"Historically, many of the greatest philosophers have argued that homosexual acts are morally objectionable."

I haven't posted for a while, because for the past month I've been deeply immersed in my dissertation. And it looks like I'll be at that for a couple more months still. But something happened that I thought I needed to share with you. I accidently signed a petition asking the American Philosophical Association not to penalize Christian colleges for discriminating against gays and lesbians in their hiring practices. Twice. I accidently signed the petition, and then I did it again.

Actually, I signed the petition on purpose, but I tried to attach a comment explaining that while I didn't agree with discrimination, I did agree that the schools had the right of religious freedom and if the schools had theological reasons for discrimination, then they should be allowed to hire whoever they wanted. But the comment function on the online petition didn't work. So now it looks like I support the cause without reservation. Oh well.

Here's a link to the petition. It's actually a counter-petition in response to a petition asking the APA to censure the Christian colleges. Here's a link to that original petition. As discriminatory schools, it specifically mentions "Azusa Pacific University, Belmont University, Bethal University, Biola University, Calvin College, Malone College, Pepperdine University, Westmont College, and Wheaton College", many of which I would love to work for, and two of which I have already worked for.

Anyway, here are my comments on the counter-petition -- the one I signed but don't entirely agree with:

This petition's distinction between act and disposition is compelling. It says "Institutions can require their faculty to agree to abide by ethical standards that forbid homosexual acts while not ipso facto discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation." In other words, they are not technically violating the letter of the APA anti-discrimination policy. This should be enough to allow these schools to avoid official censure.

At the same time this distinction is somewhat disingenious in that a job candidate at most of the schools in question who was open about having a "homosexual orientation" and did not "repent" of that orientation would be disqualified for the job -- even if he or she promised to remain celibate and to abstain from "homosexual acts". In other words, many of these schools really do discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

But for me this is an issue of religous freedom. As the petition points out, the discriminatory schools are simply "abiding by their long-standing and coherent ethical norms" -- despite the fact that, as I believe, their ethical norms have turned out to be false. Their position on homosexual acts is deeply grounded in their theological system such that they could not change their position without giving up their entire religious way of life. For that reason I believe these schools should have the right to discriminate based on sexual orientation.

This may or may not be a right we wish to reward with government funding (see my post on Prop 8), but a private organization such as the American Philosophical Association -- which was founded (according to the APA website) "to promote the exchange of ideas among philosophers, to encourage creative and scholarly activity in philosophy, to facilitate the professional work and teaching of philosophers, and to represent philosophy as a discipline" -- should allow for a diversity of moral viewpoints.

P.S. The petition's appeal to authority (quoted in the title of this post) is not exactly convincing. Most modern philosophers see appeal to authority as a logical fallacy. At the same time, it is fun to notice that many excellent philosophers have signed the petition. My favorite is Alasdair MacIntyre. Predictably all my Biola professors and collegues signed. Also: Peter Kreeft, Hugh J. McCann, Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, Linda Zagzebski. Even my fellow Hume scholar Donald W. Livingston.

"Churches could lose their tax-exemption status."

It seems like every time I watch TV there's an anti-Prop 8 commercial on. (For those of you outside California, Proposition 8 is a voter initiative to amend the state constitution making same sex marriage illegal. This is in response to the recent state Supreme Court decision saying that the California constitution guarantees equal rights to same sex couples.)

Here is a link to the video. (I couldn't get it to embed in this post.) The ad is a point by point response to an earlier commercial for Yes on Prop 8 (embedded below):



Now, one claim from this ad sticks out to me: "Churches could lose their tax-exemption status." The "No On Prop 8" people ridicule this claim because the Supreme Court decision explicitly states that religions will not be affected. But I actually think that, while they are usually paranoid, the religious right is correct in their fears about this proposition. Why wouldn't the same sort of reasoning apply in the same sex marriage case that applied in the interracial marriage case when Bob Jones University lost their tax exempt status for their racial discriminatory policies?

I actually don't know what I think about this issue. I totally agree that Bob Jones's policies were evil. And I agree that the same-sex marriage issue is parallel. But I also think it was part of Bob Jones's religious freedom to keep the races segregated according to their (evil) fundamentalist doctrines. Maybe no churches should be tax exempt. But it seems wrong to dole out tax exemption in such a way that it pressures churches to violate their own religious teachings.

