As Evan mentioned last week, Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage Discrimination challenged Dan Savage to a duel in a revealing moment of compensatory bravado. Brown’s challenge, written in a breathless blog post, came in response to a speech Savage made last month to attendees at a high school journalism convention in which he said that the Bible contains “bull***t. . . about gay people.” He noted (correctly) that Christianity’s holy book is chock full of authoritative pronouncements on a plethora of other topics (shellfish, dinner, farming, menstruation, virginity, masturbation. . .) that are emphatically rejected by every person, Christian or otherwise, living in the 21st century as opposed to the Stone Age. Savage also accurately pointed out that turning to the Bible for questions of morality is a dubious exercise at best, due to the fact that the Bible is “a radically pro-slavery document” that “got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong.”
Savage’s point — just in case it isn’t already abundantly obvious — is that it’s absurd to suggest that the Bible is infallible on the issue of homosexuality when it is so demonstrably fallible on a host of other issues. And he made that point, without disrespecting or slandering any religion, by simply describing what the Bible actually says.
According to Brown, though, accurately describing what the Bible says is tantamount to bullying. And he won’t stand for it:
Let me lay down a public challenge to Dan Savage right here and now: You want to savage the Bible? Christian morality? Traditional marriage? Pope Benedict? I’m here, 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. It’s easy to make high-school girls cry by picking on them. Let’s pick on someone our own size!
. . . I’m here, any time, any place you name, Dan Savage. You will find out out how venal and ridiculous your views of these things are if you dare to accept a challenge.
So yeah. Brown is man, hear him roar. Blah blah blah. Incidentally, if you’re currently unoccupied and have a couple minutes to spare, read Brown’s post in its entirety. It’s rather entertaining — what starts off as an indignant letter to NOM’s “marriage supporters” ends up reading, by the time the screed concludes, like a half-hearted mélange of great moments in presidential speeches: “With charity towards all, with malice towards none, we will fight for the right, as God gives us the power to see what’s right. God bless you and may God bless America.” I can’t tell if Brownie intended to re-purpose Lincoln’s Second Inaugural or deliver the State of the Union Address. . .
But anyway, lo and behold, last Friday Savage responded. His message to Brown? It’s on.
I will name the time and the place, per your offer, as soon as possible. Looking forward to it, NOMnuts.
Color me thrilled. As an LGBT activist and media-consuming American, I’ve seen a lot of both Dan Savage and Brian Brown on TV, YouTube, and the like. As such, I’m more than a little surprised that Brown challenged Savage in the first place, since I’m willing to bet NOM’s Bigot-in-Chief would get his you-know-what handed to him in any serious debate. Perhaps Brown, too, recognizes this: as of this writing, he’s made nary a peep in public about Savage accepting his offer. Stay tuned, folks; we’ll see what develops.
Oh, and in case either Dan or Brian happen to be reading: consider this my formal request for two front-row seats. I don’t want to miss a thing.
This ought to be interesting…maybe even entertaining.
Three front row seats.
Evan: WOOT! Road trip!
Since BB said that Dan can pick the venue, I suggest since Dan is from Seattle that it take place in Dan’s local Starbucks. :)
Oh John Becker, ROTFLMAO with this prose of yours “So yeah. Brown is man, hear him roar.” Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
Actually, John, I’ll bring a date. Four seats.
It will be interesting and highly amusing. Of course Brian will spin, twist and obfuscate. He’ll insist his own interpretation of the Bible is The Truth and declare himself the winner no matter how seriously his backside is handed to him.
Has anyone heard word if Brian Brown has accepted the challenge?
My money is on Dan Savage who will make mincemeat out of this turkey. Dan is thrilled at the prospect of such a debate. Brian Brown would be a fool to appear with Dan Savage!
Dan spoke about this on his later Savage Love Podcast. The right painted his comments as being out of place for a high school audience. He did apologize for insulting the few people walking out. However, his comments weren’t out of place at all. H mentioned that approximately 22 out of several students walked out of his presentation. All of the students attending had to have signed permission slips from their parents to attend (Dan is known for speaking bluntly, something he doesn’t or should apologize for). He asked the people putting on the conference if he should toine his comments down and he was tol “absolutely not.” What he said was right on target and the audience, except for the 22 that walked out were pleased to hear what he had to say.
