When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced this month that the United States would use diplomacy to encourage respect for gay rights around the world, my heart leapt. I knew her words — “gay people are born into, and belong to, every society in the world”— to be true, but in my country they are too often ignored.

The right to marry whom we love is far from our minds. Across Africa, the “gay rights” we are fighting for are more stark — the right to life itself. Here, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people suffer brutal attacks, yet cannot report them to the police for fear of additional violence, humiliation, rape or imprisonment at the hands of the authorities. We are expelled from school and denied health care because of our perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. If your boss finds out (or suspects) you are gay, you can be fired immediately.

People are outed in the media — or if they have gay friends, they are assumed to be “gay by association.” More benignly, if people are still single by the time they reach their early 20s, what Ugandans call a “marriage age,” others will begin to suspect that they are gay.

Traditional culture silences open discussion of sexuality. I am 29. I grew up in a very observant Catholic family in the suburbs of Kampala. From the time I was old enough to have romantic feelings, I knew I was gay, but we weren’t supposed to speak of such things.

When I was 14, I came out to my brother. Later, when others close to me asked if I was gay, I didn’t deny it. Though some relatives accepted me, I came out to the rest of my family slowly. Some simply chose to ignore the fact that I was gay, or begged me not to tell anyone, fearing I’d shame our family name. Others stopped speaking to me altogether.

Many Africans believe that homosexuality is an import from the West, and ironically they invoke religious beliefs and colonial-era laws that are foreign to our continent to persecute us.

The way I see it, homophobia — not homosexuality — is the toxic import. Thanks to the absurd ideas peddled by American fundamentalists, we are constantly forced to respond to the myth — debunked long ago by scientists — that homosexuality leads to pedophilia. For years, the Christian right in America has exported its doctrine to Africa, and, along with it, homophobia. In Uganda, American evangelical Christians even held workshops and met with key officials to preach their message of hate shortly before a bill to impose the death penalty for homosexual conduct was introduced in Uganda’s Parliament in 2009. Two years later, despite my denunciation of all forms of child exploitation, David Bahati, the legislator who introduced the bill, as well as Foreign Minister Henry Okello Oryem and other top government officials, still don’t seem to grasp that being gay doesn’t equate to being a pedophile.

In May, following criticism from the West and President Yoweri Museveni, the bill was shelved. But the current parliament has revived it and could send it to the floor for a vote at any time. Meanwhile, the bill’s influence has been felt in Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon, all of which have recently stepped up enforcement of anti-gay laws or moved to pass new legislation that would criminalize love between people of the same sex.

Not all Ugandans are homophobic. Some say there are more pressing issues to worry about than gay people and believe we should have the same rights as anyone else. But they are not in power and cannot control the majority who want to hurt us.

A veil of silence enforced by thuggish street violence and official criminalization is falling over much of Africa. Being a gay activist is a sacrifice. You have to carefully choose which neighborhood to live in. You cannot go shopping on your own, let alone go clubbing or to parties. With each public appearance you risk being attacked, beaten or arrested by the police.

I remember the moment when my friend David Kato, Uganda’s best-known gay activist, sat with me in the small unmarked office of our organization, Sexual Minorities Uganda. “One of us will probably die because of this work,” he said. We agreed that the other would then have to continue. In January, because of this work, David was bludgeoned to death at his home, with a hammer. Many people urged me to seek asylum, but I have chosen to remain and fulfill my promise to David — and to myself. My life is in danger, but the lives of those whose names are not known in international circles are even more vulnerable.

Still, I continue to hope. There are encouraging times when my fellow activists and I meet people face to face and they realize we aren’t the child-molesting monsters depicted in the media. They realize we are human, we are Ugandan, just like them.

Standing on David’s shoulders, we are no longer alone. Political leaders like Mrs. Clinton and religious leaders like Archbishop Desmond Tutu are willing to publicly state that being gay is just one of many expressions of what it means to be human. I call on other leaders — particularly my African-American brothers and sisters in politics, entertainment and religious communities — to come to Uganda, to stand with me and my fellow advocates, to help dispel harmful myths perpetuated by ignorance and hate. The lives of many are on the line.

“In dreams begin responsibilities,” wrote Yeats in 1914. These words resonate with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people who have witnessed dramatic shifts in our relationship to power. After generations of sacrifice and organization, gay people in parts of the world have won protection from discrimination and relationship recognition. But these changes have given rise to a nefarious phenomenon: the co-opting of white gay people by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim political forces in Western Europe and Israel.

In the Netherlands, some Dutch gay people have been drawn to the messages of Geert Wilders, who inherited many followers of the assassinated anti-immigration gay leader Pim Fortuyn, and whose Party for Freedom is now the country’s third largest political party. In Norway, Anders Behring Breivik, the extremist who massacred 77 people in July, cited Bruce Bawer, a gay American writer critical of Muslim immigration, as an influence. The Guardian reported last year that the racist English Defense League had 115 members in its gay wing. The German Lesbian and Gay Federation has issued statements citing Muslim immigrants as enemies of gay people.

These depictions of immigrants — usually Muslims of Arab, South Asian, Turkish or African origin — as “homophobic fanatics” opportunistically ignore the existence of Muslim gays and their allies within their communities. They also render invisible the role that fundamentalist Christians, the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Jews play in perpetuating fear and even hatred of gays. And that cynical message has now spread from its roots in European xenophobia to become a potent tool in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In 2005, with help from American marketing executives, the Israeli government began a marketing campaign, “Brand Israel,” aimed at men ages 18 to 34. The campaign, as reported by The Jewish Daily Forward, sought to depict Israel as “relevant and modern.” The government later expanded the marketing plan by harnessing the gay community to reposition its global image.

Last year, the Israeli news site Ynet reported that the Tel Aviv tourism board had begun a campaign of around $90 million to brand the city as “an international gay vacation destination.” The promotion, which received support from the Tourism Ministry and Israel’s overseas consulates, includes depictions of young same-sex couples and financing for pro-Israeli movie screenings at lesbian and gay film festivals in the United States. (The government isn’t alone; an Israeli pornography producer even shot a film, “Men of Israel,” on the site of a former Palestinian village.)

This message is being articulated at the highest levels. In May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Congress that the Middle East was “a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted.”

The growing global gay movement against the Israeli occupation has named these tactics “pinkwashing”: a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life. Aeyal Gross, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, argues that “gay rights have essentially become a public-relations tool,” even though “conservative and especially religious politicians remain fiercely homophobic.”

Pinkwashing not only manipulates the hard-won gains of Israel’s gay community, but it also ignores the existence of Palestinian gay-rights organizations. Homosexuality has been decriminalized in the West Bank since the 1950s, when anti-sodomy laws imposed under British colonial influence were removed from the Jordanian penal code, which Palestinians follow. More important is the emerging Palestinian gay movement with three major organizations: Aswat, Al Qaws and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. These groups are clear that the oppression of Palestinians crosses the boundary of sexuality; as Haneen Maikay, the director of Al Qaws, has said, “When you go through a checkpoint it does not matter what the sexuality of the soldier is.”

What makes lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their allies so susceptible to pinkwashing — and its corollary, the tendency among some white gay people to privilege their racial and religious identity, a phenomenon the theorist Jasbir K. Puar has called “homonationalism” — is the emotional legacy of homophobia. Most gay people have experienced oppression in profound ways — in the family; in distorted representations in popular culture; in systematic legal inequality that has only just begun to relent. Increasing gay rights have caused some people of good will to mistakenly judge how advanced a country is by how it responds to homosexuality.

In Israel, gay soldiers and the relative openness of Tel Aviv are incomplete indicators of human rights — just as in America, the expansion of gay rights in some states does not offset human rights violations like mass incarceration. The long-sought realization of some rights for some gays should not blind us to the struggles against racism in Europe and the United States, or to the Palestinians’ insistence on a land to call home.

