The Gospel According to Gaga (Or, “Take a Load off Fanny”)
Election Reflections #9: How Gays Became the Religious Right’s “Arch” (And More Importantly, Why)
Take a load off Fanny. Take a load for free. Take a load off Fanny. And put the load right on me. – The Band, The Weight
I'm beautiful in my way, cause God makes no mistakes. I'm on the right track, baby, I was born this way. – Lady Gaga, Born This Way
In the last letter, we touched on the unenviable situation segregationists found themselves in when society had shifted, and all of a sudden, there was an embarrassing amount of evidence of their bigotry – including images from Birmingham like this one:
But as bad as that was, what really put them between a rock and a hard place were images like this one:
It’s nearly impossible to claim the moral high ground, which is the position religious supremacists have always coveted for themselves when racists, in full Klan garb, are proudly posing for photos crowded around the pulpit in front of a packed congregation with a “Jesus Saves” banner in the background. Advocates of segregation were actively seeking an image makeover, some way of clouding society’s memory of all they’d done in the name of racial supremacy. And the only way to do that was by serving up a new threat, one that would allow them to shift from being the attackers of children to their protectors. That’s exactly what a war on gays would allow them to do. It’s a story with five parts.
I. The Homosexuals
An ethics course in seminary was the first time I saw The Homosexuals, a CBS-sponsored documentary broadcast in 1967, and that was anchored by Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes fame. The hour-long segment aired at what might be the most dynamic period in American history. Everywhere we looked, people were demanding the rights they rightfully should have had all along. But none of that could happen without us making some fundamental changes.
Though televised two years before the Stonewall Uprising occurred, we’d already seen a decade of increasingly audacious gay rights activism, including protests of the 1965 New Year’s Day arrest of attendees at a fundraising ball held by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual; the picketing of the White House to draw attention to the federal government’s firing of people for no other reason than their orientation, and the Compton’s Cafeteria Riots in protest against ongoing harassment and brutality by the SFPD.
The Homosexuals followed in the footsteps of the 1961 The Rejected, the first documentary made covering what was then called the homophile movement. However, the two shows could not have been more different. Even their names reflected each show’s perspective. The Rejected called us to look at what we were doing to our gay citizens. The Homosexuals, however, was about what “those people” were doing, both with each other and by extension, to the rest of us.
Sitting there watching both shows long after they’d aired, it seemed clear how the latter, with its sensationalistic reporting, along with the increasingly bombastic rhetoric coming from church pulpits across America, served to only further stir the social hostility that made an uprising like Stonewall necessary. The show began:
There is a growing concern about homosexuals in society – their increasing visibility. In preparing this broadcast, CBS News commissioned a survey by The Opinion Research Corporation in the public attitudes towards homosexuality. We discovered that Americans consider homosexuality more harmful to society than adultery, abortion or prostitution.
Mike Wallace then referenced Dr. Charles Socarides, who at the time of the interview, was clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, and who had stated repeatedly and emphatically that homosexuality “is, in fact, a mental illness.” In its description of gays, the program stated:
The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested or capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. His sex life, his love life, consists of a series of one-chance encounters at the clubs and bars he inhabits. And even on the streets of the city – the pick-up, the one night stand, these are characteristics of the homosexual relationship… There is even talk of a homosexual mafia in the arts, dominating various fields – theatre, music, dance, fashion. In painting, there is the commonly expressed notion that the homosexual’s influence has been corrupting.
Still, we can’t lay all the blame on this lone CBS broadcast. In fact, in the six years between the two programs, general religious consensus had shifted from believing that same-gendered sex should be decriminalized to making gays the new Red Scare. Mike Wallace, for his part, would come to regret his participation in the broadcast. "I should have known better," he said in 1992.
But incendiary programming notwithstanding, all kinds of amazing Americans from Bayard Rustin, Harvey Milk and James Baldwin, to Congresswoman Barbara Boxer, astronaut Sally Ride, Nobel Peace Prize recipient Jane Addams and Senator Tammy Baldwin to activists Kiyoshi Kuromiya, Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera all prove that people of diverse sexualities and identities have been making us a better nation for as long as we’ve been a nation.
Or, take my fellow Alabamian, Navy Seal Brett Jones, who explained that he knew as a kid that he didn’t feel the same way about girls that his buddies did. He didn’t have a name for it until he heard a sermon about the “evils” of homosexuality. "Oh!" he thought. "That's what it's called." (Thanks, pastor!)
