God hates fags: The rhetorics of religious violence

God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence

Volumn , Issue , 2006, Pages 1-229

  Cobb, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84900619638     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Book

References (170)

1. Rocky Mountain Collegian, 16 January 2001; found on http://www.lambda.10.org/antigay_protests.htm, accessed 10 May 2002.
2. www.godhatesfags.com/memorial.html, accessed 24 April 2002. A companion memorial has been set up for Dianne Whipple, the "filthy dyke" who was mauled and killed by dogs ten days after Westboro's protest.
3. For an excellent discussion of the limits of tolerance when Christian conservatives advocate the "love the sinner, hate the sin" position, see Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 45-72.
4. http://www.family.org/welcome/aboutfof/a0000078.html, accessed 24 June 2002.
5. John Gallagher, "Colorado Goes Straight to Hell," The Advocate, 23 February 1993, 34.
6. Tolerance/Intolerance: Sexual Orientation Issues (Colorado Springs: Pikes Peak Library District, 1993), videotape of panel.
7. Gallagher, "Colorado," 34.
8. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1953), 39.
9. On the rise and limits of this kind of "homoerotic" inclusion in the public sphere, see Eric Clarke, Virtuous Vice: Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
10. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 19.
11. Butler, Excitable Speech, 41.
12. For this type of work which I'm definitely not pursuing in this book, see, for select examples, Gary Comstock, Gay Theology without Apology (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1993);.
13. Robert Gross, Jesus Acted Up: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto (San Francisco: Harper, 1993).
14. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 131.
15. For an example of scholarship that attempts something like the transformation and critique of racial identities in the United States, see Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
16. Jakobsen and Pellegrini, Love the Sin, 13.
17. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1963), 16.
18. The National Association of Evangelicals, http://www.nae.net/about-mission.html, accessed 20 April 2003.
19. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961), 25.
20. http://www.godhatesfags.com/main/purpose.html, accessed 8 June 2002.
21. Stanton L. Jones, "The Loving Opposition: Speaking the Truth in a Climate of Hate," Christianity Today, 19 July 1993, 19.
22. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 176.
23. Family Research Council, http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?c=ABOUT_FRC, accessed 6 July 2004.
24. Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 8.
25. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8.
26. See Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1915), 366-392;.
27. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1950), 164-200;.
28. René Girard's Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), especially his concept of the surrogate victim, 250-273.
29. Butler emphasizes this part of queer life in numerous places in her work, but see "Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification," in The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
30. Michael Warner, "Introduction," in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxv. For a more in-depth discussion of this model, see Steven Seidman's contribution to Warner's volume, "Identity and Politics in a 'Postmodern' Gay Culture," 105-142.
31. Beth Loffreda, Losing Matt Shepard (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 5.
32. This speech is endlessly available on the Web. My citations of the speech come from Matthew's mother's Web site, "Matthew's Place": www.matthewsplace.com/ dennis2.htm.
33. Shirley Samuels, "Introduction," The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1992), 5.
34. GLAAD/Denver, "Civil Rights, Democracy, and Amendment 2," 1993.
35. Jakobsen and Pellegrini, Love the Sin, 93. They discuss the Halley article.
36. Janet E. Halley, " 'Like Race' Arguments," in What's Left of Theory: New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory, ed. Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2000), 66.
37. Miranda Joseph, "Analogy and Complicity: Women's Studies, Lesbian/Gay Studies, and Capitalism," in Women's Studies on Its Own, ed. Robyn Wiegman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 275.
38. Janet Jakobsen, "Queers Are Like Jews, Aren't They?" in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, ed. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovtiz, and Ann Pellegrini (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 71.
39. Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David Halpern (New York: Routledge, 1993), 309.
40. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "More on Power/Knowledge," in The Spivak Reader, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean (New York: Routledge, 1996), 145-146. This whole difficult essay has been crucial in my thinking about the religious nominalism of queer sexuality, and my understandings of Foucault have been so helped by her challenging prose.
41. J. Hillis Miler, The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 73.
42. Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans. with an intro H. C. Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1991), 216 (1404 a).
43. Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203. For this point, also see Robyn Weigman's American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
44. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color, 458.
45. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color, 4.
46. Hortense Spillers, "The Idea of Black Culture," talk delivered at Western Ontario University, 7 December 2002.
47. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color, 5.
48. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 7.
49. See Dwight A. McBride, ed. James Baldwin (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
50. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., definitively explicates the tradition of "signifyin' " in black letters in books such as The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
51. Theophus H. Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 18.
