in to Fox News for stuff to feel outraged about—it’s that or get a pacemaker installed (average age of Fox News viewer: sixty-five)—and I heard from thousands of them over the course of a couple days.
John “Reagan Conservative” Mac isn’t someone I know personally; he’s just another TCOT—“True Conservative on Twitter”—bravely battling the forces of liberalism and secularism. I don’t usually get into arguments with Twitter trolls. But Mac sent me that tweet two minutes before this e-mail popped into my in-box: “God is not mocked! So mock on. You will soon see Who has the last laugh. Hear the Word of the Lord: Leviticus 20:13: ‘If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.’ Mock on, pervert. This is your time. Enjoy it. It is brief.”
So you see, John Mac, the Old Testament is germane.
Anti-gay Christian hypocrites—for the record: Not all Christians are anti-gay, not all Christians are hypocrites—are constantly citing passages from the Old Testament to justify their hatred of LGBT people. We are far likelier to hear about Leviticus 20:13 or Sodom and Gomorrah from an anti-gay bigot than we are to hear about Corinthians or Timothy or Romans. It doesn’t matter if the anti-gay bigot is ranting on the subway, on a “Christian” television network, or during a GOP presidential debate: They’re all citin’ the Old Testament. Even those ADAM AND EVE, NOT ADAM AND STEVE! signs the haters like to wave at anti-gay demonstrations—and I’ve seen plenty of ’em at NOM demonstrations—are a reference to the Old Testament.10
Baptist minister Louie Giglio was invited to give the benediction at Barack Obama’s second inauguration and then quickly dropped from the program after numerous news reports about an anti-gay sermon Giglio delivered in the mid-nineties and still stood by. In the sermon Giglio described gay people as “haters of God,” said that people who engage in gay sex are “worthy of death,” and—inevitably—Giglio cited Leviticus 20:13. Evangelical Christians were outraged, of course, but not at Giglio for citing Leviticus. They were outraged that Giglio would be dropped from the inauguration for calling for the deaths of Neil Patrick Harris, Ellen DeGeneres, and Chris Colfer, among others.
But let a gay person bring up Deuteronomy 22:20–21 and the same people who were citing Leviticus 20:13 a minute ago, or standing silently by while others cited Leviticus 20:13, are suddenly up on their feet, loudly objecting to this spurious reference to the Old Testament. (For those of you who have yet committed the Pentateuch to memory—for shame—Deuteronomy 22:20–21 goes a little something like this: “If there is no proof that his bride was a virgin, the men of the town will take the woman to the door of her father’s house and stone her to death. This woman brought evil into your community by sleeping with someone before she got married, and you must get rid of that evil by killing her.”) Every time a gay person brings up a verse from the Old Testament in self-defense, the John Macs of the world start shouting, “Silly faggot! That stuff about girls being stoned to death on their wedding nights is in the Old Testament! That’s not in the New Testament!”
Neither is the book of Leviticus. So if it isn’t kosher for LGBT people to bring up what the Old Testament says about shellfish or personal grooming or tattoos or menstruation or slavery or stoning women to death for the crime of premarital sex, then it’s not kosher for Christian conservatives to bring up Leviticus or Sodom and Gomorrah or Adam and Eve. B
ut they do bring it up.
All. The. Fucking. Time. They. Bring. It. Up.
And it’s not like they need to. There’s no shortage of anti-gay passages in the New Testament, courtesy of Paul, but no one ever flings Timothy in our faces. And why is that? I have a theory. It’s not because we might like the idea of having Timothy—any Timothy—thrown in our faces. It’s because what the New Testament has to say about homosexuality (“abusers of themselves with mankind will not inherit the Kingdom of God”) isn’t nearly as violent as what the Old Testament has to say about homosexuality (“they shall surely be put to death”). For anti-gay bigots it’s not enough to let God punish us in the afterlife. Many long to murder us here on earth. (Anyone who thinks I’m exaggerating hasn’t been following the news about Uganda’s proposed “kill the gays” law. In December of 2012, the pope granted an audience to Rebecca Kadaga, the Ugandan lawmaker pushing the bill, and offered her his blessing.)
Sorry, John Mac, but people waving Bibles around point to Leviticus every day to justify their hatred of LGBT people. And we have a right to crack open that same Bible and ask…what else is in here?
We have a right to point out the hypocrisy.
And do you know what they call “pointing out the hypocrisy” where I come from?
Calling bullshit.
On the day of the debate—was Bigot Christmas really here at last?—the camera crew showed up first. While the three-person crew rearranged the furniture, set up the lights, and tested the sound equipment, Terry slipped out of the house and went across the street to check on dinner preparations.
Here’s another funny detail about the Dinner Table Debate: One of our neighbors—a straight married guy named John—knew that Brian Brown was coming to dinner before a gay married guy named Terry did.
John Colwell is a stay-at-home dad to four wonderful kids, an absolutely amazing cook, and we count John and his wife Mishy among our best friends. Before I responded to Brown’s debate challenge, I walked across the street and asked John if he would cook dinner if Brown accepted my invitation. John immediately agreed. The only thing John loves more than a dinner party is a good argument—and the only thing he loves more than a good argument is a good shit show.
Now Terry is a great cook—let the record show—but I know my husband. There was no way in hell that he would agree to cook for Brian Brown. In fact, the second fly-on-the-wall-flattening thing Terry shouted after I told him that Brown was coming to dinner was this: “I am NOT cooking for that bastard!”
“You don’t have to,” I said. “John said he would cook.”
“JOHN KNEW ABOUT THIS BEFORE I DID?!?”
Birds fell dead from the sky.
