Ron Lindsay points out in the Huffington Post that coming out as an atheist is significantly different from coming out as LGBT.
True. Nobody is saying that being straight is based on a lot of unexamined and untenable beliefs. Nobody is saying or hoping that straightitude will wither away. A good many atheists are saying that religion is based on mistaken beliefs and that it does harm as a result, and should either wither away or become very much less obtrusive and demanding and Special.
I don’t foresee a best-selling book entitled “The Straight Delusion” or “Heterosexuality Poisons Everything.” The LGBT community wants acceptance; they don’t want to persuade others to join their “team,” and even if they had that objective, they would strive for it in vain.
By contrast, the amount of literature that has been produced in the last decade criticizing religious belief is extensive and continues to grow. Moreover, these critiques of religion seem to have had some effect.
So the fact that we don’t have two heads or spikes isn’t enough to make us acceptable, and we might as well get used to it. In fact it’s what we want. (“We” as usual are gnus, or outspoken argumentative atheists.) We want to chip away at social deference to religion, and we can’t combine that with claims to be jes’ plain folks like everybody else.
12:49. I can spend a luxurious 11 minutes eating lunch.
I’m happy to read this. I’ve long felt that the analogy between the gay rights and atheist movements was being drawn too uncritically, with little appreciation of the significant differences between them. I think Ron could take this critique further by articulating what additional strategies we might pursue in order to achieve our aims, since simply “coming out” is not going to cut it. I hope, too, that Ron will reevaluate his own past statements drawing odd parallels between the secular and civil rights movements, for example. Sometimes those comparisons have been inaccurate and unhelpful.
I do have to say, though, that the final sentence seems absurd to me: “the path to acceptance may be a bit longer and rougher than it has been for our LGBT friends.” That strikes me as vastly unlikely, almost absurd.
There are at least two instances where the subject of conversion is important: One is the movement out of the closet. There are still many outwardly straight people who are covering their true sexuality with heteronormative behaviors. The second might incorporate some of the first in some blatantly anti-gay individuals [Rent boys anyone?]. These crackpots seem to feel that teh geh is infectious. Once you do the nasty with another guy, you’re ruined for life.
Actually, we do want to persuade people that being gay or trans or bi is something to be proud of and to accept about themselves if they are L, G, B, or T. Coming out is a big part of that. It signifies people changing from identifying as straight or cis or avoiding such misidentification altogether. There is a sort of team spirit to that and it is not striven for in vain.
A similar item from the essay:
Again, many people don’t know they are LGBT for various reasons. Those people are either mistaken about their sexuality or gender identity or ignorant of it (due to youth, for instance). I have known several gay men who lived many of their adolescent and adult years as straight men, including myself. So, yes, I’m sorry, but there are heterosexuals–at least people who identify as such–who are mistaken about their sexuality.
Moreover, I don’t think coming out as an atheist was ever meant to be anything more than coming out as LGBT was meant to be. Both are about acceptance: personal and public. Coming out is not meant to touch on the validity of atheism but on having pride in or being comfortable with personally identitying as an atheist and doing that in larger and larger social circles. Coming out does not win intellectual battles and never has (though it might have a part in winning legal battles).
I should add that it does win intellectual battles when the battle being fought is over whether or not LGBT people or atheists exist!
@James Croft:
I’m in agreement with Lindsay but equivocal about what you say @2. My explanation is turning out to be vary, very long, so that it may turn into a post “Growing up Gay and Atheist” and I want to run it by Ophelia rather than just leave it in a comment.
Also, rather than just leaving a pointer to your own blog post on this topic from late May myself here in the comments, i think you should offer it to FtB and decide whether you want to have it posted by reference, sending people to your blog, or have a separate copy on FtB.
“Nobody is saying that being straight is based on a lot of unexamined and untenable beliefs.”
One of us is clearly reading the wrong Tumblrs. 🙂
Dang, i should have refreshed before I posted.
As Aratina says, there are gay people who make it into adulthood before figuring it out. One from the 1990s or thereabouts who fought his expulsion from Anapolis was Joseph Steffan. He was notable for being top of his class or something like that.
Another one (as in, roughly the same timeframe, and he also wrote a book about it) I can’t remember the name of, and can’t dredge it up with some Amazon searching. He was notable to me because he fooled around with other guys, I think even having anal sex, but didn’t think of himself as gay but was disappointed when his partners “outgrew” this “play.” I could be misremembering some of this, I read it so long ago, but I was completely struck that he was so un-selfaware.
People who deal with STDs, especially AIDS, have the “Men who have Sex with Men” category. I also imagine that those people who grow up in the most socially isolated (from e.g. our great society with gays on television and in the news and as referents spouting from the mouths of politicians) might, to paraphrase what dirigible quotes, be living a straight lifestyle based on a lot of unexamined and untenable beliefs. If that social isolation is religion-based they could be the hardest to get to, with their identities tied up not only in religion but straightness.