52. Rene Hill, "Who Are We for Each Other? Sexism, Sexuality, and Womanist Theology," in Black Theology: A Documentary History, Vol. 2: 1980-1992, ed. James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 345-351. In this essay, she articulates the way homophobia persistently works in black theology, thereby undermining its healing and helpful spiritual/theological desires for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and (implicitly) transgenders in black faith communities.
53. James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), xviii.
54. Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, 193.
55. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, "Sex in Public," Critical Inquiry 24:2 (Winter 1998): 558-564.
56. See Biddy Martin's "Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary," Differences 6 (Summer-Fall 1994).
57. Lauren Berlant, "Intimacy: A Special Issue," Critical Inquiry 24:2 (Winter 1998): 285.
58. See Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 63.
59. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 83.
60. Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, 200.
61. Baldwin, 645-646.
62. Baldwin, "Everybody's Protest Novel," in The Price of the Ticket, 30.
63. Baldwin, Giovanni's Room (1956; New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993), 246-247.
64. Nancy Armstrong, "Why Daughters Die: The Racial Logic of American Sentimentalism," Yale Journal of Criticism 7:2 (1994): 18.
65. Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, 207.
66. Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Normon and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 71.
67. See Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life 1911 (New York: Free Press, 1965); all of Mircea Eliade's corpus, but especially The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959).
68. David Leeming, Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 89.
69. Sondra A. O'Neale, "Fathers, Gods, and Religion: Perceptions of Christianity and Ethnic Faith in James Baldwin," in Standley and Burt, eds., Critical Essays, 141.
70. Hortense Spillers, "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual," in boundary 2 21:3 (1994): 87.
71. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 35.
72. See Derrida's, "La Structure, le signe, et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines," in L'écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1967), 409-428.
73. Burke, Rhetoric of Religion, 27.
74. Baldwin, "Every Good-Bye Ain't Gone," in The Price of the Ticket, 644.
75. Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, 202.
76. Brown, States of Injury, 55.
77. Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, 193-194.
78. Baldwin., Go Tell It On the Mountain, 144.
79. Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, 200-201.
80. Jean Toomer, Cane (1923; New York: Liveright, 1993), 83. Further citations will appear in the text.
81. Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
82. Quoted in John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of the Homosexual Minority in the United States 1940-1970, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 19.
83. D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, 64-65.
84. Will Roscoe, "Introduction," in Harry Hay, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 44.
85. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 4.
86. D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, 65.
87. Hay, Radically Gay, 79.
88. Denning, Cultural Front, 13.
89. William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York City: Oxford University Press, 1973), xi.
90. Lionel Trilling, "The Promise of Realism," in The Liberal Imagination (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 29.
91. Rey Chow, "On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem," in Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory, ed. Rey Chow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 16.
92. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 5.
93. Jim Kepner, "Something Furtive," from One, quoted in his edited volume, Rough News, Daring Views: 1950s' Pioneer Gay Press Journalism (New York and London: Harrington Park Press, 1998), 45.
94. Stephen Crane, "An Experiment in Misery," in The Portable Stephen Crane, ed. Joseph Katz (New York: Penguin, 1969), 154. The experiment is driven by a desire to understand, to "feel" another's experience, which is quite explicit in an introduction that was edited out after the sketch's first appearance in New York Press, April 22, 1894. Further citations will appear in the text.
95. Chauncey, Gay New York, 34.
96. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1-2.
97. Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 96.
98. Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economics of Play (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 20.
99. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (1953; New York: Vintage, 1972), 32.
100. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 40.
101. Charles Madison, "Preface to the Dover Edition," in Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1900; New York: Dover, 1971), vii.
102. Madison, "Preface," v.
103. Kenneth Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 72.
104. Tennessee Williams, Suddenly Last Summer (1958) in Tennessee Williams: Four Plays (New York: Signet, 1976), 26. Further citations will appear in the text.
105. See George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975);.
106. Jacques Derrida, "Des Tours de Babel," in Difference in Translation, trans. and ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 165-205.
107. Derrida, "Des Tours de Babel," 165-166.
108. For this publication history, see Brian Parker, "A Provisional Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer (1958)," Modern Drama 41 (1998): 303-326.
109. For a discussion of cannibalism in Melville, and particularly in Benito Cereno, see Geoffrey Sanborn, The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of the Postcolonial Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
110. Williams, "Desire and the Black Masseur," in Tennessee Williams: Collected Stores, intro. Gore Vidal (New York: New Directions Book, 1985), 205. Further citations will appear in the text.
111. Baldwin, "Everybody's Protest Novel," in The Price of the Ticket (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), 30-31.
112. James Baldwin, "The Devil Finds Work," in The Price of the Ticket, 561.
113. Baldwin, "Here Be Dragons," in The Price of the Ticket, 678.
114. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 24.