By the late ‘60s, change was afoot everywhere, including for the LGBTQ+ community who, taking a page from the playbooks of other oppressed groups, had begun demanding, instead of just pleading for rights that should already have been theirs. In doing so, they came to embody two very real threats to the supremacist agenda; they started using their considerable power to gain representation and, because the LGBTQ+ community includes members of every other segment, they were in a position to bring essentially everyone, including churchgoers together.
Bayard Rustin, in From Protest to Politics, laid out a roadmap for this very thing – what a new majority of people who want a society that works for all of us instead of just some of us could look like. That vision was put into practice by fellow activist and gay man Harvey Milk, who won office by building a vast coalition that brought together everyone from San Francisco’s ethnic groups to the city’s working class, labor unions, and of course, the flourishing LGBTQ+ community. Which, in the minds of supremacists, ratcheted up their threat level from zero to public enemy #1.
By the mid-70s, simply being gay had been declared the greatest threat facing our nation since communism – worse than abortion, adultery and prostitution – just as the CBS survey presented in The Homosexuals had suggested. The gay liberation movement had become Christian supremacy’s primary target, one that they could attack with vigor while still positioning themselves as the saviors of society. And there’s perhaps no better example of that than Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign.
II. Saint Bernards and Nail Biters
On January 18, 1977, Dade County, Florida, passed an ordinance that expanded anti-discrimination statutes in employment, housing, and public services to cover sexual orientation; a law proposed by newly elected Metro-Dade County Commissioner Ruth Shack. The new statute would eventually draw the ire of entertainer Anita Bryant, who would make its rescission her life focus. Prior to the ordinance’s proposal, Anita and Ruth had not only been friends; Anita had contributed $1,000 to Ruth’s campaign, and Ruth’s husband was Anita’s talent agent.
Anita’s overriding concern was that the ordinance would not allow for the firing of teachers who were gay even in religious schools, after her pastor had warned her that schools were the new “homosexual hunting grounds” and pressed her to lend her celebrity to the cause. He set up a meeting between Anita and a retired police sergeant who presented her with images of naked children, claiming that they’d been ostensibly taken by “gay perverts”. And though all it did was extend the same basic protections to sexuality minorities, the meeting where the ordinance would be considered was overrun by scandalized churchgoers who’d traveled from across the country to fight the “homosexual menace”.
Anita spoke for them when she, in a classic example of victim-reversal, reframed the statute as an assault on her civil rights: "The ordinance condones immorality and discriminates against my children's rights to grow up in a healthy, decent community." Still, the resolution passed, and in response, New Right religious leaders devised a battle plan – gather 10,000 signatures to force a voter referendum. They approved the name "Save Our Children, Inc." and voted Anita president. Two months in, a poll indicated that women in Dade County actually opposed repealing the measure 2 to 1; many of them, unlike Anita, had gay friends and therefore weren’t alarmed. Alarming them became the organization’s core strategy.
They did everything they could to convince people that if we lose the power to unilaterally fire gays, evict them, etc., they’ll run roughshod over society; that simply by existing, they posed the greatest threat to America’s children that the nation had ever seen; the same rhetoric FBI director J. Edgar Hoover used against the BPP, among others. “Leaders and representatives of the Black Panther Party travel extensively all over the United States preaching their gospel of hate and violence not only to ghetto residents [emphasis added], but to students in colleges, universities and high schools as well.”
"As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children, “Anita would say, “Therefore, they must recruit our children." And, "If gays are granted rights, next we'll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with Saint Bernards and to nail biters." And, on June 7, 1977, Anita's campaign succeeded; the anti-discrimination ordinance was repealed by a margin of 69 to 31%. Anita then declared, "All America and all the world will hear what the people have said, and with God's continued help we will prevail in our fight to repeal similar laws throughout the nation."
But things didn’t go anything like she’d hoped or planned. Her declaration of war led to a massive boycott of every product she’d once helped sell. Companies cut ties with her, endorsements were lost, and the only appearances she could book were with supporters of Save Our Children and similar causes. Both her career and her marriage evaporated. But even more important was her impact on the LGBTQ+ community. Because, instead of silencing them, supremacists had essentially caused the very thing they’d hoped to prevent. Not unlike the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor, they’d woken the sleeping giant.