Nadie puede dudar de que el colectivo LGTB (lesbianas, gays, bisexuales y transexuales) ha logrado avances de justicia y reconocimiento que hace apenas 30 años parecían casi impensables… Detrás está (y eso conmemora el famoso y no siempre bien entendido Día del Orgullo Gay) la revuelta de los homosexuales neoyorquinos en Stonewall, cuando volvían del funeral por Judy Garland. Pero digámoslo mejor, detrás está la fuerza de un gran colectivo de hombres y mujeres con una sexualidad distinta a la mayoritaria, que deciden no seguir siendo ofendidos y humillados y pasar a la acción para lograr -poco a poco y con esfuerzo- ser como los demás. Tener los mismos derechos y deberes que el resto de ciudadanos y no avergonzarse nunca más de su condición. ¿Todo está logrado? En Occidente se ha dado un paso de gigante. Pero en el resto del mundo, está todo por hacer. En muchos países regidos por religiones intolerantes (como en el Irán de los ayatolás) gays y lesbianas son perseguidos, encarcelados y a menudo ahorcados o lapidados…

Entre nosotros el movimento LGTB tiene hoy dos o tres problemas fundamentales: la vieja guardia de los luchadores históricos (que fue fundamental) está un tanto parada y no parecen llegar visibles relevos. El movimiento vive pero está algo quieto, no me gustaría pensar que adormilado en los laureles. Además, la homofobia (y la transfobia, etcétera…) no ha cesado ni disminuido, y esa es la principal tarea que el colectivo tiene que acometer: acabar con el machismo homofóbico, que no es distinto al que se manifiesta en la llamada violencia de género. Ya sabemos que esa lucha es larga, porque el machismo lleva siglos dominando y porque las correcciones de viejas conductas, casi atávicas, se hacen sobre todo con la educación, con el civismo y con la urbanidad, asignaturas en que la España actual suspende mayoritariamente y aún partido por partido… Necesitamos nuevos líderes carismáticos y mejor educación. ¿Parece poco? Es muchísimo.

De otra parte, el colectivo (sobre todo en su lado gay, el más numeroso) propende a ser muy poco cuando no nada autocrítico. Y así el gay arquetípico es hoy en día un chico discotequero, guapete,algo huero, que se cuida bastante en el gimnasio y que goza de sabatinas o no sabatinas noches de interminable frivolidad. Los modelos del gay televisivo también abundan en el lado frívolo. No seré yo quien arroje una piedra contra la frivolidad, que me parece importante y que puede hasta marcar una identidad. Pero no se puede olvidar que un verdadero colectivo LGTB tiene que ser muy plural. Tienen que caber todos los estilos: el frívolo y el serio. El plumero y el que está contra la pluma.

Además las editoriales (gays y no gays) se han dado cuenta -por desdicha para muchos autores homosexuales- de que la mayoría de los gays no leen. Sobre todo los jóvenes. Apenas hay nuevos lectores y sí algunas nuevas lectoras. Los gays cultos suelen ser mayores y en parte quienes sufrieron represión y se salvaron en buena medida de ella por la cultura, que les enseñó quiénes eran, de dónde venían y que nunca estuvieron solos aunque pudiera parecerlo (Wilde, Gide, Cernuda). Un movimiento LGTB frivolizado y con un alto porcentaje de incultos es un movimiento inerme, pues al menos cierta cultura identitaria es más que una defensa. Imagen del gay: frívolo e inculto, no creo que sea para tirar campanas a rebato. Al contrario, es otra de las fallas hondas del movimiento ahora mismo. Cierto que la floja venta de muchos libros gays o lésbicos (sobre todo cuando no son de mero consumo) se debe también a la mala educación del lector heterosexual, que aunque simpatice con los derechos gays, piensa que esa literatura no le incumbe. Los gays formados les llevamos mucha ventaja. Pudimos leer con placer los poemas amorosos de Pedro Salinas o de Pablo Neruda aunque supiéramos que iban destinados a mujeres. ¿Qué importa eso? La calidad vale. Así es que el lector heterosexual tiene que ver que el amor o la vida funcionan igual en un lado o en otro…

Como se ve, no es oro todo el brillo del mundo LGTB que tanto ha conseguido y tiene razón para su orgullo. Pero falta pluralidad de estilos, falta cultura (falta mucha cultura, aunque acaso también sea un mal general, pero ahí menos evidente) y sobra un poquito de hueca frivolidad y de cancaneo, aunque la alta frivolidad es buena y sana. Sin duda.

I am an active-duty U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer. I have deployed twice to Iraq and once to Afghanistan and have commanded infantry Marines in combat.

On Tuesday, Gen. James Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps, said he believes repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” and allowing gay and lesbian Marines to serve openly could “cost Marines’ lives” because of the “mistakes and inattention or distractions” that might ensue. I am not homosexual. And in this instance, I must respectfully disagree with my commandant.

The commandant cites the importance of cohesion within small combat units and warns against its disruption by allowing homosexuals to stop concealing their identities. In my experience, the things that separate Marines in civilian life fade into obscurity on the battlefield. There, only one thing matters: Can you do your job? People care much more about whom you voted for or what city you’re from while on the huge airbase with five Burger Kings, or back in the States, than they do when they’re walking down a dusty road full of improvised explosive devices in Haditha or Sangin.

In the end, Marines in combat will treat sexual orientation the same way they treat race, religion and one’s stance on the likelihood of the Patriots winning another Super Bowl. I do not believe the intense desire we all feel as Marines to accomplish the mission and protect each other will be affected in the slightest by knowing the sexual orientation of the man or woman next to us.

In the recent Defense Department survey, 58 percent of combat arms Marines said they felt allowing homosexuals to serve openly would negatively affect their unit, but 84 percent of combat arms Marines who had served with a homosexual said that there would be no effect or that the effect would be positive. It seems obvious that if allowing homosexuals to serve openly degraded performance, rather than improved it, a majority of Marines who had served with homosexuals would oppose repeal. Yet this is not the case, and homosexuals serve openly in the militaries of Britain, Canada, Australia, Israel and others with no ill effect. This suggests that much of the opposition toward repeal within the Marine Corps is based on the politics of individual Marines and not any measurable military effect.

Repeal would undoubtedly produce some disruption, but if other nations’ experiences are any guide, it will be so minimal as to be essentially nonexistent. Consider what is likely to happen if and when “don’t ask” is repealed: Lance Cpl. Smith will be having a typical Marine conversation with Lance Cpl. Jones, and the topic will turn to women. Smith will remark on how much he enjoys their company. Jones will reply: “Actually, man, I like dudes.”

Smith: “Really?”

Jones: “Yeah, man, really.”

Smith: “Wow. I didn’t know that.”

Both will then go back to cleaning their rifles.

Is it really likely that lance corporals who know each other better than brothers, and may have saved each other’s lives in split-second reactions during deployments, are suddenly going to refuse to serve in the same unit or quit the Corps because they have to share a shower?

Repeal will of course have many effects. Gay and lesbian Marines who are now barred from discussing their identities honestly with their superiors, peers and subordinates would be able to do their jobs free from the nagging knowledge that they are being less than honest with their brothers and sisters in arms. It is difficult to see how this could do anything but improve their job performance. Gay and lesbian Marines have long fought and died for a country that refuses to acknowledge their existence. Some are certainly among the Marines who have passed through Bethesda Naval Hospital and rest in Arlington.

I believe the reluctance many Marines feel about repeal is based on the false stereotype, borne out of ignorance, that homosexuals don’t do things like pull other Marines from burning vehicles. The truth is, they do it all the time. We simply don’t know it because they can’t tell us.