Evan — right on! So it’s Michael, me, you, and your date so far. If Wayne and Jamie are in, there’ll be six of us. This is shaping up to be a blast!
Chris — since Brian Brown was the one who issued the challenge to Dan Savage in the first place, one would assume that he accepts his own challenge.
This is what I wrtoe to a prominent rabbi on the subject of dan Savage. since he didn’t respond to me, I think I can post it in its entirety here.
Rabbi, I can’t even begin to fathom your column. I got about halfway through with the growing conviction that you don’t understand any of it, despite your brother, despite your obvious compassion, intelligence and education. And I’m pretty sure that’s because whatever you believe, what you don’t see is that you are still coming from the place of the wholly imaginary superiority of the heterosexual, and the concomitant and equally imaginary moral and spiritual superiority of a deeply religious heterosexual. You sincerely believe, and don’t question in the slightest, that you understand something God might have said 3000 years ago on a subject that might, in a vague general sort of a way, possibly be homosexuality, at least as it might have been understood by people 2500 years, 7000 miles, and a universe of culture and language away from us.
And this has relevance to life in the 21st century?
This approach to gay people is very similar to the ways the Christian majority has often approached Jewish people—with an always assumed, self-assigned religious and moral superiority, which is just the blindness I’m referring to. The Torah cannot condemn what it does not know. And apart from the possible exception of David and Jonathan, the Torah is vague, ignorant, and nearly silent here. Levitical passages don’t even address gay women, so how could they address homosexuality as we understand it today? It’s very much like the Sodom story. The only way that has ANYTHING at all to do with homosexuality, as understood either then or now, is if you read with the preconception that it does. And yet, it is the go-to example of how and why God Hates The Gay.
Maybe you should walk in the shoes of the average gay person, hear what we hear, feel what we feel, and experience abject hatred for the crime of existing. In fact, as a Jew, I have a better idea. Maybe you could look at the history of our people, starting with the slanders in the Gospel of John, the ghetto laws, pogroms, forced conversions, and mass expulsions of the Middle Ages, continuing on with Martin “Jews-are-devils” Luther, strolling into the paranoid, deadly fantasies of the Third Reich, and finishing up with F. Bailey Smith and his immortal spew, “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew!”
The institutionalized hatred of the Jewish people has been going on for 2000 years, and the similarly abject hatred of gay people for nearly as long. But in both cases, “sincere religious belief” and “The Bible says…” have been the primary motivators. For every slander against Jews, there is a parallel slander against gay people. I’ll see your blood libel and raise you “gay men are child molesters”. Let’s have “Gays hate God” go mano-a-mano with “Christ Killers”. You have Marranos, we have ex-gays.
You wrote: “But such efforts at reconciliation are undone by the gratuitous hate-filled bigotry of people like Dan Savage whose response to prejudice against gays is to offer insulting and degrading prejudices against religion.” You subtly changed the subject. Let me give you the contrapositive of that statement, at least as I see it. “If religion wants to be respected, maybe it needs to start acting respectably.”
Dan Savage doesn’t hate either religion or religious people. He hates religious hypocrisy, of which the complaints against him are an unfounded and softly spoken example. He hates the very idea that religion has been used as a club for 2000 years against gay people, as it has against the Jews. In my youth, and occasionally still, I commonly heard anti-Semitic slanders passed off as mere conventional wisdom. For my whole life, for 62 years, I have listened to the so-called religious “quote” their bibles, whether New or Old Testament, twisting vague, badly translated passages into book-length diatribes that call my very existence a threat to marriage, family, children, faith, liberty, western civilization, and humanity itself. They use the “Word of God” to justify what cannot be justified by any other means, INCLUDING the “Word of God.”
Are we supposed to smile indulgently at that, and politely point out that maybe, perhaps, if it’s not too much trouble, you might want to possibly reconsider a general re-phrasing of that remark? Those days are gone. You might even say, “NEVER AGAIN!”
