"gay agenda"

[Arnold Zwicky]

jim landau writes:

 >In a message dated 7/7/2003 12:03:12 AM Eastern Standard Time,
 >Justice Scalia writes:

  >> "the agenda promoted by some
  >> homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium
  >> that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct."

 >Maybe I'd have a different opinion if I saw some more context from
 >Justice Scalia's dissent, but it looks to me as if "agenda" in the
 >above quote has nothing more than the traditional meaning of a
 >"proposed list of items to be discussed".

there are some nuances to wonder about in this definition: "some" (see
landau, below), the avoidance of "gay" in favor of "homosexual" (which
i've already commented on), the restriction to "homosexual activists"
rather than to gay people in general, the claim that removing moral
opprobium is the central goal in gay activism (activists themselves
would say that they are working for gay rights, but scalia avoids "gay
rights", probably because he believes that so-called gay rights are
"special rights"), and the restriction to "homosexual *conduct*",
rather than more generally to homosexuality (the suggestion is that
homosexual desire is not necessarily opproprious, but that *choosing*
to act on that desire - we are, after all, able to decide on one kind
of conduct rather than another - is) or homosexuals (this is the "love
the sinner, hate the sin" attitude that i've already mentioned).  so
the definition is scarcely neutral; there's a lot of rhetorical work
being done there.

but it comes close to an attempt, within scalia's world view, at
treating the expression "homosexual agenda" as entirely compositional
in its semantics and as involving the neutral head word "agenda",
without any implication of the hiddenness or deviousness that some
other posters have commented on.

the Palo Alto Daily News columnist i wrote to, tom elias, did not in
fact write the headline with "gay agenda" in it.  but he did
distribute the piece with the suggestion that "gay agenda" could be
used in describing its contents.  he says that he intended that
expression in an entirely compositional way, as denoting the political
goals of (most) gay people (i'm paraphrasing him some, but i think
this captures his intention fairly).  so the only problem with elias
is that he seems not to recognize that there is an idiomatic,
politically slanted, sense of the expression abroad in the land, so
that some number of readers - he and i differ as to whether this is a
small number, of people like me who are especially sensitive to this
use, or whether it's a much larger number, of people who have been
exposed to the politically slanted use - will misinterpret his
intentions.

scalia's intentions are not so easily divined.

 >What bothers me is that Scalia used the word "some".  I would
 >imagine that most if not all such activists have such an item on
 >their public agendae.

[well, agendas.  "agenda" is, historically, a latin plural, which
has been reinterpreted as a singular count noun in english.]

yes, well, that's a problem.  though, in fact, eliminating the moral
opprobrium associated with homosexuality/homosexuals/homosexual acts
isn't a primary goal for some (maybe most) gay activists.  many - i am
one - would say that winning the hearts and minds of the populace
can't be a primary goal, but getting the law off our backs (so to
speak) is. (here there's a straightforward analogy to the black civil
rights movement.)  if you think that what we do with each other in our
bedrooms is icky, that's your opinion and you're entitled to it; just
don't make us criminals for it.  if you think that we're inferior or
bad people because our sexual desires are for people of the same sex,
well we're dismayed by that and wish it weren't so, but as a starting
point what we want is not to be discriminated against on the basis of
our sexual orientation (whatever you think of us).

putting that aside, there's still scalia's restriction to activists,
and then to only some activists; it's not gay people in general (this
is already a restriction: those who are affected by issues of gay
rights include not only those directly affected, gay people
themselves, but also a much larger collection of their straight family
and friends), just the activists (who are, of course, a small minority
of gay people, as they are in any other group with common social and
political interests), and then only some of them (some "bad" subgroup,
in contrast to the ok gay activists, whoever they might be in scalia's
world).  the effect is to reduce the targets of scalia's criticism to
an extreme minority of the population: gay people are already a small
minority, activists are a small minority of gay people, and the wrong
sort of activists are just some fraction of these.

this is rhetorically very clever.  scalia can attack an entire group
of people while, strictly speaking, his words apply only to some tiny
number (admittedly, i am one of that number).  "gay agenda" for scalia
turns out to be much less compositional than you might have thought.

the restriction to conduct, rather than desire or persons, is also
rhetorically clever.  scalia can still maintain, as he does, that he
has no problem with homosexuals, while trashing the "gay agenda", and
he can fold in, almost invisibly, the view of homosexuality as a
(bad) choice.

but scalia's definition is vastly more disingenuous than this.  he
writes as if he had never heard of the politically slanted uses of
"gay agenda".  i'm willing to believe that tom elias is more naive
on this point than i'd expected, but there's absolutely no chance that
antonin scalia is.  i can't believe that he's unaware of the following
(i quote here from another message to elias):

------------

 there's a decades-old tradition among fundamentalists (and, more
 generally among political conservatives) of inveighing against the
 "gay agenda", which is seen as demanding "special rights" for
 homosexuals, as threatening marriage and the family, as spreading
 disease, and as aiming to corrupt children.  check out the site

  www.glbtq.com/arts/documentary_film,4.html

 which has a description of warring documentary films.  from the
 site:

  Late in 1992, right-wing fundamentalist groups produced The Gay
  Agenda: The Report, which generalizes "the ills of gay life" that
  would infect a city or state with legislation giving "special
  rights" to glbtq people. In 1993 the Southern Baptist Convention
  produced Gay Rights-Special Rights: Inside the Homosexual Agenda.

  Both films circulated in Oregon, where the Oregon Citizens Alliance
  was pushing for passage of anti-gay Ballot Measure 9, and in
  Colorado, where conservative groups were campaigning for Amendment
  2, which would have prohibited discrimination claims based on sexual
  orientation.

 note that the second film was produced by the Southern Baptist
 Convention, not exactly a fringe group.  the American Family
 Association and similar groups have been quite vocal about the "gay
 agenda" in this sense, and have gotten a lot of coverage in the press
 (especially by insisting that fairness and balance demand that
 statements in favor of gay rights, or any favorable depiction of gay
 people, must be balanced by equal time for the other side).

------------

so scalia presents what on the surface looks, falsely, like a simple
compositional definition of "homosexual agenda", the sort of thing
that no sensible person could object to, while acting as if the
expression had no wider, and much nastier, life in american politics.
no resonances here, nosiree, just simple talk.

this is masterful, and (to me) scary, and here i speak as a linguist
(in the tradition of dwight bolinger, among others) and as an angry
faggot.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), trying to put his biases
  right out in front while still looking at things with clear eyes