It is time for “don’t ask, don’t tell” to join our other mistakes in the dog-eared chapters of history textbooks. We all bleed red, we all love our country, we are all Marines. In the end, that’s all that matters.

After 17 years, “don’t ask, don’t tell” may finally be on its way out. Even if the Senate resists the latest efforts to end the policy, it appears that most members of the military – from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on down – support the law’s repeal.

But there’s one part of the military where resistance is greater than in any other: the United States Marine Corps.

That is clear from early reports about a survey sent to 400,000 active duty and reserve service members on “don’t ask, don’t tell” that will be officially released next month. More than 70 percent of respondents, spanning all branches of the military, said the effect of repealing the prohibition on openly gay troops would be positive, mixed or nonexistent. But about 40 percent of the Marine Corps respondents expressed concern about lifting the ban.

Top Corps leaders, past and present, haven’t been shy about stating their concerns. While serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace said in 2007 that “homosexual acts between individuals are immoral and . . . we should not condone immoral acts.” (He later clarified that the comment reflected his personal religious views.) While serving as Marine Corps commandant, Gen. James Conway told reporters in August that “an overwhelming majority [of Marines] would like not to be roomed with a person that is openly homosexual.” Most recently, the current commandant, Gen. James Amos, while expressing support for the survey, echoed Conway’s comments, eliciting a mild rebuke from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen.

What is it about the Marines? Compared with the other services, why do a disproportionate number of them overtly resist ending “don’t ask, don’t tell”?

I have studied, taught and interviewed Marines for 15 years and have gained great appreciation for the history and culture of the Corps, so much so, in fact, that I began teaching at the Marine Corps War College in Quantico almost three years ago.

Marines have survived and thrived as a service in part because they exemplify everything warrior. (I have never seen as many trucks with gun racks as I do driving on the Quantico base.) They pride themselves on being the toughest service, serving in the most austere environments under the most demanding circumstances. This pride has been forged throughout history, from Iwo Jima to Khe Sanh, from Fallujah to Helmand province.

In the Corps, the creed that “every Marine is a rifleman” means that no matter the Marine’s specialty, he or she is ready to fight. Marines do battle where the stakes are high and the quarters close. Although they have individual specialties, they all have infantry in their blood.

As a rule, ground pounders are more conservative, resistant to change and likely to uphold tradition. This equates to a fear of the unknown – in this case, serving in combat with an openly gay Marine.

Every Marine sees himself or herself as on the front lines, if not at the moment, then ready to deploy at any time. The Marine Corps is a smaller service than the other branches, with a greater singularity of purpose. That attitude is part of Marine Corps exceptionalism broadly, as well as when it comes to the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Anything that could dilute the warrior ethos will face a challenge.

I am an openly gay woman, equally comfortable at Quantico and in Dupont Circle. Each of these worlds holds negative stereotypes about the other, and like all stereotypes, they tend to break down on an individual level. Yet for some in both cultures, the notion of a gay Marine seems almost impossible, as though this most masculine and punishing service simply isn’t for gay people.

You don’t need to spend time with Marines, as I have, to realize how important the warrior ethos is to them. Simply turn on the television and see how the Corps markets itself: Do you have what it takes to join the few, the proud? When discussing their high retention numbers with the Marine Corps leadership a few years ago, I was told that the Corps prides itself on not having to pay big bonuses, as the other branches do, to keep people in the force – the honor of being a Marine is all the reward offered or desired. It’s part of why there are no former Marines, only retired Marines. Once you’ve joined the tribe, unless you do something that goes against the Corps’ values of honor, courage and commitment, you never leave.

In the Marines, anything that seems to contradict or challenge that warrior culture is treated like a foreign particle entering a body’s immune system – it is rejected. This visceral reaction will not change if we dismiss those who value these traditions.

But the Marine Corps culture itself, I believe, will eventually lead the service to support the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Although I am not closeted, the fact that I am gay does not come up in my job as a professor at the War College. Nor should it. I am not a Marine. I have not been in combat with Marines. The students at the college are the future leaders of the Corps, and I lead respectful debates in class on issues from grand strategy to counterinsurgency operations. I’m sure that my sexuality does not fit with the private views of every Marine. But it doesn’t have to. I was hired by the college as a professional and honored as the 2010 outstanding Marine Corps University civilian professor. In my experience with the Marines, professionalism trumps sexuality.

I am very sympathetic to the strain that the Marine Corps is under and would never support a policy change that I thought would hurt the Corps in a time of war. I have researched the implications of repealing the law, willing to land wherever the facts led me. The argument that we can’t repeal the policy because it would impair troops on the ground from carrying out their missions is specious; the opposition to the policy on practical or logistical grounds is surmountable.

The values of honor, courage and commitment are inseparable from the Marines. By definition, gay and lesbian Marines break one or more of these core tenets every time they have to hide or lie about who they are. Eventually, gay Marines must out themselves by upholding Corps values, or continue compromising the very values that make them Marines.

Repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” would not mean that hundreds of gay and lesbian Marines would immediately come out of the closet. But it would mean that they could keep their personal and professional integrity. The examples from other countries where homosexuals are allowed to serve suggest that many will go about their lives as normal, but without the fear of being discharged if discovered.

The key to reconciling Marine culture with the open service of gay men and women will not be found among the rank and file or even among closeted service members; it must come from Corps leaders. Most research on how to integrate minority groups into the military has a common thread: the utmost importance of leadership to the process. The fact that the current and prior Marine commandants have expressed discomfort at the prospect of the demise of “don’t ask, don’t tell” is unfortunate because the generals risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, hurting the Corps they desire to protect.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” will be reversed in time. And as the military survey indicates, a majority of the Corps does not see a risk in the repeal. How the change affects the Marines is up to the leadership. A Marine officer once told me that, besides all Marines being riflemen and riflewomen, what sets them apart is discipline: “If the law changes,” he said, “we will comply with the law. You can take that to the bank.”

I believe he’s right. The United States Marine Corps is the most professional force in the world. There is no reason to think that it will be less adept at integrating gays than Britain, Canada or Australia (just three of the 26 countries that allow gays and lesbians to serve openly, according to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network).

The current leadership should look to a fellow Marine for guidance. Staff Sgt. Eric Alva stepped on a landmine and lost his right leg only three hours into ground operations in Iraq in 2003; he was the first service member to be wounded there. He also happens to be gay. Alva received a medical discharge and has gone on to work for the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” At an event in 2007, he came out publicly, saying, “I’m an American who fought for his country and for the protection and the rights and freedoms of all American citizens – not just some of them, but all of them.”

The Marine Corps leadership should not only accept such sacrifices but honor those who make them. The Corps’ motto, “semper fidelis,” means “always faithful.” There is no qualifier for sexual orientation. Once a Marine, always a Marine.

Seth Walsh walked into the garden of his family’s home in Tehachapi, Calif., last month and hanged himself. He was just 13. Before making the tragic decision to end his life, however, he had endured years of homophobic taunting and abuse from his peers at school and in his neighborhood. He is one of six teenage boys in the United States known to have committed suicide in September after suffering at the hands of homophobic bullies.

In the past few weeks there has been a spate of attacks directed against people perceived to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. In New York on Oct. 3, three young men, believed to be gay, were kidnapped, taken to a vacant apartment in the Bronx and subjected to appalling torture and abuse. In Belgrade on Oct. 10, a group of protesters shouting abuse hurled Molotov cocktails and stun grenades into a peaceful gay pride parade, injuring 150 people. In South Africa on Sept. 25, a large-scale march in Soweto brought attention to the widespread rape of lesbians in the townships, assaults that perpetrators often try to justify as an attempt to “correct” the victims’ sexuality.

