For LGBTQ activists, the cycles of triumph and tragedy seem to be accelerating. Over decades, American public opinion gradually warmed to the idea of marriage equality, from 27% national approval in 1996 to 61% approval in 2016. In 2015, the Supreme Court held in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges that anti-gay marriage restrictions violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. Marriage equality was the law of the land.
The backlash started immediately.
Indeed, it started before the decision was even issued. In dissent, Justice John Roberts wrote that the legalization of same-sex marriage was an affront to “respect for the teachings of history” across “millennia.”
Picking up that theme, serious presidential candidates echoed the idea that anti-gay bigotry was a longstanding conservative principle. Ted Cruz, for instance, proposed a constitutional amendment to allow voters to oust Supreme Court justices. That bears repeating: a major candidate for President sought to overturn one of the Founders’ core ideas, an independent judiciary, simply so as to enable state discrimination against homosexuals.
The rhetorical violence of Cruz was soon paired with new police actions. Several jurisdictions, beginning with North Carolina in March of this year, passed so-called “transgender bathroom laws” requiring that people only use bathrooms conforming to their biological birth gender. To enforce this rule, armed police officers would presumably need to target women and men based on the comparative masculinity or femininity of their appearance, and then compel them to submit to a genital screening before using a public restroom. Of course, there was no evidence whatsoever that transgendered restroom users were any more threatening or dangerous than traditional heterosexual Americans. The legislators in North Carolina were not responding to any actual threat; like Ted Cruz, they were fomenting hatred of LGBTQ Americans to capitalize on a homophobic backlash and thus advance their political careers.
Actual physical violence, never far from homophobia, erupted into terror in Orlando, Florida, in June, when an apparently self-hating gay man committed the largest mass shooting in American history by opening fire at a gay club.
Across this roller-coaster of the past few years, the narrative practically writes itself: progress and enlightened appreciation of individual people in opposition to conservative, natural law principles of heterosexuality. Right?
Wrong. That narrative gives the homophobes too much credit. Homophobia is NOT a conservative idea. On the contrary, and contrary to the arguments of many anti-gay political, religious, and political leaders, homophobia has no historical or biological legitimacy.
Homosexuality: With Us Since The Dawn of Human Civilization
Let’s start with Justice Roberts’ dissent in Obergefell. His claim that a “millennia” of civilizations had rejected same-sex marriage was embarrassingly false. Indeed, none of the four civilizations Roberts mentions (“the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs”) had an exclusive one-man-one-woman definition of marriage. At least Roberts’ opinion was in dissent; the now-invalid 1986 decision Bowers v. Hardwick upheld anti-homosexual “sodomy” laws using equally false historical arguments.
To see the absurdity of Roberts’ claim, let’s consider the first known hero of human history. Gilgamesh, an ancient warrior-king, was immortalized in humanity’s first great work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh. As described in the Encyclopedia of Ancient History, the historical king’s “influence was so profound that myths of his divine status grew up around his deeds.” Gilgamesh was also homosexual. The love of his life was Enkidu, a wild man. Gilgamesh’s mother told him about Enkidu that: “a strong partner shall come to you . . . you shall love him as a wife.”
Gilamesh was not alone. Ancient Greece and Rome lionized homosexual heroes such as Hercules and Achilles, and explicitly embraced homosexuality in the poetry of Sappho and the philosophy from Plato. Ancient Asian and Middle Eastern civilizations also recorded homosexuality as a commonplace fact of life. Homosexuality was widely accepted in ancient China. In Africa, the ancient tomb of royal courtiers Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum signified one of the oldest recorded same-sex relationships from the time of ancient Egypt’s pharoahs. In Europe, both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian Churches sanctioned same-sex marriages well into the premodern era, as historian John Boswell has documented.
In sum, according to the best archaeology available, homosexuality has been commonplace for as long as humans have existed.
Homosexuality: Natural For Many Millions of Years
Longer, actually. If we turn from soft sciences to harder sciences such as zoology and biology, we find homosexuality common in nature long before human beings evolved. According to research published in 2009 article in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, same-sex behavior is a nearly universal phenomenon in the animal kingdom, found in species from worms and frogs to mammals and birds. In his book The Social Conquest of Earth, legendary Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson explains that homosexuality is far too prevalent in nature to be an accident or mutation — it must, on the contrary, serve an evolutionary purpose. He has theorized that for higher social animals such as humans, homosexuality serves a vital function of promoting positive group dynamics.
The Sickness of Modern Homophobia
Many modern leaders, in deviance from natural history and in a perversion of human history, now attack homosexuality as unnatural. In the former Soviet Union, much of east Asia, and throughout the Muslim world, for instance, hostility to homosexuality is widespread. Former Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for instance, claimed that Iran had no homosexuals. The current President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, has called homosexuality “unnatural” and “disgusting” as he has explained why he signed a law making certain homosexual acts punishable by life in prison. The atheistic Soviet Union criminalized homosexuality, and current Russian leader Vladimir Putin has allied himself with the Russian Orthodox Church to criticize homosexuality as deviant and repugnant.
Even in the western world, the sickness of homophobia is widespread. Recently, a Catholic priest in Italy, Father Gino Flaim, called homosexuality “a sickness” that was much less comprehensible to him than pedophilia. Mike Pence, the current Vice Presidential selection for presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, has been a radical homophobe throughout his long political career. Pence, of course, claims that his homophobia stems from the Bible, but as is typical of such homophobes Pence is inexplicably unconcerned about the very long list of other Biblical prohibitions (such as shaving and the material of American football).
How could this objectively false idea — that homosexuality is unnatural — become so widespread? How could political, religious, and legal scholars develop such a wildly inaccurate view of nature and humanity?
We have some evidence from the psychological study of humans today. Research by scholars from the Stanford University School of Medicine showed that homophobia arises in males as a defense mechanism due to unresolved psychosexual anxieties. One way to understand this research is that when boys feel sexually insecure or inadequate, they sometimes become homophobic as a coping mechanism. Like the character Colonel Frank Fitts in the movie American Beauty, they violently proclaim their hostility to homosexuality because they need reassurance that they are real men.
In other words, it seems plausible that homophobia is a modern sickness that is driven primarily by a vicious cycle of repression and self-hatred by homosexual leaders.
We have seen precisely this phenomenon play out repeatedly in the United States anti-gay movement. Examples include Family Research Council founder George Rekers, evangelical leader Ted Haggard, former national Young Republican president Glenn Murphy Jr., and Republican Senator Larry Craig, all of whom were vociferously homophobic in their public statements until they were found to have engaged in homosexual acts that were otherwise illegal (because they involved solicitation or coercion).
It doesn’t require much imagination to imagine how this might play out across history. As religious or political leaders turn their personal coping mechanism into a broader crusade, a society can turn hostile to homosexuality. Those who fail to confront this perversion play into the hands of those, like ISIS and the Orlando terrorists, who are willing to express their hatred in murderous violence. Thus, a disease of individuals becomes a disease of society. Those who care about facts and evidence, however, should acknowledge that this is a modern sickness