I have listened to every single vicious lie, scurrilous vilification, craptastic fairy story, unjustified condemnation, and obvious projection ever told about us by these “good people of God”, and noticed how very few of the other “good people of God” bother to call it out for what it so clearly is. It’s not their lamb being sacrificed, after all. Those who should be our defenders are in fact merely spectators at the event, failing in the end to defend even their own faith from the slander. Instead, like you, they claim their feelings are hurt, as if that even compares to murders, lies, jailings, hate-filled political campaigns, kids killing themselves, anti-gay bullying, and the destruction of gay lives and families.
You’re upset about Dan Savage, and far more than you seem to be about the very obvious truths he was stating, however coarse his language might have been.
Dan may be very blunt, but bluntness is what is called for. Just because something is a claimed as “sincere religious belief” doesn’t mean that it is. And even if it is, that doesn’t make it immune to criticism and analysis. And in any case, what-the-hell kind of an excuse is that? What about outright failures in decency, compassion, morality, respect, and if nothing else, good manners? Just this week alone, we had a pastor tell parents to break a child’s arm if the child acted gay, and later claim he was joking. He wasn’t. We had the Almost Reverend Patrick Wooden admit that his claims about gay men sticking cell phones in their butts, a story he had previously insisted was Gospel truth, was in fact something he had pulled out of HIS butt, but Lying for Jeebus is a moral thing to do. And in your own neck of the woods, you’ve got the ever-charming Yehuda Levin.
Like Dan, I don’t hate religion or religious people, either. But I am sick to death that my life, and the lives of millions of people just like me, are disparaged and lied about by the so-called religious, and made as expensive, painful, difficult and unpleasant as possible, if not outright dangerous, all on the basis of some badly translated biblical passages conveniently supporting a very durable social prejudice. Especially when other “word of God” passages, far clearer and explicit than these chimerical proscriptions allegedly against homosexuality, and of far greater “moral” import, are routinely ignored, which was Dan’s point. It’s way, WAY past the time to call “good people of God” out on their selective use of the Bible to justify their miserable treatment of other human beings.
You also wrote this: “But what I do know is that the answers to homosexuality and faith do no lie either with religious haters like Fred Phelps who insult G-d by hating gays, nor with secular fanatics like Dan Savage who insult homosexuals by falsely portraying them as angry bigots.”
You are correct in your first clause, absolutely, but your second clause is nonsense. It is not Dan Savage that is portraying Dan Savage, or any other gay person, as an angry bigot. It is the right-wing mainstream press, the religious right and their political allies that are doing that, with your unconscious assent when you allow them to change the subject. They’re not victims, but they are claiming it (the “angry bigots” meme) to distract from the obvious: their inability to refute by factual or logical means the simple truth that Dan Savage is right. I have no idea what a secular fanatic is, as there are no news reports of any flying airplanes into buildings. I don’t see Dan calling for political campaigns to shut down religion, or claiming that it threatens humanity, or that whatever violence perpetrated against religious people is justified by that threat. Dan isn’t saying to break your child’s arm if he’s gay, or that religious people put bibles in their butts.
Dan is just being Dan, and he’s bang on most of the time. His great talent is cogency. Though I usually agree with him, he only represents himself.
You write as if Phelps and his ilk are merely a few people on the fringe. There is a lot of ilk there. They are not an aberration. They are a large, loud, organized, and well-funded plurality that is allowed to flourish rather than be flushed in large part, I believe, due to the silence (at worst), obtuseness (at middle), and moral wishy-washiness (at best) of well-intentioned religious moderates like yourself. Religious moderates enable the sordid behavior of anti-gay religious bigots first by either obtusely failing to see them for whom they obviously are, or obtusely preferring to excuse them rather than offend them.
The second failure, the source of this obtuseness, lies here: the failure to reconcile and resolve what their religion says, what their own issues on this durable prejudice might be, and what basic humanity, common sense, compassion and morality say. You see, frankly, I don’t think you even believe your own religion on this subject, because one of those Levitical passages clearly prescribes the death penalty for what you are calling homosexuality. You have rejected that little tidbit, clearly elevating your basic decency over the religious beliefs you claim, and by extension, the God you serve. I mean no blasphemy here, but if this is indeed the case, you’re demonstrating that you are far more a moral being than He is. I would prefer to believe it is a bad, misused translation, than to believe that the Fount of Morality is immoral.