Homophobia, like racism and xenophobia, exists to varying degrees in all societies. Every day, in every country, individuals are persecuted, vilified or violently assaulted, even killed, because of their sexual orientation and gender identity. Covert or overt, homophobic violence causes enormous suffering that is often shrouded in silence and endured in isolation.

It is time we all spoke up. While responsibility for hate crimes rests with the perpetrators, we all share a duty to counter intolerance and prejudice and demand that attackers be held to account.

The first priority is to press for decriminalization of homosexuality worldwide. In more than 70 countries, individuals still face criminal sanctions on the basis of their sexual orientation. Such laws expose those concerned to the constant risk of arrest, detention and, in some cases, torture or even execution. They also perpetuate stigma and contribute to a climate of intolerance and violence.

But as important as decriminalization is, it is only a first step. We know from experience in those countries that have removed criminal sanctions that greater concerted efforts are needed to counter discrimination and homophobia, including legislative and educational initiatives. Here again, we all have roles to play, particularly those in positions of authority and influence, such as politicians, community leaders, teachers and journalists.

Sadly, those who should be exercising restraint or using their influence to promote tolerance too often do just the opposite, reinforcing popular prejudice. In Uganda, for example, where violence against people based on their sexual orientation is commonplace, and activists defending the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people face harassment and the threat of arrest, a newspaper published a front-page story on Oct. 2 “outing” 100 Ugandans it identified as gay or lesbian and printed their photographs alongside the headline “Hang Them.”

We must recognize such “journalism” for what it is: incitement to hatred and violence.

Political leaders and those who aspire to public office have a particularly important duty to use their words wisely. The candidate for public office who, rather than appealing for tolerance, makes casual remarks denigrating people on the basis of their sexuality may do so in the belief that he or she is indulging in harmless populism — but the effect is to legitimize homophobia.

Last month I spoke in Geneva as part of a panel discussion on decriminalizing homosexuality. The event was sponsored by a diverse group of 14 European, North American, South American and Asian countries. In a video message, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu lent his support and spoke with passion about the lessons of apartheid and the challenge of securing equal rights for all. “Whenever one group of human beings is treated as inferior to another, hatred and intolerance will triumph,” he said. It should not take hundreds more deaths and beatings to convince us of this truth. It is up to all of us to demand equality for all our fellow human beings, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday granted the Obama administration’s emergency request for a stay against a lower court order lifting the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring openly gay service members.

The decision will strike some people as odd, since popular belief holds that the president, who has said he opposes the law, can make the policy go away by simply letting the lower court order stand. In fact, the administration is required to comply with the law and defend it in court, regardless of Mr. Obama’s personal views.

Fortunately, there is another, seemingly contradictory step the White House could take that would not only make its position clear, but deal a significant blow to the law’s prospects: while continuing to appeal the ruling, the administration could inform the courts that it believes “don’t ask, don’t tell” is unconstitutional.

Many people seem to believe that the law would disappear if the Justice Department refused to appeal the court order. But there are two reasons that’s not the case.

First, the government has an obligation to comply with the nation’s laws, regardless of whether the president agrees with a particular statute. Doing otherwise would also set a precedent justifying similar nullifications by future administrations. The next president might, for example, decide not to enforce the recent health care reform law; all he would need would be a single ruling against the law by a single district court judge, which he would then refuse to appeal.

Presidents in rare instances can determine that a law is unconstitutional and decline to comply with it. But a 1994 opinion by the Office of Legal Counsel (where I was the head) concluded that a president can do so only under very special circumstances, including a conclusion on his part that it is “probable” that the Supreme Court would agree with him — a tough argument to make about “don’t ask, don’t tell” at this point.

Declining to appeal, moreover, wouldn’t resolve the issue. The law would remain on the books, and a future president could always seek to reopen and set aside the district court’s order.

However, Mr. Obama may have another option: while appealing the lower court’s decision, he could have the Justice Department tell the appellate court that the executive branch believes the law is unconstitutional.

In other words, the Justice Department would take the formal steps necessary to defend the law, but it would also make substantive arguments about why the law should be struck down. The Supreme Court could still vote to uphold the law, but the president’s position could significantly influence how the court rules.

Doing so wouldn’t unfairly strip the law of adequate defense: if the administration took a stand against the law, the appellate courts would very likely allow lawyers for Congress or outside groups to appear and argue on its behalf.

This approach is not unprecedented. In 1943, Congress passed a law prohibiting the payment of salaries to three particular government employees. Arguing that the law was unconstitutional, the employees sued and won in claims court. The solicitor general asked the Supreme Court to review the lower court’s decision, but he also told the justices that the administration agreed with the original ruling; the court ultimately struck down the law.

That case and others like it provided a precedent for President Bill Clinton in 1996 both to comply with a law requiring the military to discharge service members who had H.I.V., and at the same time inform the courts that he found it to be unconstitutional. Thanks in part to support from the military, Congress repealed the law before litigation ensued.

Telling the courts that a federal law should be struck down is not a position to be taken lightly by a president wary of overstepping his bounds. But if he concludes that the law restricts important liberties without advancing a government purpose, he has the right to say so. After all, while courts usually defer to Congress on such questions, the president is under no such obligation: he is a constitutional officer entitled to his own views on governmental necessity, particularly on matters of national defense.

True, having the administration argue that the law is unconstitutional wouldn’t guarantee that the Supreme Court would strike it down: in 1990, for example, the Supreme Court upheld a federal minority preference program even though the acting solicitor general (and future Supreme Court chief justice), John G. Roberts Jr., argued it was unconstitutional.

But the president could increase the chances that the appellate courts would agree with him by following a deliberate process that gives consideration to the views of the military leadership, some of whom have already come out against the policy. The courts would be more likely to defer to such a clear, unified position.

Since 1993 more than 13,000 men and women have been unfairly discharged from the military, people who could have been of service in America’s overseas conflicts. The best path to ending “don’t ask, don’t tell” is for Congress to repeal the law as soon as possible. If it doesn’t, President Obama should give the Supreme Court his administration’s honest view: that the law is harmful to national security.

Cuando era un muchacho, en el colegio de los frailes en donde fui adoctrinado, memorizábamos la lista de los actos que “claman venganza a Dios”. En el segundo puesto de aquel palmarés de la infamia figuraba el “pecado impuro contra naturaleza”, simbolizado en el fuego divino que arrasó a las ciudades malditas a orillas del Mar Muerto.

Hoy, este tipo de fábulas hacen reír a quienes sabemos que dicha venganza diezmaría las filas del clero y que, privada de infinidad de sus hijos, la pobre Iglesia no podría levantar cabeza después de semejante escabechina.

Pero el mismo discurso apocalíptico se esgrime ahora en el campo del islamismo radical y amenaza extenderse al ámbito de quienes, víctimas de la pobreza e ignorancia en la que se hallan sumidos numerosos pueblos musulmanes, buscan un responsable a los males que les afectan.

Recientemente, un imán argelino miembro del Grupo Salafista para la Predicación y el Combate, exhortaba a sus acólitos a la yihad y al martirio redentor de los atentados suicidas aduciendo para ello que la propagación de la homosexualidad era una de las señales anunciadoras del fin del mundo.

Dicho argumento revelador de las obsesiones y prejuicios de los autoproclamados salvadores de la Tierra y de las sociedades que la pueblan, es tan viejo como la aparición del ser humano en ella.

Basta ojear las crónicas antiguas o modernas sobre Mesopotamia, Grecia, Roma, India, Persia, Al Andalus, el Imperio Otomano, etcétera, para comprobar que un buen número de ellos apuntan al “vicio contra natura” -¿cómo diablos puede llamarse contra natura a lo que es parte intrínseca de ella?- como la causa directa de su decadencia y caída.

