The horror! I totally agree with fundamentalist Christians who think we’re gonna burn in hell. I know, it’s crazy but true. Thank G-d it's a subtle similarity. You see, I have complete faith in the fact that we (humans) are committing vile acts of pollution against our planetary body, and that this is responsible for warmer oceans and skies and the intensity of natural disasters like Katrina and Rita. Fundamentalist folks, like Michael Marcavage of repentamerica.com, have faith that we (queers and sexual deviants) are committing gravely sinful acts that have in turn spurred G-d’s wrath,
hence Katrina.
Global Climate Change versus G-d’s Wrath; Chemical Pollution versus Moral Litter; The Perceived World versus The Spiritual Realm. The differences between my environmental take on Katrina and Marcavage’s vision of a soggy Sodom in the Gulf are stark enough that I shouldn’t worry if he and I happen to foresee an apocalypse of our own doing, right? Well…actually…the line between science and faith has been obscured lately and it’s making it more difficult to use science to defend and understand queerness. In an ideal world, understanding and defending ourselves would, of course, be unnecessary, but…
When
religion takes on global warming as a cause; when intelligent design is competing for airtime with Darwin in science classrooms; when creationism is popping up in natural history books sold in
national park gift offices ; when I have something in common with a Christian fundamentalist, you can be sure the end times are near. End times of what? And why the hell am I writing about this on Big Queer?
This is a given: Because we’re a democracy our laws and our politicians inevitably change along with the tide. No, our constitution doesn’t generally get rewritten, but legislation does end up accommodating some of “we the people.” And by the looks of things, the people want religion to take the place of science. To what end?
When biologists publish papers on same sex couplings and bisexuality in the animal kingdom, it kind of validates queers. It shouldn’t, but it does because it naturalizes what for many is unnatural. Would it matter if we didn’t get to read about the gay penguins in New York’s Central Park Zoo or the lesbian seagulls in California, or about gay genes in American men? The answer’s not so clear…
Get this: for years scientists didn’t report on queer animals because Darwin doesn’t easily explain them. You can’t pass on your genes if sex isn’t reproductive, so…no evolution for your DNA. I don’t think fundamentalist Christians realize how fundamentalist Darwinism could be used to their advantage. Maybe this is the next step, in which case we might have science as well as "science." Will we fit in the schism?
Who the hell cares! Science has had a history of ignoring us and so has religion and so has history for that matter. We’ve been marginalized, then accepted a little, marginalized again, bla bla bla. If these debates cause the media to stop reporting on gay octopuses (octopussies?) or on queer kids getting gay bashed in school, we’ll report on it in our media!
How unsettling it is to read over my call to arms when time has shown that we can indeed be erased and that history repeats.
As
religion continues to appropriate science (or vice versa), it will alter America’s concepts of natural and unnatural. It will change the way people respond to Nature and—the reason we should be keeping an eye open—it may introduce a whole new kind of scapegoating and whole new battlefields on which we’ll have to defend our existence. The terms of sociology, science, nature, and history that we can now draw upon to defend ourselves might become useless because these themselves will have taken on
new meanings, meanings that might make us invisible. Our defenses may turn against us. Once again. The horror...