I have trouble with that, as in, I can’t empathize. I’m only attracted to men, and figured that out even before I’d ejaculated the first time. I’m 55 btw.
I guess in summary (I need to do other things including sleep) you can’t say whether the journey to religion-free self-acceptance or sexual orientation/identity self-acceptance is more difficult. That’s a question that’s probably pointless to try to answer, like attempting to hierarchicalize different modes of discrimination.
Agreed. Although people who make this argument, even though it is easily supported by evidence, often get straw-manned as claiming that sexuality is merely a choice, uninfluenced by any other factors.
Social brainwashing that occurs from an early age is a very, very powerful force. It can easily confuse people into believing delusions, and prevent them from exploring who they are. That’s even the entire point, from the conformist point of view.
Indeed, it is pointless. A common phrase used to describe it is “oppression olympics”. There is no verifiable or objective answer to the question, so arguing about it is the same as challenging someone else’s priorities.
Unfortunately, too many people adopt a view that says only the oppression that affects them is important, and everything else may be overlooked. This undermines intersectionality, and prevents us as a society from recognizing the countless different ways in which each kind of oppression can be traced back to very similar root attitudes and behaviors.
Aratina, I agree, people can be mistaken or ignorant about their sexuality. My best friend from undergrad realized he was gay in his late 20s or early 30s, which goes against popular understanding. So I would like to see better public understanding of that.
But reading Ron Lindsay’s post Coming Out Atheist Is Not the Same Thing As Coming Out LGBT, you can see many of his points coming from Greta Christina’s two-part post, We’re Telling Them They’re Wrong: Why Coming Out Atheist Is Inherently Oppositional and Coming Out Atheist Is Different from Coming Out Queer – But Still Sort Of The Same.
Where Lindsay wrote:
he meant exactly what Christina wrote:
And where Lindsay wrote:
he meant exactly what Christina wrote:
I’m not sure if your thoughts at 4. really addressed what those quotes meant (where “team” and “recruit” were euphemisms). Anyway, you might want to read those Greta Christina posts, which devote more space to coming out atheist having an oppositional aspect, whether we like it or not.
I totally agree with you saying, “I don’t think coming out as an atheist was ever meant to be anything more than coming out as LGBT was meant to be.” I agree, that is the intention, and the goal is “acceptance: personal and public.” But in my experience, coming out atheist to a Jewish friend for example, I mentioned bus ads “Good Without God” being “carefully crafted to be positive and mild” and still getting remarkable resistance, and she replied, “I can appreciate the slicing effect it has on a person whose belief system is centered around that G-d that you dismiss.”
Greta Christina says, “I think atheists need to cop to that.”
@Dave Ricks
Thank you for the links. I didn’t realize the connection between Greta Christina’s essays and this one by Ron Lindsay.
I still see solid parallels between coming out as an atheist and as LGBT (I’ll drop the T in what follows since I am speaking from experience, but I don’t suppose it is that much different). The word “recruit” is often used by bigots as a scare tactic, but it is a really silly one if any critical thought is applied to it at all. By promoting the belief that gay people can recruit straight people to the gay team, the bigots are actually the ones saying that straight people don’t have to be straight and are only doing so out of choice.
The reality is that there is so much pressure on gay and bi people to not come out (and on straight people to not be accepting of gayness and bisexuality in their friends) in most places that a successful gay rights campaign (like the creation of a school LGBT club) that relieves some of that pressure and lets people question their sexuality or become comfortable identifying as gay or bi or be BFFs with gay or bi people can seem like it is recruiting straight people.
There are also, unfortunately, plenty of straight people (and “straight” people) who believe that gayness or bisexuality do not really exist or should not exist. These are people like parents who would turn on their own child if she or he came out. Coming out to one of them is very much challenging that person’s beliefs, especially recently since many super-Christians tend to wear their hatred of LGB people on their sleeves. If such people were all exotic Westboro Baptist specimens from under the darkside of the rainbow, that would hardly matter to anyone, but the bigots are often family, relatives, friends of family, superiors at work, landlords, neighbors, etc. For LGB people who have to face these bigots, getting them to change their beliefs about gayness and bisexuality are incredibly important, and coming out to one of them is an oppositional act. There is hope that minds will be eventually changed so that relations can smooth and continue, while the intention is to be accepted for who one is by people that matter.
So, I think the reaction you get coming out as LGBT or as an atheist is a mixed bag. I’ve had really bad reactions coming out as an atheist to some (being told by one guy that he wanted to punch me and getting treated like the devil incarnate by a woman on a bus), but to others (even a Muslim) it was no big deal and didn’t affect our relationship in the slightest. How personally a theist will take it depends on the theist.
@Dave Ricks
I see that Greta Christina covered the same points in the second link you provided.