El Dios colérico de la Biblia -la peor invención, dicho sea de paso, de la mente humana- sigue castigándonos con epidemias, terremotos, inundaciones y otros desastres que no distinguen por cierto, “justos” de “pecadores”, pero no atina a reiterar la furia vengativa que redujo a Sodoma a sal y ceniza, ni a remediar, de pura fatiga, la chapuza que creó en una semana. Tascándose el freno, asiste impotente, siglo tras siglo, a la obstinada perversión de sus criaturas, a esa natura fuera de la natura que desde el Génesis se prolonga hasta el tercer milenio, ya sea abiertamente como en la galaxia gay de Occidente, ya de forma discreta, pero integrada en sus tradiciones en la Zona Sotádica descrita por sir Richard Burton hace siglo y medio.

A mi llegada a París, huyendo del rigorismo católico y la opresión política del franquismo, comprobé que la homofobia reinante en España infectaba también a mis compatriotas de fuera. Entre los militantes del PCE, del que fui compañero de viaje durante un buen tiempo, la burla y el desprecio a los “invertidos” eran idénticos a los de la Península. El ingreso de Jaime Gil de Biedma en el Partido fue vetado por el responsable barcelonés del mismo y recuerdo las bromas que se gastaban a costade Luis Landinez, un escritor inscrito en aquel que, tras sufrir en las cárceles del Régimen por su doble condición de rojo y maricón, había buscado refugio en Francia. Un miembro de la Redacción de Realidad, la revista intelectual del PCE, de la que fui dado de baja por “desviacionismo” en 1964 junto a Claudín y Semprún, me afirmó rotundamente que la supuesta homosexualidad de García Lorca era una infame calumnia de la derecha y que él estaba escribiendo un libro para desmentirla de forma irrebatible y definitiva.

En Cuba, la experiencia fue más dramática. Pese a que el comportamiento sexual de los mulatos y negros de los barrios populares de La Habana Vieja, Regla y Guanabacoa no difería mucho del de los magrebíes, egipcios, paquistaníes o turcos, la violencia del discurso homófono de los dirigentes y cuadros revolucionarios mostraba a las claras que la intolerancia ideológica, ya fuera la del nazismo o la de los regímenes soviéticos, no tenía nada que envidiar a la de las diferentes Iglesias de antaño ni al islamismo de nuevo cuño. El modelo soviético que se impuso en la Isla intentaba crear una sociedad homogénea en la que los deseos e impulsos de una buena parte de sus miembros no tuviera cabida.

En nombre de la decretada pureza del hombre nuevo -al que llamé en otra ocasión, el bárbaro viejo-, decenas de millares de pájaros fueron enviados a cortar caña en las siniestras Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción. El monolitismo ideológico, como el religioso de ayer y de hoy, exige una condigna uniformidad sexual que sujeta el cuerpo y la mente del ser humano a un molde único, del que no cabe el menor desvío. No obstante de eso, como describió magistralmente en sus novelas Reinaldo Arenas, los propios guardianes que vigilaban a los reclusos de las UMAP, satisfacían a escondidas sus deseos con ellos, como acaece en las sociedades en las que la homosexualidad identitaria se desdibuja y quien recurre ocasionalmente a ella por la situación en que se encuentra -alejamiento forzado de la familia o dificultad de acceso al otro sexo- no se considera a sí mismo ni es considerado homosexual en la medida en que su “situacionismo” no se convierte en adicción. El lamentable y tardío mea culpa de Castro por las tropelías de la llamada “década ominosa” no disminuye en nada su responsabilidad en las mismas. Miles de cubanos “degenerados” como Virgilio Piñera fueron víctimas de su cruel acoso y marginación.

El dilema que afrontan los homosexuales de una buena parte de Oriente Próximo, norte de África y el Caribe -me ciño a los países en los que mis estancias y viajes me han avezado a sus usos y costumbres-, es elegir entre la visibilidad duramente conquistada en Occidente o una práctica satisfactoria pero silenciada; entre salir del armario o ajustar sus impulsos a las normas implícitas de unas sociedades en las que es posible integrarlos gracias a un “ni visto ni oído” avalado por hábitos y tradiciones que se remontan a siglos. El escritor marroquí Abdellah Taïa rompió el tabú en su relato Une mélancolie arabe y ha sido defendido con valentía por el semanario laico Tel Quel.

La presente ola de violencia estatal en países antaño permisivos como Irán o Irak, en donde los culpables de sodomía pobres y sin buenos arrimos son lapidados o ahorcados conforme a la hipócrita moral wahabí de la Península Arábiga, pende como una espada sobre la cabeza de las víctimas potenciales de ese totalitarismo teocrático que busca un chivo expiatorio a los abusos de su poder y a su incapacidad de responder a las aspiraciones de sus súbditos menesterosos, sin brújula ni esperanza.

Como señalan Stephen Murray y otros autores en su libro de referencia sobre el tema, Islamic homosexualities, no hay una homosexualidad única sino un abanico de homosexualidades que difieren entre sí y rechazan el modelo comunitario gay, visto como algo ajeno a su querencia, sin considerar que el igualitarismo legal que encarna no es un valor exclusivo de Europa y de Norteamérica sino que tiene validez universal. Desde la repugnante misoginia de los talibanes de Kandahar expuesta recientemente en el documental Españoles en Afganistán a la movida de Chueca el trecho es largo y las discusiones sobre lo gay y lo pre-gay lo serán también.

It’s Pride season in Europe and the Americas. It’s a time to celebrate the huge achievements that have and are being made in terms of LGBT rights across this part of world. In Syria, however, things have taken a recent turn for the worse.

Since late March, police have conducted a series of raids on private parties and meeting places, and more than 25 men have been arrested. The arrests are shrouded in secrecy but some information has leaked out.

At the Gay Middle East news website (GME) we have received several testimonies and published two reports from undercover sources in Damascus. In Beirut, Georges Azzi of Helem (the first LGBT advocacy group in an Arab country) confirms that arrests are taking place. Writing for the Huffington Post, Michael Luongo quotes him as saying: “Unfortunately none of our contacts can give us more details at this point. It seems that the police are tracking gay people in Syria now.”

Neil Grungras of the US-based Organisation for Refuge, Asylum and Migration (also quoted by Luongo) says: “I too have heard rumours, but nothing concrete of an escalation. That being said, among our clients in Turkey was a gay Palestinian from Syria who spent four years in prison and was severely tortured on trumped-up charges because he was gay.”

It seems that some men have now been in jail without bail or visits from family, friends or colleagues for over three months.

To many readers this may sound disheartening but inevitable. Isn’t Syria a conservative and deeply religious Islamic country? Actually the reality is different. Syria sees itself as a secular and diverse country. In general, sexual minorities have been more or less left alone – marginally tolerated – as long as they didn’t stray into the political arena and start making demands.

But the latest raids mark a frightening new crackdown from the Syrian authorities. They have invoked article 520 of the Syrian penal code of 1949 which outlaws “carnal relations against the order of nature” with a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment. Anyone seen as aiding people under suspicion or convicted of such an offence is also likely to get into trouble with the law. The result is that some unfortunate men have been left to languish in jail and some are alleged to have been treated brutally by the police.

Gay life in Syria is still underground. Private parties and meeting places are essential for LGBT people across Syria. There are no openly gay bars or organisations. People hold private parties in remote places where they hope to go unnoticed and be inoffensive. The authorities know of these gatherings and have tended to overlook them.

The crackdown has hit the heart of Syria’s discreet but significant LGBT communities. The men are being held on various grounds including: performing a homosexual act; selling, buying or consuming illegal drugs; organising and promoting “obscene” parties.

