(The New Republic)
Washington is the capital of awkward alliances, but few are more revealing
than Bill Bennett's recent espousal of the work of one Paul Cameron.
In an appearance on ABC's "This Week," and then in the pages of The
Weekly Standard, Bennett has openly declared that research shows that
the average life span for a male homosexual in America is 43 years.
In the Standard, Bennett was so thrilled and shocked by this discovery
that he repeated it in italics: "Forty-three."
The source for this information, as Bennett subsequently revealed,
is a researcher named Paul Cameron. Loyal tnr readers will fondly
remember this curious character. (See "Queer Science," by Mark Pietrzyk,
October 3, 1994.) As Pietrzyk reported, Cameron was expelled by the
American Psychological Association in 1983 for misrepresenting the
findings of others and engaging in dubious research techniques. Among
Cameron's "findings" are that 52 percent of male heterosexuals have
shoplifted and that twelve percent have either attempted or committed
murder. Over the years he has also argued that gay men are responsible
for up to one half of all child abuse cases (despite making up maybe
two percent of the population), that they are ten to 20 times more
likely to molest children than heterosexuals, and that fully half
of all sex murderers are homosexuals. One of Cameron's "studies" included
41 gay men out of a total sample of 4,340 adults. Another was based
on interviews with 34 serial killers. One of his "pamphlets" is illustrated
by a photograph of an adult male arm dragging a small boy into a public
restroom. This is what the former secretary of Education thinks is
social science.
Bennett's favorite Cameron statistic--the average life span of 43
for all gay men--is based on obituaries from gay newspapers during
the height of the aids epidemic. Useful for some things, that plague!
But even then, the statistic is misleading. As any student of these
papers knows, the obit sections--which scarcely existed before aids-
-are primarily ways to commemorate openly gay people who have died
early deaths. (An indication of this is that the same study found
that the average age of gay men who died of causes other than aids
was 42.) These neighborhood papers--with very limited pages--in no
way attempt to record all homosexual deaths, and rarely do so. In
fact, there's no database, in a stillcloseted world, that could. The
statistic, in other words, is based on a skewed sample of a subset
of homosexuals in a grotesquely atypical period. It's about as reliable
as basing a statistical survey of death rates in the general population
from people admitted to emergency rooms.
But this, in some respects, is hardly revealing. There have always
been hate-filled cranks out there. What's revealing is that Bennett
clearly couldn't care less about the source of his data. It's a great
sound bite, the kind of thing that sticks in the mind, something that,
even when it's exposed, carries a useful political punch. In the
letters section of the Standard, Bennett cites not only Cameron for
his early death point, but another man, this time with a medical degree:
Jeffrey Satinover. Satinover has argued in print that all gay men
are pathological and compulsive; that the most effective policy for
them is a fundamentalist religious conversion; and that the Renaissance
"could have just as easily been called `The Great Death,'" since it
killed off the anti-pagan hegemony of "Judeo-Christianity" in favor
of modern science.
I have no idea whether Bill Bennett regrets the Renaissance, but there
is little doubt about his facile use of "facts." Just as typical was
Bennett's casual reference on "This Week" to "the great continuing
interest of the homosexual male community into [sic] recruiting children
into its ranks." Note the generalization. Bennett blithely accuses
a whole group of people of wanting to commit the most heinous crime
against innocents, with no evidence whatsoever. It was the device
once used by anti-Semites. Why should it not now be used by a leading
conservative intellectual? And among his "plain evidence" for this
in the Standard were remarks by gay leaders condemning pedophilia!
Go figure.
No, what's truly revealing is what he infers from his recitation of
a gay male life span of 43 years. Does he argue that this shocking
"statistic" makes it more essential for gay men to practice safe sex?
No: Bennett seems uninterested in that debate insofar as it pertains
to gay men (and he has opposed safe-sex education for gay teens).
Does he argue that gay men should be monogamous to cut down HIV transmission?
Well, not if it means implementing any measures to foster gay monogamy,
such as the right to marry or even domestic partnership. Does he
argue that the social costs of aids make it even more vital to finance
HIV research? Funny, Bennett hasn't exactly made a cause of that.
No, the only use Bennett makes of this statistic is that it helps
prove that homosexuality is bad and should therefore be discouraged,
or, rather that, "if you're a homosexual male in this country, it
takes 30 years off your life." And what does he mean by this formulation?
Does he believe that gay men choose their orientation and therefore
need to be encouraged to make a heterosexual choice? No, he doesn'
t. On "This Week," he said: "I think the best state-of-the-art science
right now is the belief that some people are hard-wired this way."
