The American Protestant religious right's animosity toward lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and the transgendered (LGBT) is a well documented, longstanding political phenomenon, but Michael Cobb's God Hates Fags and Cynthia Burack's Sin, Sex, and Democracy develop new insights about the structure and significance of this animosity. Both are interested in more than just the hatefulness of this rhetoric, although they take their analyses in different directions and use different approaches. While both analyze the rhetoric of religious hatred, Cobb looks specifically at texts and spectacles about religious violence and hatred as providing an alternative political framework to the superficially accepting politics of multiculturalism. Burack, on the other hand, seeks a deeper democratic engagement through disentangling the various strands of antigay religious rhetoric and tracing their ideological significance. Taken together, the books advance our understandings about the relationship between rhetoric and ideology as they are manifested politically. They also ask us to think about the rhetoric rather than simply dismissing it as hateful and ugly. Both authors see these expressions as doing culturally constitutive work upon which queers can productively build.
Cobb's book focuses sharply on the language of hatred. In his analysis, this language serves as the substance through which “queers strategically mediate conventional structures of national belonging” (11). The emotive language of religious hate generates a productive analogy between queers and racial minorities. Racial minorities appropriated the language of racial hatred to leverage a religious challenge to their subordination that resulted in massive, although incomplete, social transformation and ultimately narrowed the sphere for the expression of such hatred in dangerous and damaging ways. Cobb argues that the queer struggle for liberation has achieved significant leverage by borrowing this framework, which he describes as “sentimental racial protest — a literary and figurative but still very political voice — that need not be overly precise in a hostile public sphere that is always ready to hate, to regulate, and to restrict the freedom of its queers” (13–14). Cobb analyzes religious hatred in American literature, working through the idea of the American jeremiad as applied to queerness. In doing so, he engages James Baldwin's work, but also considers Stephen Crane, Jean Toomer, Tennessee Williams, Alice Walker, and Dorothy Allison, looking to the imperfect but useful analogies these authors mobilizes between racially subordinated identities and queerness. These analogies, drawn from the overarching narrative linking religion, race, and violence, provides a rhetorical means for mapping out violence and religion as they play out together on minority bodies that are by extension queer.
Cobb turns this analysis to the political sphere through his broad consideration of clashes over queer politics in the 1990s and 2000s and a focused interpretation of the battle over Colorado's Amendment 2, which prevented localities from barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and was invalidated by the US Supreme Court in Romer v. Evans in 1996. Cobb argues that the simultaneously religious and vicious language of Amendment 2's supporters ironically led to its downfall, providing ready evidence for the argument that the pain and violent intent behind the amendment paralleled the pain and violent intent behind segregation laws and ordinances. Cobb touches on other manifestations of religious hatred for queers around pedophilia and incest and how these accusations have led to defensiveness through escape into the sanctuary of racial sentimental politics. His conclusion is that the dynamic and rhetorics of religious hatred are deeply enough embedded that they will continue to structure queer politics, but that this kind of hatred has value beyond the potential cul de sac of racial analogies. Rather, he suggests, the hatred itself is productive and generative. Acknowledging, even embracing the hatred legitimates a politics of opposition and provides the standing to hate back, to remove queers from their positioning as disposable bodies that can be killed with impunity.
Burack's agenda is also to understand the political force and significance of religious rhetoric, but her focus is different. Scholars and most public commentators, she argues, do not attend carefully enough to politically inflected religious speech or to religiously inflected political speech. This lack of attention, she argues, leaves us without crucial information about a significant threat to secular democracy and the political rights of sexual minorities. While other scholars have criticized the Christian Right's tendency to speak in different registers to insiders and outsiders, Burack sees this as a strength, arguing that “the Christian right has become more … effective at designing and deploying multiple modes of address, different rhetorical tones, emphases, or arguments directed at in-group and out-group audiences” (xxiii). But Burack is not simply advocating against the Christian Right's agenda. Rather, she hopes to enable her readers to see Christian conservatives as fellow citizens with a particular vision of the nation that they are seeking to implement through political action.