Their attacks would galvanize the movement in ways no one could ever have imagined, and in the process, the community honed the political skills they would need for a much bigger threat than Anita ever was – the AIDS epidemic. They’d master important lessons about everything from self-love to resilience to owning one’s power. And in the end, love would win. “But,” you might be thinking, “What does all this have to do with the election we just had?” Actually, a lot.
III. Negrophobes and Segregationists
In 1964 – 2024: Meeting History, my birthday post, I included a quote by New Right political strategist Kevin Phillips where he explained how he wasn’t concerned about African Americans registering as Democrats, the longstanding home of segregationists. He was encouraged: "The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South,” he said in a 1970 New York Times interview, “The sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are; without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats."
The statement summarized the core premise of his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, considered the first systematic articulation of what would come to be known as the Southern Strategy, the idea that the newly taken-over Republican Party could re-establish political dominance and offset membership decline simply by doing one thing – utilizing the bigotry and racial hysteria that had been stoked mostly by Democrats and especially in the South, for more than a century to its advantage.
By the early ‘70s, “Negrophobes” and segregationists had, as Kevin predicted, coalesced under the Republican banner, and though an ideological minority, they’d set about taking it over. But, as Lee Atwater surmised, they had to be smart about it. The days of running around shouting “Nigger, Nigger!” were over. So, what did they do? They flipped the narrative. We’d become a society where the “Negro menace” was increasingly a tough sell. But the “homosexual menace”? They could work with that.
Supremacists on the political side only had the weak “states’ rights” argument, which is why they resorted to, “The Niggers are coming! The Niggers are coming!” But supremacists on the religious side had something way better – an ancient collection of stories they could use to justify all kinds of things. They took the load off poor, beleaguered segregation and put the load right on homophobia, abortion, and, according to Reagan, “welfare queens”, “strapping young bucks” and the “war on drugs”.
They stopped trying to silence people calling for equality and shifted the conversation from First Amendment rights (freedom of speech) to Second Amendment rights (bearing arms). They stopped posing for photos in Klan hoods in front of “Jesus Saves” banners and got clear on what, exactly, society needed saving from. They needed a radical rebrand, one that ideally could shift them from being the villains of the story to its heroes – the lone defenders of morality, family values and the America we used to be.
They took over the NRA (National Rifle Association), an organization started by the Union Army and, that had historically supported gun control, including the Gun Control Act of 1968, turning it into gun control’s greatest enemy. They created the “pro-life” platform plank after changing the Southern Baptist stance from “life begins at breath” to “life begins at conception”, then started bombing Planned Parenthood clinics instead of African American churches.
They radicalized local Christian congregations and conscripted congregants into the culture war they’d launched, charging them to oppose everything from gay rights statutes to no-fault divorce while supporting everything from “Stand Your Ground” to the death penalty. (“I learned that murderers pay for their crimes – even if we make a mistake sometimes” – Pete Seeger, What Did You Learn in School?)
They claimed that Tinky Winky, the PBS children’s programming character was gay: “He is purple—the gay pride color, and his antenna is shaped like a triangle—the gay pride symbol,” said Jerry Falwell, at that time, one of the most powerful pastors in America. (He went on to explain, on the Today Show, no less, how Tinky Winky is a boy, but talks in a high voice. Then, there’s the red “purse” he sometimes carries, which apparently clinches it.)
In 1980, Bob Jones III, president of segregationist Christian Bob Jones University publicly advocated for the stoning of Americans who were LGBTQ+. And starting in 2022, self-described “true Christians” began gathering, with their Bibles aloft, to pray outside libraries where drag queens sang the ABCs with kids inside and read books to them about how it’s OK to be different; denouncing library staff members as “from the devil.”
IV. The Party of Pat Robertson
In a March 1986 memo distributed to the Iowa Republican County Caucus, Southern Baptist televangelist and de facto head of the emergent religious right, Pat Robertson, provided the following advice on how to participate in the takeover of the Republican Party:
Rule the world for God. Give the impression [emphasis added] that you are there to work for the party, not push an ideology. Hide your strength. Don’t flaunt your Christianity. Christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers control political parties and so it is very important that mature Christians have a majority of leadership positions whenever possible, God willing.
The memo’s directive wasn’t new. It was the distillation of the same strategy they’d used to take over the Southern Baptist Convention – by far, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, a feat they accomplished by doing one thing – electing a president who shared their theocratic values ten years straight, then using that position to oust everyone who wasn’t philosophically aligned.
