Gay Judges and Conservative-Christian Privilege

Judge Vaughn Walker, presiding over the Prop 8 trial in San Francisco, is gay.  Conservative Christians hate that.  Anti-gay activist Matt Barber writes,

This is no different than having an avid gun dealer/collector preside over a Second Amendment case – or a frequent user of medical marijuana deciding the legality of medical marijuana.

First, given the good ole boy network of American politics, does Matt really believe that no huntin’, gun-totin’ judge has ever presided over a gun control case?  But I’m more interested in the comparisons he didn’t make:

This is no different than having a black judge preside over a civil rights case, or a woman preside over an abortion case, or a Jew preside over an Islamic fundamentalist’s case.

Why do you suppose he didn’t go there?  Because it would show how offensive his reasoning is?  But there’s only one comparison that would give his argument any credibility:

Having a gay judge preside over this case is no different than having a conservative Christian preside over it.

See, Matt has said the “homosexual lobby” poses a direct threat to the religious freedom of conservative Christians.  If so, then the “textbook conflict of interest” facing a gay judge would face a conservative Christian judge, too.  Surely Matt have to agree if I turned his anti-Judge-Walker conclusion around to read:

Any decision favoring [a ban on gay marriage] in this case will be permanently marred and universally viewed as stemming from [a conservative Christian judge’s] personal biases and alleged lifestyle choices.

I doubt Matt’s planning to state that any time soon.  I doubt he can even see the logic of it.  He’s blinded by Conservative Christian privilege (let’s call it “CC-privilege” for short).*

You may know of white privilege — the idea that whites in our culture have advantages they’re not even aware of, advantages they consider normal and natural.  And then there’s straight privilege, like holding hands with your partner in public without fear of being attacked — and never thinking about gays and lesbians who lack this privilege.  It’s an unconscious trait, because its owners have a hard time imagining their lives without it:  “Co-workers are offended because I mentioned my [opposite-sex] fiance?  That would be ridiculous!”

Here’s how CC-privilege works: If you took Matt’s comparisons to their logical and full conclusion — if you suggested all CC judges should recuse themselves from cases involving gays, or cases about religious freedom or religion in the public square — conservative Christians would think you insane.

• First, they’d (correctly) point out that our legal system would fall apart if we kept benching CC judges.
• Second, if they were honest, they’d tell you such an idea would contradict their strategy of advancing judges who are willing to issue rulings based on their CC beliefs.
• Finally, they’d tell you that their strategy is good and right and normal, because conservative Christianity is good and right and normal — while homosexuality, of course, is a disgusting, foul, degraded condition.

Here’s the privilege part:  They take this last point for granted, and they expect you to do the same, expect the whole  national dialog on marriage equality to do the same.  And for a long time, that’s exactly what America did.  A very long time.  That’s changing now, and it’s rocking the CC comunity.  You’ve seen how abusive our opposition leaders become when you challenge their beliefs.  You’ve seen this discrepancy:

• Their attempts to strip us of our of rights, and to deny the benefits of a married family to the kids of gay and lesbian couples?  That’s just the democratic process.
• Our attempts to question their motivation, our emphatic disagreement with their condemnation, our efforts to secure simple equality?  That’s a hateful, intolerant attack.

This is so ass-backwards you can’t even call it a double standard.  The logic is so wrecked, the only good explanation is a psychological one:  They’re reacting against a threat to their  privilege.  In their eyes, we’re mounting a frontal assault on the very ideas of “moral” and “good.”  That’s why we get insane and otherwise inexplicable statements from the likes of Pat Robertson:

I don’t really believe homosexuals want to get married.  What they want to do is destroy marriage.

To us, that’s paranoid delusion.  But to a CC extremist like Pat Robertson, any threat to your privilege is an attack on morality itself.

CC-privilege is useful.  It lets you abandon logic and assign evil motives to your opponents, no matter what the evidence.  For instance, Matt writes of Judge Walker,

He even violated federal rules by deciding to allow the trial to be broadcast worldwide, but was subsequently shot-down and sharply rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court for doing so.  Unfortunately, the damage was already done.  Prop 8 supporters lost around two-thirds of their expert witnesses who, naturally – based on homosexuals’ violent reaction to passage of Prop 8 – feared for their own safety and for that of family members.

Matt can only say this if he ignores a whole slew of facts:

• It was a close Supreme Court decision — four heterosexual justices sided with Walker.
• During pre-trial depositions, our attorneys demolished their witnesses’ testimony.
• One of their witnesses who dropped out, William Tam, was so damaging to their own side that we called him to the witness stand ourselves.
• During cross-examination, the other side did everything they could to distance themselves from Tam.  They didn’t want him to speak for them.

These facts creates a compelling narrative for why these pro-Prop 8 witnesses were dumped dropped out.  But go ahead and ignore them.  And it’s easy because OH MY GOD JUDGE WALKER IS GAY.  That solitary fact shines so brightly it obliterates the ability to see anything else, like snow blindness in the frozen Arctic of Matt’s brain.

Matt writes further,

[Judge Walker] also allowed plaintiffs a parade of “expert” witnesses who viciously maligned Christians and other observers of natural and historic sexual morality as “prejudiced,” “bigoted” and “homophobic.”

Why the scare quotes around “expert” ?   Because anyone who doesn’t respect CC-privilege  automatically violates all that is natural and good, therefore is wrong, and therefore couldn’t possibly be an expert.

Matt sees disagreement with conservative Christians and equates it with maligning Christians in general.   He ignores a few more facts here.  For instance:  many Christian churches opposed Prop 8.  For instance:  gay marriage won the support of 47.76% of California’s voters — that’s a whole lot of Christians.  You can be Christian and favor civil marriage equality. Can Matt see that?  Can Maggie Gallagher?  Can Bishop Harry Jackson?  Every time Maggie says marriage equality is an attack on Christianity I wish someone would tell her, “Maggie, you are not Christianity.”

But Matt’s grievance against gay Judge Walker is scary on a deeper level.

He also allowed plaintiffs a parade of “expert” witnesses who viciously maligned Christians…

Allowed?

Forget what I said before.  Pretend Matt is right when he says our side maligned Christians.  Is Matt saying Judge Walker shouldn’t have allowed witnesses who are critical of Christianity?  Is he saying a normal judge wouldn’t — and shouldn’t — allow such witnesses?  That such voices simply shouldn’t be…allowed?  Is that what Matt’s fighting for?

I doubt he’d say it out loud.  And I hope he doesn’t agree with it on a conscious level.  But underneath — lord, his words betray him.  He’s upset, not just because these witnesses disagree with him, but because they offend the core of his conservative Christian privilege.  And his reaction to that, really, is profoundly chilling.

*  The first C in CC-privilege is crucial.  Conservative Christians will see this blog post as an attack on religion, even though it only addresses a small subset of Christianity, which in turn is only a subset of all religion.  But that’s the nature of CC-privilege:  Disagreement with them is of course an attack on goodness itself.