A senior Syrian police officer handling the case has said: “The Syrian authorities’ major interest is the safety of people. We targeted those parties only because of the increasing rate of drug use, while our presence in those parks and squares is because of the increasing rate of robberies.”

While at first glance the “public safety” explanation may sound reasonable, men who are desperately trying to avoid the attention of the police because of their sexuality are not very likely to be robbing people and pushing drugs. In any case, drug use and dealing is much more common and prevalent in big heterosexual venues across Syria which are far more visible and accessible.

Meanwhile, in the last two weeks GME has received information that further arrests have been made of people suspected of cruising in discreet meeting places. Several dozen may now be in prison for “gay offences”. Put simply, these raids and arrests seem to have been specifically designed to trap and arrest men suspected of homosexuality; they are unlikely to be anything to do with public safety in Syria.

The outlook is grim for those now under arrest. A conviction for homosexuality in Syria would not merely condemn you to a prison sentence, but upon release you are very likely to be ostracised by family, friends and colleagues. In some cases physical attacks and even “honour killings” have been known to follow. A mere accusation of being homosexual can be a death sentence.

Furthermore, the crackdown is not just a local issue – it has repercussions across the region. Thousands of LGBT Iraqis have relocated to Syria fleeing the horrific violence in their country, their plight made all the more poignant after the Iraqi authorities’ recent raid on a safehouse in Karbala.

Now, both Syrian and Iraqi LGBT communities across Syria face an uncertain and unsafe future, the latter terrified of being deported back to Iraq and almost certain death. While some journalists have portrayed this as a broader political issue, LGBT communities across Syria are desperate to avoid such categorisations as they simply want to carry on with their life in a discreet and inoffensive manner.

This is not a “public safety issue” but a human rights one – Amnesty International has been contacted and is looking into the case. Let’s hope that good sense may yet prevail in Syria. The Syrian authorities could quietly drop the charges and release these men safely back into their communities (or alternatively find them a safe home in a country that can adopt them). Then Syria could repeal section 520 and allow LGBT people to live their lives without fear or persecution.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote a letter last month urging Congress to delay legislation that would end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military until after Dec. 1, when the results of a 10-month Pentagon working-group review are due. While the request is reasonable, it is the military that will pay the highest price if Congress does not act now.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” is both a federal law and a Pentagon policy. The law ties the military’s hands on this issue. If Congress fails to repeal it, the Pentagon’s study process will be compromised because the Defense Department will not have the authority to implement its own recommendations.

Fortunately, there is an option that fully respects the secretary’s request to Congress while moving forward on a reasonable timetable. Congress could repeal the federal statute and return authority to the military to set rules about gay troops, just as the armed services had before “don’t ask, don’t tell” became law in 1993.

Indeed, acting now to remove the constraints imposed by that law is the most faithful response that Congress can offer to the working group’s efforts to engage service members and their families, to fully assess the impact of ending the policy, and to develop comprehensive recommendations for how to make the change.

Current efforts to end “don’t ask, don’t tell” have focused on repealing the law and on replacing it with a policy that requires equal treatment of gay, lesbian and bisexual troops. This is a tougher sell to moderates in Congress and has the downside of perpetuating congressional meddling in military policy.

By contrast, the “repeal only” option would leave to the Pentagon any questions about the possibility, content and timing of policy changes, while eliminating the law that straitjackets military leaders’ ability to craft the most sensible policy. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who also signed the letter, wrote that they “oppose any legislation that seeks to change this policy prior to the completion” of the study. But repeal-only, without language instructing the Pentagon on what to do, would not impose change on the military. Rather, it would allow the Defense Department to study and implement the change as the military deems fit, while fully respecting the review that is underway.

Repealing the law while avoiding action on a nondiscrimination statute will not please everyone. Proponents of ending unequal treatment of gay troops have insisted that an anti-discrimination statute replace the current law because they do not trust the military to move forward on its own and they fear that a future president or Congress might again impose a discriminatory policy.

It is true that without a mandate from Congress, the Pentagon would have the discretion to leave current regulations in place as it determines how best to implement repeal. There is, however, little cause to fear that the ban would remain indefinitely, and it is highly unlikely that a future administration or Congress would roll back equal treatment once the Pentagon adopts it. Although some wish to see equality written into law, the current political climate calls for reconsideration. This is why a repeal-only option has merit. Such a change would not impose a solution but, rather, the opposite: It would remove constraints on the military’s ability to do its job. Congress should repeal the law, providing the secretary and the chairman with enough maneuvering room that, when the time is right, they can implement policies that end discrimination and maximize military readiness.

The centre of Minsk, capital of Belarus, is blocked for at least 15 minutes, then four cars with the Belarusian national flag as licence plates sweep past. A young guy next to me is calling his mum to tell her that he is so excited and just saw with his own eyes the bulletproof car of Alexander Lukashenko, sometimes described as Europe’s last dictator.

Just over a week ago, the Belarusian leader was sent a letter asking him to authorise Slavic gay pride this coming weekend. So far, there has been no response.

Lukashenko’s undemocratic rule has been marred by controversial elections, suppression of political opposition, prosecution of human rights activists and opposition figures, media control, and so on. To be honest, though, I don’t feel that I’m in a dictatorship when I visit Minsk – the city gradually looks more and more like a European city with many bars, restaurants, casinos and a relaxed police presence. The gay community is no exception; any taxi driver will know where to drive you if you want to go to the local gay club.

But Belarus missed a unique chance to improve its reputation and upstage Russia by giving permission for the first ever gay pride march this coming Saturday. A similar event in Russia was banned and dispersed at the order of the homophobic mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, a year ago.

Lukashenko, who once called himself an Orthodox atheist, was not obliged to please the clerics who are against such events. All he had to do was overcome some of the old Soviet authoritarian thinking and he could have improved his country’s image as well as benefiting Belarusian society and democracy-building. If only I had been able to talk to him when his car went past; I am sure I would have been able to persuade him to allow the gay pride march in Minsk.

Lukashenko is not alone. Opposition politicians also declined to support the LGBT community and Slavic gay pride. When in Brussels and Strasbourg they talk a lot about democracy and human rights, but back in Belarus there is scarcely a word of support for gay rights – even from pro-democracy politicians fighting against Lukashenko’s regime.

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender activists in Belarus are not seeking political power. Their aim is to achieve their basic civil rights, irrespective of the political regime. The Slavic gay pride movement was founded in Minsk in November 2008 at a time when hardly anyone spoke about LGBT rights in Belarus. Since then discussions are being had in the local newspapers, on internet sites, forums and blogs and between ordinary people. Generally, the reaction of these people is much more tolerant than in neighbouring Russia.

Even the official response of Minsk city executive committee banning the march was different. Warsaw, Riga, Moscow, Belgrade and Vilnius tried to ban the pride events of their local LGBT communities, citing security concerns and protection of morals. In the absence of any organised opposition to the event, Minsk authorities fell back on the absurd argument that the march was due to pass too close to underground pedestrian crossings and metro stations.

The organisers of Slavic gay pride had informed Minsk authorities about their intention to hold the event in early March and the reply only came a week before the scheduled date, without any alternative proposals and leaving no time for negotiations with the authorities.

Tomorrow dozens of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Belarusians, alongside straight people, will go to the streets of Minsk to defy the ban and assert their constitutional rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of expression. They will show that they are against homophobia and discrimination.

They cannot expect protection from the European court of human rights because Belarus is still the only country in Europe which is not a member of the Council of Europe. In contrast to Vilnius last Saturday, they will not be joined by dozens of foreign human rights activists. There will be no European parliamentarians taking part in the Slavic gay pride. There will probably be no foreign diplomats to observe the event. But they will be joined by a group of fellow Russian activists who face similar problems and who will come to show their solidarity. And, most importantly, they will have the courage and unstoppable will to live in freedom, respect and dignity. All of them know the risk they are taking, but they are ready to pay the price.

