One Utah

I’ve added some text to expand on some ideas.  I’ve noted them.

The brouhaha in American Fork holds a morbid fascination for me. The American Fork PTSA invited a group to address their meeting and talk about the dangers of pornography. What they discovered they were going to get was a denunciation of glbt persons dressed in the cloak of truthiness. The group that was to speak calls itself Standard of Liberty (apparently a Book of Mormon term) and trades in misinformation, lies and bigotry. This group has decided the single greatest threat to everything they hold dear is glbt people. The American Fork PTSA cancelled the meeting which was reorganized and held at the local public library.

Having spent some time over at Standard of Liberty’s site, I feel comfortable saying that it’s obvious they know nothing about sexuality. The “experts” they quote are without exception right wing activists not actual researchers and scientists. They approvingly link to groups like NARTH, a group which believes homosexuality is a disease to be cured, and to organizations like Concerned Women for America and Mission America; these are groups whose “science” on sexuality starts with the conclusions then ignores all the evidence that doesn’t support their conclusions. The Standard of Liberty folks often decry their Utah County neighbors as being insufficiently righteous. In one pathetically laughable incident, they got the vapors over some country music artist posing naked in Playgirl and later performing in Utah County. Reading through their site, one comes across statements that having a gay child is embarrassing and they approvingly quote notoriously anti-gay quack Charles Socarides as saying that having a gay child is like having a death in the family and he doesn’t mean that mentaphorically. So they got their presentation and they’re pretending its some sort of victory for First Amendment rights.

New text  Standard of Liberty’s website - the content of which seems to be the product of Steven and Janice Graham the founders - focuses extremely narrowly on issues of sexuality.  Article after article creates false contrasts between “moral” straight behavior and “immoral” homosexual behavior, ignoring the reality that heterosexuals engage in exactly the same behaviors:

same sex sexual attraction often involves a gamut of acting out, including preoccupation with sex, masturbation, fantasizing or lust, pornography, and sinful associations such as gay clubs, internet chat rooms, telephone sex, cross dressing, flirting, dating, and cruising. All these are mental and physical choices and acts. 

This list of “sins” is absurdly all inclusive.  Flirting and dating are sins?  And you know, most sex clubs are straight sex clubs.  Acting out?  The morality such a statement embraces infantilizes persons, denies them their full moral agency by seeing sexual orientation as a matter of “acting out.”  I find it almost impossible to read such a list without feeling a sense of sadness for people who embrace such retrograde attitudes.  Fantasy, lust and masturbation are all normals parts of the human sexual experience.  Dismissing them as acting out strikes me as sadly limited.

The Utah Pride center is doing their own public meeting in American Fork a week form today. I’ll be honest, I’m afraid they’re gonna mess it up.

Don’t get me wrong, I have tremendous respect for the work they do and the professionalism they bring to a difficult and at times thankless job.  The Pride Center is frequently on the front lines of conflict about sexuality in Utah. Their youth programs are vitally important to a great many kids. I’m scared they’ll mess up for all the right reasons, but they’ll still mess up. 

Here’s my take on it:  Utah County, despite the pearl clutching concerns of the Standard of Liberty folks, is one of the most culturally conservative places in the US. When I’m in a charitable mood, I describe Utah County as the exemplar of everything that is right with Mormonism. When I’m more honest, I describe it as the exemplar of Mormonism, all the good and all the bad, emphatically emphasized. When it comes to sexuality, that has resulted at least in the appearance of a false consensus - the unstated belief that we all believe the same thing, have had the same experiences and want the same things. Martha Beck has talked about the ways in which Mormonism takes issues with which it is uncomfortable and put thems on a shelf and pretends they’re not there; her experience talking about sexual abuse in Utah County was one of unleashing the floodgates and suddenly it felt as if she couldn’t turn the corner without running into someone who wanted desperately to talk to her about their experience.