Burack's analysis ranges widely through contemporary conservative Christianity. She considers Christian engagements with the idea of tolerance and their eschatological visions to set up her theory, which maps religious rhetoric into four categories. Rhetoric is directed either to an in-group exclusively or to an in-group that assumes public consumption as well. And socio-politically, the register is either therapeutic or political. This matrix provides different strategies for addressing queer sexuality, at times molding different strategies depending upon the location of the struggle in which religious right activists are engaging. At other times, the matrix marks distinctly different commitments on the part of religious right activists. This appears most dramatically in the contrast between the comic-style Chick Christian tracts (employing an in-group political rhetoric of condemnation) and Love Won Out, an organization speaking in a language of compassion to the in-group to encourage gays and lesbians to “return” to heterosexuality. Burack carries this device through rhetoric linking gays to pedophilia and identifying gays as terrorists. Ultimately, she argues that the Christian right is not a monolith, but rather a coalition, and thoughtful engagement with the different registers of religious opposition to LGBT people can potentially shake up the coalition, as well as encourage the nuanced thinking that separates positions within the Protestant religious right from the big tent of Christianity and the broader communities of devoted religious believers.
Both books challenge the reader (largely presumed to be a supporter of LGBT equality) not to dismiss anti-queer rhetoric, nor even to understand it simply to grasp the risks that it poses to queers and to robust democracy. Rather, they suggest in different ways that the rhetoric itself can be useful in advancing LGBT rights. Both see the expressed animosities as a productive pivotal standpoint for queer engagement with the center of the political order, Cobb through mirroring hatred to achieve independent subjectivity and Burack through turning around the lessons of toleration to apply to the religious right. While Cobb's approach is literary and Burack employs interpretive political analysis, they both trace ideology through rhetoric and emphasize the transmutable nature of ideology as religious speakers attempt to bridge their Biblical narratives to political and policy-focused arguments to each other and in the public sphere.
Cobb's challenge at the end is to take on hatred as a malleable tool for resistance to a political world that defines queer bodies as expendable and not always even identifiable as sacrifices when subjected to violence. His work is remarkably nuanced in its engagement with the advantages and disadvantages for queers of relying on the analogy to race to achieve reform, and he maps this out pragmatically and politically, rather than getting sidetracked into a lengthy discussion of how valid the analogy is. However, at the end, many readers are likely to be troubled by his embrace of hatred and insistence that its continued existence does useful political work for queers. By calling attention to the most hateful speech, he argues, queers can make room within these words “in order to describe negatively the position of queers in contemporary U.S. politics and culture … I'm still a minority because I'm so quickly affiliated with incest, pedophilia, and the destruction of functional, productive families” (163). This insight, however, does not lead to a positive political program. Religious hatred is liberating, but only in a negative sense, freeing queers from the obligation to view politics as a form of rational and deliberative engagement. A form of citizenship might be extracted from hatred, but Cobb sees the most viable path through hating back, not through pressing for sentimental citizenship through analogy to the despised minority status of people of color. He argues effectively about the potential downsides to the analogy and explains why using the hatred has advantages over this strategy, but offers no other alternatives.
Burack's work can be taken to answer this challenge. Her call to hear the religious right in all of its guises and engage with them on an equal standpoint of democratic citizenship carves out a different political ground than the alternatives Cobb proposes. Burack's “gay agenda,” in contrast to that condemned by the religious right, is “to live openly and without apology, to call into question the settled beliefs of our fellow citizens, and to alter historical patterns of the distribution of rights and status” (136). She acknowledges that this agenda will provoke disgust, anger, and fear from the varied Christian standpoints she discusses, but argues that it is necessary to hear and tolerate expressions of these feelings. This is also controversial. At what point does hearing and acknowledging these rhetorics move from toleration to legitimation, and how can the boundary be maintained in a richly diverse political culture where the rhetorics themselves are always under contestation?
Both Cobb and Burack would likely respond that, regardless of what queer agendas are adopted, antigay Christian rhetoric is likely to remain part of our political discourse for many years to come, as will attempts to leverage this rhetoric into policy outcomes. The question remains what to do about the political power of this agenda. Given that both conservative Protestants who oppose LGBT equality and the politically active LGBT community members are minorities, they both have strong incentives to build rhetorical strategies that will enable their coalitions to grow and gain allies. Which will ultimately be the more successful remains in the balance, and the outcomes will significantly drive American democracy in more inclusive – or more hateful – directions.