Pat, in his 1990 book, The New Millennium, made a statement that summed up the strategy that’s led to every political victory this faction has achieved since, including in 2024: "With the [voter] apathy that exists today, a well-organized minority can influence the selection of candidates to an astonishing degree." Two years later, he would go on to state to the Denver Post that, "We want...as soon as possible to see a majority of the Republican Party in the hands of pro-family Christians..."
And that’s exactly what happened. They’d not only bring their ideological tribe together under the GOP’s banner, claiming it as their land flowing with milk and honey, they’d set about subduing and silencing the people already living there, the old-style Republicans who didn’t share their values. Pat, at that time, the most famous religious personality in America, would emerge as the needed bridge between New Right political strategists, Republican elected officials and the church; taking this message to the congregation of the faithful and legitimizing it in the pulpit; just as Martin had preached social justice and nonviolence.
In 1987, he’d launch the Christian Coalition; a massive and far-reaching effort to outrage religious voters and, with copious spiritual war imagery, terrify them into helping win political races. The organization rose to prominence quickly. In 1994, by election time, they’d distributed over 40 million copies of what they called the Family Values Voter's Guide in more than 100,000 churches across the country. In order to not violate laws prohibiting churches from campaigning, the guides were an ingenious way of communicating which candidates supported what they’d identified as Christian values; of utter importance to God.
And the results were remarkable: that year, Republicans took control of Congress for the first time since the supremacist takeover of the party itself, and they made unprecedented gains in state legislatures; not just in the South, but throughout the nation. Prior to the 1994 election, Democrats held majorities in 25 state legislatures, whereas Republicans held eight. After the 1994 election, Democrats had majorities in 18 states, whereas Republicans held 19.
And the strategy had legs. In 1997, Fortune magazine ranked the Christian Coalition the 7th most powerful political organization in America, Time Magazine, in 1995, had already dubbed Ralph Reed, who Pat had appointed to run the organization, "The Right Hand of God", and by 2004, people affiliated with their faction controlled all three branches of the federal government. Still, over time, it became evident that something had gone dramatically wrong for the group that had taken over the Republican Party, even for people like Kevin Phillips, originator of the Southern Strategy.
V. Tactics of Attrition
In his 2006 book, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, Kevin presented what one New York Times book reviewer called, "A nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed, and dangerous shortsightedness." He cited extensive quotes from politicians who’d adopted this theocratic framing (far beyond the recent tendency to end every speech with “And God bless the United States of America!”), including from George W Bush where the president actually inferred that he was speaking for God.
And Kevin was far from the only one. Years later, Michael Gerson, Evangelical, longtime Republican strategist, George W Bush administration staff member, and conservative Christian author sought to address similar themes. In a September 1, 2022 Washington Post column, his last before succumbing to cancer, he had this to say:
“Much of what considers itself Christian America has assumed the symbols and identity of white authoritarian populism, an alliance that is a serious, unfolding threat to liberal democracy… Leaders in the Republican Party have fed, justified and exploited conservative Christians’ defensiveness in service to an aggressive, reactionary politics.
This has included [links provided by him] deadly mask and vaccine resistance, the discrediting of fair elections, baseless accusations of gay “grooming” in schools, the silencing of teaching about the United States’ history of racism, and (for some) a patently false belief that Godless conspiracies have taken hold of political institutions. Some religious leaders have fueled the urgency of this agenda with apocalyptic rhetoric.
They’re both part of a growing list of people who’ve traveled as far as they can with the social supremacy that’s poisoned the party they love and the faith they believe in, in the same way President Jimmy Carter left the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000 due to their increasingly totalitarian views. Of course, they were all repaid by being labeled “traitors”, just as Elwin Wilson, whose “betrayal” was apologizing to John Lewis for being part of the group of segregationists who beat him 50 years prior, back when John was a Freedom Rider, was.
But they’re anything but traitors. What they are, is part of the new American majority, one that gets that it’s not about breaking the nation down into factions – black or white, red or blue, God or gays. It’s not about setting some of us against the rest of us. It’s about realizing that if we don’t become a society that works for all of us, we’ll soon be one that works for none of us. All or none. That’s the real choice.