On matters of sexuality in general, Utah County residents have learned to not discuss it publicly. The success of a group like Standard of Liberty is not in stereotyping and misinforming about gay and lesbian folk. They trade on the belief that even discussing sexuality is dirty and wrong. They play on people’s misperceptions about sexuality and deliberately use the term sexuality to mean sex (you know, doing the deed, bumping uglies, you know, fucking) and conflate disparate concepts. They spread their misinformation about glbt persons, but that misinformation is based on a whole set of bad assumptions about human sexuality. For instance, in Our Whole Lives, we talk about the idea that people are sexual beings from birth to death, referring to the Circles of Sexuality, that model our sexual selves as having multiple components, such as gender and gender identity, the need for intimacy and closeness. Groups like Standard of Liberty deliberately misunderstand that model to claim that proponents of that view believe children should be having sex.

So here’s my thing. The Pride Center is going to put together resources and go down and give a presentation on gay people. They’ll address the lies about gay people spread by Standard of Liberty and they’ll walk away having accomplished nothing. They won’t have addressed the underlying assumptions on which the bigots at Standard of Liberty trade. Reading the articles written by the Grahams who founded and run Standard of Liberty, you get a deeper dis-ease about sexuality. They talk about it almost exclusively in negative terms; its portrayed as addictive, dangerous, deadly. It is a fear-based monologue about sexuality that has the effect of making readers less comfortable with sexuality. You effectively know less after you read their stuff than you did before.  New Text.  I suspect the Pride Center will make the mistake of going in to debunk the lies told by the Grahams; for the general public that becomes a battle of the experts, which results in a draw.  For a group like Standard of Liberty, the goal is to keep people from having the full facts about sexuality.  In a battle of the experts, the general audience walks away confused, throwing their hands in the air.

If it were up to me, here’s what I would do.

First, you have to validate that feelings of people that talking about sex is wrong and uncomfortable. Give them a chance to own their discomfort with the topic. That by itself will reduce dis-ease. Get the reasons it’s awkward up where everyone can see them, then explore the Our Whole Lives values and assumptions. In particular, the idea that information about sexuality is helpful, not harmful. The four key values and the assumptions are powerful tools. (Those values are Self Worth, Responsibility, Sexual Health, and Justice and Inclusivity; the assumptions include things like sexual intercourse is only one of many valid ways of expressing sexual feelings, and each person is entitled to their own values and ideas about sexuality.)

Then, give them some tools to understand and talk about sexuality. I like the Circles of Sexuality because it allows people to see the different aspects of being a sexual being and to see the need for intimacy is not the same thing as the need for intercourse. It gives a chance to talk about ideas like skin hunger and to see the distinction between gender and gender roles. The circle on sexualization is a chance to explore how even if we’ve never been victims of the misuse of sexuality, it still impacts our lives. I think it would be valuable to let people think about and know that each of us has been wounded in different ways with regard to our sexuality.

With those minimal tools in hand, you can talk about sexuality. I’d do forced choices exercises and give people a chance to think about their values and experiences. I’d use this activity as a way to being introducing ideas about sexual orientation and about the reality of gay lives.

I’d go through all the earlier steps for one simple reason: most people don’t have a language with which to discuss sexuality. Especially in culturally conservative places, public discussion of sexuality is stilted and limited to some very narrow concepts.

Honoring people’s discomfort and exploring the Our Whole Lives values and assumptions will give participants a language with which to discuss sexuality. Getting the participants actually participating will give them ownership of the content. In essence, effectively responding to the Grahams means shortcircuiting what they’re doing - which is creating fear about sexuality in general, and then focusing on glbt issues. If you give people tools to understand sexuality that are comprehensive, easy to understand and reduce discomfort with the topic, you essentially undo the damage done by the Grahams. Participants will walk away from the evening owning the topic and the content, more comfortable with the topic of sexuality. And that, more than disabusing people of the lies about gay people and sexual orientation told by the Grahams, will have a transformative effect.

This entry was posted Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 7:08 am and is filed under Bigotry, Bigotry, Bullying, Conservatives, Homophobia, Mormon LDS, Religious Fundamentalism, Sex, This Blog, censorship. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.