Americans New McCarthyism
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showed 72 percent of Americans opposed the legalization of interracial
marriage.
One function of stereotypes is to turn the people they target into
‘‘things”:
Judge Kramer did not allow television cameras in the
courtroom, but that did not damper interest. Cameras were set
up in another courtroom, wJiere lawyers made statements and
many of the same-sex couples answered questions. At one
point, the opposing sides got into a tiff, ^^4len a lawyer for the
Alliance Defense Fund [co-founded by Dr. James Dobson]
asked the couples to move away from the cameras.
“This is a prop,” the [Alliance Defense Fund] lawyer,
Benjamin W. Bull said, pointing at the rows of [same-sex]
couples.
“Excuse me,” countered one of their lawyers, Gloria Allred.
“They are human beings, not props.” {New York Times,
December 24, 2004)
That has been one of the primary McCarthy-like uses of the stereotypes
and myths deployed by the Christian Right and their political brethren: to
dehumanize gay people and turn them into objects of distrust and revulsion
suitable for moral outrage. These immoral “things” could then be used in
political arguments based solely on the epistemology of fundamentalist religion
and its so-called “traditional” values to undermine the human, social, and
economic reality of gay Americans and their families. From Mary Ellen
Peterson’s 365Gay.com December 28, 2004, report:
Kramer has asked to see additional written arguments by
January 14th. But, [he] has told the city it cannot include
arguments countering the assertions made by conservative
groups opposing same-sex marriage that gays can be cured
and that children are better off with opposite-sex parents.
Among the documents submitted by the Alliance Defense
Fund are statements by Princeton University psychiatrist
Jeffrey Satinover that gays misled the American Psychiatric
Association into removing homosexuality from its list o f
mental disorders in 1973. Satinover regularly promotes socalled 'reparative or aversion therapy 'fo r gays.