Slavic gay pride will be a celebration of courage and will remind us that Harvey Milk’s ideals are still alive, and still inspire people all around the world to fight injustice and prejudice, even in hostile and suppressive conditions.

And I am sure that the day will come when a young guy, like the one who saw the motorcade of the “last European dictator”, will call his mother to say that the gay parade is talking place on Independence Street in Minsk. The big rainbow flag Belarusian and Russian activists intend to fly over Minsk on Saturday will bring this day closer.

Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity — or because of their sexual orientation. Nor should anyone be excluded from health care on any of these grounds. In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights. We knew this was wrong. Thankfully, the world supported us in our struggle for freedom and dignity.

It is time to stand up against another wrong.

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people are part of so many families. They are part of the human family. They are part of God’s family. And of course they are part of the African family. But a wave of hate is spreading across my beloved continent. People are again being denied their fundamental rights and freedoms. Men have been falsely charged and imprisoned in Senegal, and health services for these men and their community have suffered. In Malawi, men have been jailed and humiliated for expressing their partnerships with other men. Just this month, mobs in Mtwapa Township, Kenya, attacked men they suspected of being gay. Kenyan religious leaders, I am ashamed to say, threatened an HIV clinic there for providing counseling services to all members of that community, because the clerics wanted gay men excluded.

Uganda’s parliament is debating legislation that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment, and more discriminatory legislation has been debated in Rwanda and Burundi.

These are terrible backward steps for human rights in Africa.

Our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters across Africa are living in fear.

And they are living in hiding — away from care, away from the protection the state should offer to every citizen and away from health care in the AIDS era, when all of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services. That this pandering to intolerance is being done by politicians looking for scapegoats for their failures is not surprising. But it is a great wrong. An even larger offense is that it is being done in the name of God. Show me where Christ said “Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones.” Gay people, too, are made in my God’s image. I would never worship a homophobic God.

“But they are sinners,” I can hear the preachers and politicians say. “They are choosing a life of sin for which they must be punished.” My scientist and medical friends have shared with me a reality that so many gay people have confirmed, I now know it in my heart to be true. No one chooses to be gay. Sexual orientation, like skin color, is another feature of our diversity as a human family. Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people? Does God love his dark- or his light-skinned children less? The brave more than the timid? And does any of us know the mind of God so well that we can decide for him who is included, and who is excluded, from the circle of his love?

The wave of hate must stop. Politicians who profit from exploiting this hate, from fanning it, must not be tempted by this easy way to profit from fear and misunderstanding. And my fellow clerics, of all faiths, must stand up for the principles of universal dignity and fellowship. Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.

When the Pentagon’s top brass announced last week that they no longer believe military unit cohesion suffers from the presence of openly gay men or women in the ranks, they effectively transformed a policy question into a legal one, to which the answer is clear: Congress can no longer mandate discrimination in the armed forces on the basis of sexual orientation.

In the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law criminalizing same-gender sexual relations, reasoning that such conduct was part of a constitutionally protected liberty interest. The court also suggested that the Texas statute was vulnerable to challenge as a denial of equal protection of the laws. And it is application of the equal protection doctrine to the military’s professional assessment of the impact that openly gay service members have on combat effectiveness that is likely to be the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Congress, of course, has broad constitutional power to adopt rules and regulations for the armed forces that would be unthinkable in the civilian workplace. Moreover, the courts properly give such rules very great deference. In one leading case, the court upheld an Air Force restriction on the wearing of religious dress — in that case a yarmulke — while in uniform. As the court explained, in the military “there is simply not the same [individual] autonomy as there is in the larger civilian community.” Restrictions on homosexual conduct, and even the admission that a service member is gay or lesbian, might be justified on the same reasoning — but only if those restrictions are rationally related to a proper governmental purpose.

This doctrine of equal protection is the minimum standard by which the Supreme Court measures any law, regulation or policy that treats one group differently than another. It has been applied in Romer v. Evans to laws disadvantaging homosexuals. In that 1996 case, the court invalidated a provision of Colorado’s constitution that forbade adoption of anti-discrimination laws based on sexual orientation. It could find no proper governmental purpose supported by this limitation and concluded that the provision “classifies homosexuals not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else.”

The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is now utterly vulnerable under that standard. When Congress enacted the ban in 1993, it justified the restrictions based on the military’s need for “unit cohesion.” Openly gay soldiers, Congress concluded, “would create an unacceptable risk.”

In 1993, the military agreed with, indeed encouraged, this assessment. Today, according to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, it does not. Statements of Defense Secretary Robert Gates indicate that the Pentagon’s civilian leadership also no longer agrees. That these judgments have been reached after nearly a decade of superb combat performance by U.S. forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, in situations where troops served together for months-long stretches under enemy fire and in incredibly confined conditions and were inevitably aware of each other’s intimate habits, including sexual orientation, makes them all the more compelling.

This would not be the end of the court’s inquiry when “don’t ask, don’t tell” is challenged, since it is the court’s assessment of Congress’s conclusions that must in the end govern. Yet the fact that the military’s senior leadership (both in and out of uniform) sees no significant threat to unit cohesion and combat effectiveness from permitting openly gay men and women to serve will make it all but impossible for Congress to articulate a rational basis for excluding them.

The election, two months ago, of the Rev. Mary Glasspool, a priest who has been in a committed relationship with another woman for more than 20 years, as a suffragan (assistant) bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, has brought added turmoil to the Episcopal Church in the United States and to the worldwide Anglican Communion. There has been sporadic schism since the regular ordination of women as priests in 1977 and especially since the election of the Rev. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003. He is the first openly gay bishop in the history of those Christian bishops — Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Greek and Russian Orthodox among them — who trace their succession back to the apostles.

In protest, several dozen parishes have aligned themselves with conservative Anglican bishops in Africa, and the Roman Catholic Church has offered to take in disaffected Episcopalians. In 2008, the leadership of the Anglican Communion, to which the American church belongs, tried to keep things together by urging the Americans not to elect other openly gay people as bishops until the Communion could establish more common ground. The Los Angeles electors’ choice of a gay woman as bishop has pushed the denominational envelope to the point of tearing.

The Glasspool election and its ensuing uproar make me realize how much has changed since 1976, when my father, who came to the Los Angeles diocese as a priest in 1947, died. About the biggest controversy within the church during most of his ministry was over proposed revisions to the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.

At that time, marriage was strictly Adam and Eve. Gays were closeted, whether they were in the congregation or the male-only priesthood. Until 1971, when women were first ordained as deacons, the highest post a woman could attain was member of the vestry, the elected group that manages parish business. But even that was uncommon; usually the highest ranking woman in the parish was the leader of the altar guild, which arranges the flowers in the church, sets up the Eucharistic vessels and washes and irons the linens used in the service. Women could not be priests because — according to the reasoning that had held for two millenniums — none of the apostles was a woman. This made as much sense as saying that, as none of the apostles was a scholar, scholars could not be priests, or that because all the apostles were Jews, only Jews could be ordained.

In 1977, I interviewed one of the controversial new priests, the Rev. Carol Anderson, for an Esquire article, and thought she was simply marvelous. Twelve years later, as either coincidence or a wave of the hand of God, she arrived as the new rector of my now nominal parish, All Saints’ in Beverly Hills, and we have become great friends. Oh, and now the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church is a woman, Katharine Jefferts Schori.

These changes did not come until I was in my 30s. I had always been deeply devout, an altar boy from age 6, a regular at church camp and then on its summer staff, and the vice president and then the president of our diocese’s Episcopal Young Churchmen. I attended Hobart College, in Geneva, N.Y., which is affiliated with the Episcopal Church, my tuition paid in part by a clergy scholarship. Until well into my 20s, I gave regular consideration to becoming a priest myself.