115. Michael W. Rosen, "Boycott Threats Will Only Harden Majority's Conviction," Gazette Telegraph, 20 December 1992, D5.
116. This argument runs throughout much of the discussion of the history of Amendment 2 and its court cases. This specific quotation comes from a helpful volume on the legal strategies of anti-Amendment 2 advocates by Lisa Keen and Suzanne B. Goldberg, Strangers to the Law: Gay People on Trial (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 40.
117. Joseph Sobran, "The Truth about Shakespeare and the Gay Rights Agenda," Gazette Telegraph, 29 December 1992, A7.
118. See all of Stephen Bransford, Gay Politics v. Colorado and America: The Inside Story of Amendment 2 (Cascade, CO: Sardis Press, 1994), but especially 60-87.
119. Tony Marco, quoted in John Gallagher and Chris Bull, Perfect Enemies: The Religious Right, the Gay Movement, and the Politics of the 1990s (New York: Crown, 1996), 104.
120. "From the Mouth of McCartney," Gazette Telegraph, 14 February 1992.
121. Gallagher and Bull, Perfect Enemies, 108.
122. Freedom Watch, The Citizens Project Newsletter, vol. 2:3 (June-July 1993), 1. On file with the author.
123. Waldo E. Martin, Jr., ed., Brown v. Board of Education: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford, 1998), 172-174.
124. Gallagher and Bull, Perfect Enemies, 5.
125. "Tenn. County Officials Seek to Ban Gays," www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933, 114467,00.html, accessed 11 May 2004.
126. Gallagher and Bull, Perfect Enemies, 6.
127. See, for instance, Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
128. Donald L. Drakeman, Church-State Constitutional Issues: Making Sense of the Establishment Clause (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1991), 16. Emphasis mine.
129. Lisa Duggan, "Queering the State," in Social Text 39 (Summer 1994): 9.
130. Jakobsen and Pellegrini, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Tolerance (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 97.
131. Keen and Goldberg, Strangers to the Law: Gay People on Trial (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 37.
132. Charles A. Miller, "Constitutional Law and the Rhetoric of Race," in Law in American History, ed. Donald Flemming and Bernard Bailyn (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 147.
133. Lauren Berlant, "The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics," in Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 129.
134. Berlant, "The Subject," 128-129.
135. Jakobsen and Pellegrini, Love the Sin, 17.
136. Berlant, "The Subject," 154.
137. Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203.
138. Shane Phelan, Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and the Dilemmas of Citizenship (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 5. Phelan writes suggestively: "I believe that sexual minorities will remain strangers in the United States for a long time to come. This is not because the United States is a particularly Puritan country (although it is, in many ways)" (9).
139. Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952; New York: Modern Library, 1995), 15. Future citations will appear in the text.
140. James Baldwin, "The Harlem Ghetto," in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction, 1948-1985 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), 8.
141. Cover, "Origins of Judicial Activism," 18-19.
142. Berlant, "The Subject," 129.
143. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 131.
144. James Baldwin, "Here Be Dragons," in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction, 1948-1985 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), 689.
145. "Mission: America," www.missionamerica.com/agenda1.htm, accessed 27 May 2003.
146. See Urvashi Vaid, The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1996);.
147. Andrew Sullivan, An Argument about Homosexuality (New York: Vintage, 1996);.
148. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
149. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), xx.
150. In addition to Duggan, there's more to read. Even if they might hate the language- based arguments I've made throughout this book, see Rosemary Hennessey, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2000);.
151. Alexandra Chain, Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to the Market (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
152. David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (New York and Boston: Little, Brown, 2004), 212-213.
153. Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove et al. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3-44.
154. Michael S. Rosenwald and Stephen Kurkjian, "Monthlong Plot to Kill Geoghan," www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2003/08/26/monthlong_plot_to_kill_geoghan/, accessed 10 October 2003.
155. "Sex Abuse Priest Killed in Prison," 25 August 2003, http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/08/24/geoghan/, accessed 20 October 2003.
156. www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2003/04/22/national1737 EDT0668.DTL, accessed 24 October 2003.
157. Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 70-71.
158. www.godhatesfags.com/main/index.html, accessed 10 January 2004.
159. Chauncey, quoted in Frank Rich, "And Now, Queer Eye for Straight Marriage," 10 August 2003. Final section 2, page 1, column 2.
160. Butler, Antigone's Claim, 73.
161. Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Washington Square Press, 1982), 11. Further citations will appear in the text.
162. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 101. Her discussion of Allison and the novel's connection to a collection of concerns of lesbianism, trauma, and sexual violence is deeply helpful.
163. Judith Butler's "Critically Queer," in Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993).
164. Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 254.
165. Butler, Antigone's Claim, 81.
166. Butler, Antigone's Claim, 82.
167. Quoted in Jane Lapman, "Gay Marriage: Clergy Gear for Amendment Battle," The Christian Science Monitor, on-line edition: www.csmonitor.com/2004/0109/ p13s01-lire.html?livingNav, accessed 9 February 2004.
168. Text of majority opinion of question presented by the Massachusetts Senate, found on www.boston.com/news/specials/gay_marriage/sjc_020404/, accessed 5 February 2004.
169. Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), 95.
170. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2004), 3.