A Revolution, but What Kind?

Good newspapers are forums for discourse, so obviously we shouldn't expect to agree with everything we find within them. Occasionally, however, your local newspaper prints an opinion piece whose thesis is so muddled, so offensive, so inane, that you have to question the paper's judgment for printing it anywhere other than the letters to the editor section, where it can reflect the views of the rest of the local loons. Tom Ashcraft's recent opinion piece "Gay marriage: A revolution of the worst sort" fits squarely into this category.

In this hate-swollen piece, Ashcraft, a Charlotte-area lawyer, attempts to compare the homosexual community's fight for equal rights with battles fought by French and Russian revolutionaries. He regales us with violent imagery of "the guillotine ... snapping heads in 18th-century France" and "millions of people murdered and imprisoned, often for their Christian faith, by Communist fanatics." So it's homosexual fanatics we're supposed to fear. And it's their ability to marry that's supposed to horrify us specifically. So, having duly spooked us with images of one set of revolutionaries who were beheaded until they give in and one set who killed scores upon scores of Christians, now Ashcraft prompts us to react to these 21st century American revolutionaries.

At this point, you'd expect Ashcraft to launch into an expose of the gay community; you'd reasonably expect an accounting of the evils the gay community hopes to unleash upon our innocent nation. So, he reaches deep and pulls out the following information from an admittedly authoritative source, The Human Rights Campaign, the gay, lesbian, bi and transgender rights group:

• "Marriage equality would build on America's tradition of moving civil rights forward and erasing the inequities of the past."

• "Separate is not equal. Although any step toward legal recognition of same-sex couples and their families is a step in the right direction, GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) families will not be truly equal until they, too, can receive marriage licenses."

• "GLBT people deserve equal access to the American dream. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people grow up dreaming of falling in love, getting married and growing old together. Just as much as the next person, same-sex couples should be able to fulfill that dream."

So, this is the substance of the one argument he bothers offering any support for: gays want equal rights. Horrifying isn't it?

From there, Ashcraft goes into a paint-by-numbers diatribe against the gay community, pulling out all the usual clichés and offering absolutely no support for any of his bilious and outmoded arguments. First, the genders are different, he argues, though what this has to do with marriage he doesn't say. He simply presumes--without offering any argument to support his presumption--that marriage should be between two people of the opposite sex.

His next argument proves even more bizarre: "Homosexual ideology disregards the most fundamental truth in the history of man: Humans are prone to go wrong, to choose evil -- they need wise guidance as to what is good." Homosexual ideology disregards what? What proof does he have for this utterly illogical statement? Sure, we all need wise guidance as to what is good, but gays (and the rest of us) have the right to follow the guidance of whomever they see fit. Tacit in this argument, apparently, is the idea that gays should follow some specific person's guidance. Whose? His argument presumes that the gay lifestyle is immoral and that we should all follow the "guidance" of those who believe that's true. Well, Mr. Ashcraft you can't force your muddled and archaic guidance upon me, and you can't force it upon my gay friends.

Next, Mr. Ashcraft reaches for a well-worn propaganda technique: he attributes nefarious goals to a group without offering any evidence that the goals exist. And they're the same unsupportable arguments many on the far-right keep offering: "Movement leaders really object to the created order and the one who made it. Rather than rejoicing in creation, its wonders, mysteries and limits, they resent nature and seek to overturn it." Oh, they "really" do, do they? Then why don't you have any quotes from the Human Rights Campaign proclaiming these goals then, Mr. Ashcraft? This argument, like many of those made by the lawyer, really descends into the absurd. Gays don’t need to "overturn" nature in order to be represented within it. Any one who pays the slightest attention to science knows that homosexuality not only occurs in nature, it's common throughout nature. Homosexuality is quite natural already.

What Ashcraft likely means, of course, is that his Bible tells him homosexuality is wrong. Apparently, he’s to afraid to come out and say this, though—perhaps because he knows he hasn’t the right to force his strict and increasingly irrelevant religious views upon the rest of us.

Finally, Ashcraft trots out yet another shop-worn and easily dismissed argument: "If marriage open to homosexuals becomes the new standard, they will have achieved an official repudiation of the understanding of virtually all civilization to date, including the great religions." The best response to this argument is, "So what?" Slavery was acceptable for thousands of years, too. That didn't make it right. Inter-racial marriage was forbidden in many cultures for millennia and still is in many. Doesn't make it right. The truth is, mankind is living in its moral infancy. With a few thousand years of recorded human history under our belt, we think we're tremendously evolved, when, actually, our cultural evolution represents barely a speck in the history of overall evolution. The fact that bigoted opinions have been held dear by societies and religions for a few thousand years is utterly irrelevant in the scheme of things.

Again and again, Ashcraft offers us specious arguments, which he doesn't even bother to substantiate.  Mr. Ashcraft is a lawyer; he should know better than to offer theses without any supporting arguments, without any evidence to make his case.  Certainly, he must know better, so his entire piece becomes an exercise in condescension: apparently, he depends on his readers not noticing that he, a lawyer, hasn't offered any proof to back his alarming claims.  He's more than happy to stir up the scary imagery: millions of dead in Russia; heads will roll (is this really the ending he sees fit for the gay "revolutionaries"?), but he's essentially unable to come through with the goods.

"Who will stop them?" Mr. Ashcraft asks throughout his piece, speaking of the gay revolutionaries.  Who will stop them then? Certainly not me. I plan to help.

You can help, too. Please give to the Human Rights Campaign to fight bigotry and obsolete and unscientific opinions like those of Mr. Ashcraft's.

As for the Charlotte Observer, they've printed this inaccurate, superstitious and baseless diatribe as an op-ed. They've dubbed him an Observer "columnist." Would they give a virulent racist the same space?

(I've copied Mr. Ashcraft on this post.)