Asking John to cook wasn’t just about sparing Terry from the nightmare of preparing a meal for Brian Brown. The onus was on me to reassure Brown that there would be no shenanigans with the food, and I hoped that knowing the food was being prepared by a fellow traditionally married straight man would calm any fears Brown might have. (Google “Dan Savage” and “Gary Bauer” if you’re curious about why Brown might need a little reassurance on this point. Mea culpa: I behaved terribly in 2000—but, you know, so did the national press corps, George W. Bush, Maureen Dowd, Nader voters, Joe Lieberman during his debate with Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, the Brooks Brothers rioters…)
Mark Oppenheimer showed up next, about an hour before Brown was scheduled to arrive. Mark is an upbeat guy, and he did his best to lighten the mood. But Terry was tense and even I confessed to Mark that I was nervous—and pretty seriously jet-lagged too. Terry and I spent the previous two weeks in Munich and Stockholm, on a long-overdue vacation, and we hadn’t readjusted to Seattle time.
John came over with trays of appetizers and laid them out on the kitchen counter. Terry laid out cocktail fixings. The film crew tested the equipment. The photographer from The New York Times lurked by the living room window, keeping a lookout for Brown.
“Here he comes!”
Brian Brown had arrived. I opened the front door and invited our guest in. Brian handed me a bottle of wine, and we shook hands. I showed Brown to the kitchen and introduced him to Terry and D.J.
Terry made mai tais for everyone—he even made one for Brown, a major concession on Terry’s part—and Mark and Brian and I all carried our drinks out to the backyard, where we sat under an ancient apple tree and made small talk. All of this was less awkward, somehow, than any of us expected it to be. (Credit for that goes to Terry: He makes a wicked mai tai.) Brown was his usual blustery self, but with the debate topic off-limits until after dinner—those were Mark’s rules—we had no choice but to find something else to talk about. Brown and I stumbled, again and again, onto things we had in common: activism, Catholicism, parentism.
John leaned out the back door and announced that dinner was on the table: local wild salmon with sweet corn, heirloom tomatoes, and new-potato gnocchi, followed by roasted peaches with an oat-and-almond crumble for dessert.
The first thing Brown saw when we walked into the dining room was a six-foot-tall plaster statue of Christ. There’s a lot of Catholic kitsch in our dining room—there’s a lot of Catholic kitsch in our living room, kitchen, bathrooms, and bedrooms. Most of the statues, crucifixes, rosaries, saint cards, and hymnals strewn all over our house belonged to my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. Terry and I briefly debated moving all the Catholic kitsch to the basement. We didn’t want Brown to score points by accusing us of being disrespectful. But we decided that while we would clean the house, we weren’t going to scrub it. So instead, I explained to Brown, as he took in one of our larger pieces of kitsch, how I had stepped in to prevent my grandfather’s Giant Plaster Jesus from going to a landfill.
We had agreed that there would be no discussion about the Bible—or about precisely how sinful and perverse gay people are—while D.J., in his collared shirt, sat with us during dinner. So the small talk continued through the meal. We talked about snowboarding (Terry, D.J., and I all snowboard); we talked about surfing (Brown grew up surfing; Terry and D.J. had just learned); we talked about schools and summer vacations.
The dinner dishes were cleared away and Mark reminded us of the rules: I would have twelve uninterrupted minutes to make my case; Brian would have twelve uninterrupted minutes to make his. Then we could argue with each other, with Mark moderating to keep things focused and fair. The cameras would roll for one hour and only one hour.
Terry got up and walked out before the debate started. He had no intention of sitting at the table, or standing in our kitchen, and listening to Brown—or to me, for that matter. Terry doesn’t see his equality—he doesn’t see his humanity—as something that should be up for debate. Not anymore. For Terry, and for millions of other Americans, the debate is over: Human rights are universal, LGBT people are humans, we exist in this universe, and marriage is a human right. The end. Terry waited just long enough for D.J. to get out of his collared shirt, and then bolted from the house. He would pass the hour across the street, at John and Mishy’s house, playing video games with their kids.
If you agree with Terry—the debate is over, LGBT people won, and you can’t stand hearing from bigots—you can skip the debate, just like Terry did, by jumping ahead to page 266.
If you’re the type of person who might enjoy attending CPAC, however, you should definitely keep reading.
Anyone who’s been following the debate over marriage equality closely can predict how things unfolded. When I talked about “freedom,” “equality,” and “justice,” Brown heard “moral chaos,” “persecuting Christians,” and “butt sex.” When Brown talked about “tradition,” “religious freedom,” and “Natural Law,” I heard “anachronism,” “religious bigotry,” and “double standards.”
The formal topic of the debate, which was selected by Mark, was this: “Christianity is bad for LGBT Americans?”
The debate topic implicitly endorsed one of the two big lies pushed by NOM: There are Christians over
here and the gays over there, they are two warring tribes, and a victory for the Gays is a defeat for the Christians and vice versa. In reality most LGBT Americans are Christians, many Christians are gay (Episcopalian Bishop Eugene Robinson comes immediately to mind), and not all straight Christians are anti-gay.
Christianity doesn’t have to be bad for LGBT Americans. But many American Christians choose to be bad for and bad to their fellow citizens who happen to be LGBT. The existence of gay Christians and progressive and tolerant Christians, however, demonstrates that being anti-gay is a choice. No one is born that way. (NOM’s other big lie: You can be for traditional marriage or you can be for gay marriage but you can’t be for both. I’m a big supporter of “traditional” marriage, in the sense that I love and support my friends and family members who are in opposite-sex marriages. There’s nothing Terry and I wouldn’t do for John and Mishy, for example, or our married siblings. If they were in trouble—if their marriages were in trouble—and there was anything we could do to help, we would do it.)