This issue reminds me of the issue of polygamy. Sometimes opponents of gay marriage argue that if we allow same sex couples to marry, there will be no stopping the slide down the slippery slope to allowing group marriage. Again, I think this is a place where the religious right is absolutely correct. But again, I'm not sure that it would be such bad thing to allow polygamous marriage. It was evil of the U.S. government to persecute the Mormon church for their marriage practices -- and it was even more ridiculous for the Mormons to change their doctrines in order to gain public acceptability. If the Mormon religion teaches polygamy, then it is their First Amendment right to practice polygamy.

For more reflection on polygamy, check out HBO's series Big Love, starring Bill Paxton as a man married to three wives. The show is a fascinating look at a variety of viewpoints on polygamy. It does not shy away from the dark side of polygamy as it is practiced in the fundamentalist Mormon "compounds" (forced marriage, pedophilia, incest, etc., not to mention repressive patriarchy), but the central characters' suburban polygamous family is surprisingly healthy. The show seems to be arguing that polygamy is not necessarily evil: if we brought polygamy out of the shadows of criminalization it could be made to work.

And the show's fundamentalist Mormon patriarch gives the best argument against Prop 8 I've heard: If we define marriage as the union between one man and one woman, then we criminalize many of our Biblical forefathers such as Abraham, Jacob, David, etc. In other words, the "traditional" definition of marriage does not seem to be limited to heterosexual monogamy.

Jihad: "to strive in the path of God"

First there was Trembling Before G-d (Dubowski, 2001), then there was For the Bible Tells Me So (Karslake, 2007), and now comes A Jihad for Love (Sharma, 2008). These are documentary films about religious gay and lesbian people, focusing on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, respectively. I loved Trembling Before G-d, but was disappointed by For the Bible Tells Me So's lack of rigorous engagement with the difficult Biblical texts (despite the film's title and the claims of its promotional materials.) But since Jihad was produced by the same people as Trembling, I have high hopes.

It's playing in San Francisco and Berkeley this week, though I haven't seen it, and to be honest, I'll probably wait for DVD. It's not getting great reviews, but for students of the problem of religion and homosexuality, it is surely worth a look. You can check out the official site here. And the trailer is below:

"I'm filled to the top with fear that it's all just a bunch of matter."

The most interesting person I've become aware of recently is Australian pop musician Sam Sparro. The DJs on KCRW have been playing his song "Black and Gold" a lot lately. I think it is a compliment to say that the first time I heard it, I thought it was a new Gnarls Barkley song. In other words, it's as good as the best pop music being recorded today. But then I started listening to the lyrics. And I was shocked to realize that it is about why life is meaningless if evolution is true.

Here are the lyrics:

If the fish swam out of the ocean
and grew legs and they started walking
and the apes climbed down from the trees
and grew tall and they started talking

and the stars fell out of the sky
and my tears rolled into the ocean
now i'm looking for a reason why
you even set my world into motion

'cause if you're not really here
then the stars don't even matter
now i'm filled to the top with fear
that it's all just a bunch of matter
'cause if you're not really here
then i don't want to be either
i wanna be next to you
black and gold
black and gold
black and gold

i looked up into the night sky
and see a thousand eyes staring back
and all around these golden beacons
i see nothing but black

i feel a way of something beyond them
i don't see what i can feel
if vision is the only validation
then most of my life isn't real

'cause if you're not really here
then the stars don't even matter
now i'm filled to the top with fear
that it's all just a bunch of matter
'cause if you're not really here
then i don't want to be either
i wanna be next to you
black and gold
black and gold
black and gold

It's pretty clear that the "you" in this song is God. (Though the line "i wanna be next to you" doesn't quite make sense. Maybe be means "close to you".) It's a song about trying to find meaning in an unbelievably large cosmos of "black and gold" stars. It's an existential dread that recalls Pascal's Pensées: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me."