His argument, rather, is that if we don't continue to marginalize
homosexuals, then a few "wavering" bisexual men might be tempted to
"choose" homosexuality and therefore be more likely to die off at
the tender age of "forty-three." Or, in his words: "Some people make
the choice, and there are a lot of people in the middle. If there
are a lot of people in the middle, if there are a lot of waverers,
we should be sending signals ... of what society needs to prefer.
And it needs to prefer heterosexuality."
So let's get this straight (so to speak). What Bennett is really saying
is that one group of citizens should be publicly stigmatized, denied
the right to marry, legally fired at will from their jobs, expelled
from the military despite exemplary service, and thrown to the dogs
of an epidemic without any social incentives to help rescue them,
merely pour decourager les autres. Has Bennett thought for a moment,
I wonder, about the morality of this little piece of social engineering?
Has his conscience even twitched a little at the thought of using
some people's lives (and with aids, this is not a metaphor) to adjust
the social signals sent to others? One is led to wonder, in fact,
if Bennett isn't actually in favor of gay promiscuity, because it'
s a far more useful didactic tool for him than the discomfiting vision
of stable, responsible, homosexual couples.
Imagine if Bennett had made the same argument about African Americans.
In that case, there are, in fact, reliable statistics that show that
the life span for blacks is significantly lower than that of whites.
Imagine if Bennett got on television and declared this to be a scandal,
but subsequently opposed any measures to alleviate it. Imagine, indeed,
if he used that statistic to defend the right of someone not to hire
a black person because one could reasonably infer that a black person
would be more likely to get sick. Imagine, in the most apposite case,
if he declared that, because of this statistic, black people should
not be allowed to marry whites because they would import into white
society patterns of life-threatening behavior which need to be discouraged.
Well, the truth is: you can't imagine. Because all of those statements
would be regarded as prima facie evidence of racism, and Bennett would
instantly lose any credibility he once had. But with gay men and women,
such statements are regarded as completely banal, and Bennett actually
gains points among some conservatives for voicing them. He will argue-
-with a straight face--that he is not against civil rights for homosexuals,
he just wants to tell them what is good for them. He believes, as
he wrote in the Standard, that gay men and lesbians are entitled to
rights "owed all Americans as Americans."
But that does not, apparently, include the right to serve one's country,
a right granted to African Americans as a symbolic mark of their
citizenship during the Revolutionary War and to heterosexual women
and blacks equally this century. And it does not include the right
not to be fired from one's job merely because one is gay, regardless
of one's abilities. And it does not include the right not to be imprisoned
because of private, consensual sex. And it does not include the right
of mothers to the custody of their own children. And it does not include
the right to visit a spouse of many years who is dying in an intensive
care room. And it does not, critically, include the right to marry,
a right declared by our Supreme Court to be one of the "basic civil
rights of man," vested, again according to the Court, in the Declaration
of Independence, prior to the Bill of Rights, and more fundamental
even than the right to vote, a right guaranteed to murderers and prisoners
and rapists and dead-beat dads and noncitizens, but not to gay and
lesbian Americans for something that even Bennett concedes is "hard-
wired" into their identity. "Rights owed all Americans as Americans"
? The truth is, Bennett, consciously or unconsciously, believes the
word "Americans" does not include gay men and women. It's clarifying
to hear him say it.
He will also argue that he is not demonizing people, he is demonizing
behavior. But if he means by that behavior promiscuity, does he not
have a moral and intellectual obligation to propose something to tackle
it? Would he think, for example, that mere lecturing would be enough
for heterosexual men if they too had no right to marry their loved
one? What, I wonder, would he think would happen among straights if
marriage didn't exist, if, indeed, domestic partnership didn't exist,
if their relationships were accorded no public recognition and acknowledgment,
their children no legal rights to their parents, their commitment
to each other no moral or social support? From Bennett's writings,
I have no doubt what he thinks would happen: social chaos. But the
incentives Bennett believes are essential for one segment of the society
are to be ruled out of bounds for another. There is only one possible
explanation for this. It is that Bennett considers gay men and women
so beneath and beyond the concern of real society that it is incumbent
upon him merely to echo the stigmas that perpetuate their exclusion.
And if that isn't close to a definition of bigotry, then I don't know
what is.
Andrew Sullivan, Gay-bashing
by the numbers.: FALSE BENNETT. , The New Republic, 01-05-1998.