And while it certainly starts with whistleblowers and those brave enough to sound the alarm, that alone isn’t enough, especially when policies we’ve either created (in Kevin’s case), perpetuated (in Michael’s) or simply allowed (many of the rest of us) have set us on this course. Because the people who’ve wrested the controls are beyond listening. They deny that the bridge is out. All they see is their Promised Land on the other side. But they’re really headed toward the same kind of crash that befell Anita and her faction. That’s the only place this train goes. It’s the only place it can go. Supremacy is, by definition, a tactic of attrition.
What our nation needs from us is the one thing she’s always needed. It just so happens to also be the one thing supremacists can’t abide by and is what they feared most about the surging Gay rights movement – that it would be the great unifier. That love would bring us together. This fear is what made everything from integration to Mildred and Richard Lovings’ marriage to the Rainbow Coalition such threats. Because nothing is more dangerous – or more powerful – than an undivided people.
Now, more than ever, we need this emergent majority — one that obliterates racial, political, ethnic, gender, religious and sexuality dividing lines, that growing consensus that desperately wants us to be a society that works not just for some of us but for all of us — to not just wake, but rise. To know our strength and gather it about us.
For some of us, this will mean shaking off the ideological shackles they’ve tried to bind us with. We’ll need to do what CP Ellis and Ann Atwater did and learn to see what’s truly beautiful about each other. Others of us, like Elwin Wilson and the slew of pastors over the last decade who have apologized for their horrific treatment of the LGBTQ+ community, need to help repair what we’ve broken or allowed to be broken, including not allowing religious supremacists to cast both trans people and so-called “Illegals” as their new “arch”. Some of us need to do both.
Our nation needs activists like those who converged on Selma and advocates who, like the members of the Underground Railroad, are willing to break the law to safeguard the humanity of others, and allies like those who funded everything from bail fees for Freedom Riders to the Black Panthers’ free breakfast programs for kids and free community clinics. But, perhaps more than anything, we need apostles and prophets like Lady Gaga who will continue to preach a different gospel: “It doesn’t matter if you love him, or capital H-I-M… Just put your paws up, ‘cause you were born this way, baby.”
Conclusion: The “Good Book” and the “Good Lord”
Which gets me back to my experience all those years ago watching The Homosexuals in my divinity school classroom. I remember sitting there as soon-to-be theologians argued whether the Bible really condemns gays to hell. It then dawned on me that the faith I’d inherited from my family and community wasn’t oriented like that.
It wasn’t creedal. No one unilaterally declared themselves the voice of God or claimed to have the “true” truth. It was about love. And mercy. And kindness. And justice. My grandmother said it like this, “If somebody says that the Good Book told them to hurt somebody, you better believe they’re reading it wrong.” In Me and Mary, I give many examples of how she lived this, including this one:
I had a cousin whose birth certificate said “male”, but who’d realized that they were a girl. She began to dress the part, began the transition process, and she changed her name to Emma Jean. Others snickered, refused to call Emma by her new name and indicated that she was not welcome “dressed like that”, and especially not bringing that New York boyfriend. My grandmother said, “Now, I don’t understand all that, but I do know this: We’re going to call that child whatever they want to be called, if y’all got a problem with that, you’d best get over it, and no one can say who’s welcome or not welcome in my house.” Case closed.
One of the many things I learned from Mary is that none of us has to do everything, but we all need to do something. She refused to turn anyone, even people like George Wallace into her “arch”. I remember asking her at her 80th birthday party as she and I sat off quietly to the side if she had any regrets. She nodded thoughtfully and said, “I think, maybe everybody does.” But then, she said something remarkable; something that very few people who have walked this earth can truthfully say, “But every time the Good Lord gave me somebody to help, I did my best. That’s one thing I don’t have regrets about.”
It’s hard for me to imagine that “the Good Lord” is only handing out people to help, to Mary, and not to the rest of the faithful. Religious supremacists told us that if you were different, you were either inferior, an abomination or both. But as for me, I’ll take the gospel according to Gaga any day – “I’m beautiful in my way, ‘cause God makes no mistakes. I’m on the right track, baby. I was born this way.” That holds for all of us.
Let’s end with a video of Americana rock group, The Band with Civil Rights greats and Gospel vocal group The Staples, performing an amazing version of the former’s song, The Weight, as featured in the documentary, The Last Waltz. Along with Levon and Rick on lead, you’ll get to hear the legendary Mavis, who you also heard on Hosier’s Nina Cried Power in Things That Need Doing, and her dad, Pop Staples. Every single thing about this song is a vision of the people we can be — together.