The philosophical claim here is that if there is no God, then life is meaningless. That's a questionable claim, but it's not crazy -- a philosopher as great as Nietzsche would agree. But Sparro's argument is based on the assumptions that (1) a world that evolved is necessarily meaningless, and (2) evolution is necessarily incompatible with the existence of God. These claims are kinda crazy. I can see no reason to accept either claim. And the second claim is positively dangerous: pitting God against science is a dangerous game that has only hurt both sides of the debate.

But things got even more interesting when I saw the video for the song. I was assuming Sam Sparro was some sort of fundamentalist Christian. (And I wanted to see what the video's director would do with the odd line about being "next to you.) But, boy, was I surprised.

You can check out the video here.



This ain't no ordinary fundamentalist -- he has the mannerisms of a (so called) "flaming homosexual"! A quick Google search confirmed that Sparro is indeed an openly gay Christian: he discusses his orientations (both sexual and theological) in this interview. It turns out that he was raised a fundamentalist -- according to his Wikipedia page, as a child Sparro appeared as an actor on the James Dobson produced Adventures in Odyssey program -- but that he developed a more conflicted relationship with organized religion after realizing he was gay. (My favorite quote: "I was always kind of a non-denominational Christian. What do you call it when people clap their hands and say, 'Yeah'? I was a Gloria Gaynor Christian.")

How many gay fundamentalist pop stars do you know? And how many of those have written catchy pop songs about existential angst? Sam Sparro is one of a kind.

Deconstructing Fight Club

Updated: Be sure to read the comments to this post where I clarify the claims I am making.

I've already written about a couple of movies that seduce us into a kind of self-deception. Rashomon tempts us into reading its ending optimistically, thereby confirming its pessimistic thesis that we often lie to ourselves. (You can read my analysis here.) And The Matrix tempts us into ignoring its Marxist political implications, thereby confirming its thesis that our society is in the thrall of a capitalist ideology. (You can read that argument here.)

Now I want to give a brief argument that Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) does a similar thing: it tempts us into idolizing Tyler Durden as a pumped-up man's man, while simultaneously undercutting traditional masculinity with a pervasive homoerotic subtext. I won't bother to detail the gay imagery and symbolism in the film here. Just take my word for it. (One essay which gives a good catalog of the homoerotic references is Robert Alan Brookey and Robert Westerfelhaus, "Hiding Homoeroticism in Plain View" in Critical Studies in Media Communication, March 2002.)

For now I'm more interested in self-deception. The most interesting scene along these lines is the one where Tyler looks directly into the camera and says, “You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis.” On the surface he is giving a kind of anti-advertisement meant to counter the consumerist messages of the media. But note that the film literally breaks down at this point – the sides of the image warp and we see the sprocket holes.

Here is the scene:



This cinematic device can be read as a simple homage to Bergman's Persona, a film, like Fight Club, about two people with an ambiguous relationship and which also includes a similar scene where the film breaks down. Here is that scene:



But the Bergman reference doesn't entirely make sense. Persona is about the nature of art and the human capacity for communication and other concepts which make sense of Bergman's self-reflexivity. But why is David Fincher revealing the cinematic basis of his film? Why does the film break down at exactly this point in Fight Club? I propose that our attention is being drawn to the fact that we are watching a movie -- a product of the mass media -- at exactly the moment when Tyler is attempting to undermine the influence of the media. Fincher is deconstructing himself. There is another example of this technique when Tyler is getting on a bus and sees a Gucci ad of a naked man and wonders "Is that what a man looks like?" The irony is that Tyler is played by Brad Pitt who has the exact same body as the model in the ad!

Fincher wants us to see that although Tyler is the unnamed narrator's image of an ideal man, that image is something socially constructed by the media. The things Tyler says sound a lot like people such as John Eldredge in his book Wild at Heart (e.g., "God designed men to be dangerous" but our culture teaches us instead "to be a nice guy"). And it is easy to get caught up in Tyler's speeches. But the film subverts itself, pointing out that the message that a "real man" is a macho brute like Mel Gibson (Eldredge argues that Jesus was more like Braveheart's William Wallace than Mother Theresa!) is just another one of the social constructions presented by the mass media.

But we don't notice these acts of self-deconstruction, because we don't want to. In order to realize that the film doesn't think Tyler's brand of machismo is the self-evidently true masculine ideal, you'd have to be able to admit that Fight Club is actually a gay film.