But you are half-right. Yes, Rabbi, I AM INCREDIBLY ANGRY. If my anger became corporeal and lacked my morals, decency, kindness, knowledge, and compassion, you would see cathedrals smashed, minarets flattened, and Saints living their Latter Days. You would see the mullahs that murdered an 18 year old Iranian boy strung up. You would see every single lying religious hypocrite—every Haggard, Long, Craig, Latham, Swaggart, every rabbi that says one thing and does another, publicly exposed and punished according to their stated beliefs.
I don’t think you even begin to understand how very angry so many gay people are about the political, moral, social, and religious jihad against us. However, neither I, nor any gay activist I have ever known, and virtually no gay person I do know, is a religious bigot. We leave that to the actual religious bigots. We want religion simply to mind its own goddammed and god-damning business, and stay the hell out of ours. I can assure you that if it Political Big-Money Religion were not demanding dominion over my life and my religious beliefs, I wouldn’t pay it the slightest attention.
“The answers to homosexuality and faith” certainly do not belong to Fred Phelps, the Mormons, or the Catholics. To my sorrow, nor do they reside in the limp-to-absent response to anti-gay bigotry demonstrated by those who claim to be on our side, but whose doubts are unresolved. If the words currently used against gay people were the same as those used against Jews— and they used to be, within my lifetime– we’d be hearing far more than the weak-tea hand-wringing of the “good people of God”. But because this is about an ancient prejudice and sex in our deeply puritanical culture, what we hear is primarily crickets.
As far as I am concerned, the answers to homosexuality don’t even belong to faith. Faith has merely appropriated the issue, claiming knowledge where it has only ignorance, authority where it has merely prejudice, and experience where it has an echo-chamber. Faith has claimed that this is about “sincere religious belief” and “God’s will”, much the same as it claimed about 2500 years of sexism, 2000 years of anti-Semitism, 1000 years of anti-Islam joyrides, 500 years of witch burning, 400 years of slavery, and 150 years of Jim Crow. Why am I supposed to believe that “the faithful” finally have it right on THIS subject, especially when they so clearly DON’T?
In each case, faith has progressed only when dragged forward by people like Dan Savage.
Thank you Ben in Oakland! Keep on writing, keep on fighting!!!
Thanks for sharing Ben. Brilliant!
Freaking awesome, Ben. Thanks for putting all that down.
Holy Cow, Ben, that was FANTASTIC! Generally speaking, I am too angry to be that articulate – and you are SPOT ON in your description of the depth of that anger. Thanks for sharing that here.
Ok..well..I posted this on the NOM website but I doubt the moderator is going to post it so I guess I’ll say it here:
It’s a good thing for Dan Savage that the “Pick On Somebody Your Own Size” challenge wasn’t issued when Maggie Gallagher was still the NOM President or we’d be looking at a heavyweight cage match between her and a big hairy gay bear. (no offense to big hair gay bears).
Go Dan Go. And make sure someone is there taking high quality video because that’s going to be one for the collection. I have yet to see someone with wit and humor lose a debate. I’m putting all my chips on Dan.
Brian bluffed. Dan called it.
Brown will back out, like the spineless blusterbucket he is.
Ben, great stuff. Hope you don’t mind me copying text for my own diatribes to priests and the so-called Catholic Education Service (so-called since children don’t learn anything real from them).
I guess frequent posters like on TWO site are the angry ones. I find myself more and more angry about the constant lies being told across the whole world about us. But the more anger that froths up, the more hope floats. I see SO many LBGT people take up arms. Anywhere oppression lives, the internet has brought anger then hope. Cos hope floats, see?
The other great thing is this – they are getting older – as a demographic. We are getting younger – as a demographic.
Keep on fighting….
I write to help. If it helps, please feel free to use it.
[...] may remember that, at the beginning of this month, Dan Savage accepted Brian Brown’s challenge to a debate about religion and LGBT issues. Savage pledged to [...]