I had a good model in my father, a man of immense humor who understood the frailties of humanity and who annually challenged his faith by reading agnostics from Thomas Huxley to George Bernard Shaw. He was a solid defender of Anglican orthodoxy and the guidance of the New Testament, but he also believed that every bit of Christian teaching could be summed up in three words: God is love. “The miracles,” he once told me, “are window dressing.”

Love. Treat others as you would have them treat you. If you feel you are a child of God, then honor your common and equal status with others as children of God. Except (and there are always exceptions with sibling rivalry) if they are women and therefore not qualified to perform the holiest sacraments of the church. Except if two members of the same sex engage in long, committed and faithful love; God may be love, but this love is ungodly.

Just look, some vigilant Christians say, at the “clear teaching” in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 (“Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers — none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.”); in 1 Timothy 1:9-11 (“The law is laid down … for the unholy and profane … for murderers, fornicators, sodomites, slave traders, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to the sound teaching that conforms to the glorious gospel of the blessed God.”); and especially in Romans 1:26b-27 (“Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.”)

I know that this will offend some Christians, but the notion that Scripture is perfectly clear is wishful thinking, as a recent white paper prepared by the All Saints’ clergy demonstrates. The writers of the four Gospels don’t agree on even so simple a thing as which people were present at Christ’s empty tomb. Considering that, over the centuries, the Bible has been translated into and out of multiple languages, it only makes sense to consider the context of what’s written rather than believe that every word is literal divine revelation. In rebuttal to the notion of a clear teaching of Scripture, the evangelical author and speaker Tony Campolo has said that “sodomites” is a word of dubious translation. “Nobody knows what the word means,” he said. “Interestingly enough, up until the 14th century it was translated as masturbation.”

Timothy’s reference to sodomites, for its part, is in the context of boys who were castrated to maintain their feminine and childlike characteristics and then exploited for sex — a far cry from two consenting adults of the same sex consummating their committed love.

Today, there is much reference to the supposed Christian teaching that marriage is a sacrament between one man and one woman, but it was not until the 12th century that marriage became a sacrament in the Western church.

Sex, though, has always been a particularly Christian problem. Orthodox Jews are commanded to marry, but the early Christians found celibacy a high calling. St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 7 that he wished all Christians could stay single and celibate, as he had. He knew, however, that not everyone could and so he adds, “But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.”

Less quoted than Paul’s advice that it is better to marry than to be engulfed by desire is what he says earlier in the passage: “I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has a particular gift from God, one having one kind and another a different kind.” One having one kind of gift and another a different kind is a pretty good definition of humanity in all our variety, and to me this passage expands the heart of what it means when two people, gay or straight, commit themselves to each other in the sight of a God who understands human differences.

A central tenet of Christianity is that all of us are born into sin. Then, as we grow older, we decide that some of our equals sin more than others, and in far worse ways than we do ourselves. We divine the word of God to mean that the acts we don’t like of others — what they eat, how they pray, whom they fall in love with — are an abomination in his sight, as if we can presume to decide in our own way what pleases God, and therefore what acts should be excluded and whom we can judge and damn in his name.

Exclusion always seems to become part of some people’s faith, though often over time what was excluded becomes accepted, only to be replaced by another ban: People of one denomination can’t marry those in another; people of one color cannot marry those of another.

Among my father’s parishioners in the 1950s were two men in their late 40s who came every Sunday to the 7:30 a.m. communion service and who shared a house. My parents referred to them as “confirmed bachelors,” code words for the love that dare not speak its name. They were kind and gentle men, who to even a 10-year-old obviously had some sort of special and personal bond. I am certain that they were in a loving and committed relationship that the church would then not recognize or bless, but as long as the fiction of their just being two people who happened to live together was maintained, they would continue to be accepted and valued members of the congregation. Which, of course, was well meaning but also hypocritical. Now, a multitude of parishes across the country would openly welcome the couple.

My own faith has eroded over the years, though my father’s belief in the supremacy of love still guides me. And so I can’t help but wonder, how can Christians not recognize and honor love that binds two people, any two people, together unto themselves? And if a priest has fulfilled her sacred duties with the distinction that persuades those to whom she would minister to elect her their bishop, and has led an open life of committed love that honors the essence of their God, why should her choice of a partner matter?

The Post asked pollsters and others to explain the politics of changing the ban on gays serving openly. Below are responses from Scott Keeter, Ed Rogers, Dan Schnur, Michael Buonocore, Douglas E. Schoen and Sue Fulton.

By Scott Keeter, Director of survey research at the Pew Research Center.

Support for allowing gays to serve openly in the military has been stable for several years and is significantly higher in many polls than it was when President Bill Clinton raised the issue in the 1990s. When the Pew Research Center asked about this issue last March, we found 59 percent saying they favored “allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military.” Just 32 percent were opposed, and only 13 percent were strongly opposed. A recent poll by Fox News found a similar result among registered voters (61 percent in favor).

Underlying this trend has been a broad shift in public attitudes about homosexuality more generally, a shift driven by generational change. Compared with older people, young people are substantially more supportive of allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the military, to marry or enter into civil unions, or to adopt. On the question of military service, fully 69 percent of those ages 18 to 29 are supportive. Among people 65 and older, just 49 percent say that gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly.

Changes in attitudes about policies toward gays and lesbians may also be tied, to some extent, to shifting views about the nature of homosexuality. A 2006 Pew Research poll found that 36 percent of the public believed that homosexuality is innate, up from 20 percent in a Los Angeles Times poll conducted in 1985. Similarly, 49 percent of those polled in 2006 said that they did not believe homosexuality could be changed, an increase of seven percentage points since 2003.

By Ed Rgers, White House staffer to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush; chairman of BGR Group.

The cynic’s first rule of politics is: “Be for what is going to happen.” And it is inevitable that gays will openly serve in the U.S. armed forces. For GOP candidates, however, getting in front on this issue could be harmful, especially in a primary. Much of the Republican coalition will never support gays in the military. Also, there are unique aspects of military life that need to be considered before forcing this social policy on an unwilling defense establishment that is serving this country very well.

Therefore, the best politics for Republicans is to defer to respected former military leaders. The incumbent leadership is compromised by its rightful loyalty to the commander in chief.

And for Democrats? The acceptance of gay Americans in all aspects of life is evolving politically at a rapid pace, particularly among young voters, who see anything they perceive to be anti-gay as unfair and backward. But the general population is not there yet.

President Obama may be on the right side of history, but forcing action on this issue now, with troops in the field and other, more pressing problems, is a mistake that will only add to the Democrats’ woes in November.

By Dan Schnur, Director of the University of Southern California’s Unruh Institute of Politics; communications director for John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign.

The White House has concluded that cultural trends in this country — namely the “Will and Grace-ification” of American voters, whose exposure to gays and lesbians is much more widespread than in 1993 — make this is an acceptable political risk. More specifically, though, it is a tradeoff with the Democratic base, offering it something in exchange for President Obama’s new agenda of tax cuts and deficit reduction.

Obama didn’t move to the center on many specific policy matters in his State of the Union address. But he did use the speech to dramatically reprioritize his agenda, primarily in ways designed to be more appealing to moderates than to liberals. His tepid defense of health-care reform came after more than 30 minutes on other topics. The paragraph on climate change did not include the words “cap and trade” but did call for expanded oil drilling and nuclear power. Immigration reform received one sentence in the speech, which is one sentence more than he devoted to organized labor’s “card check” legislation. With last year’s policy priorities necessarily buried under a verbal avalanche on fiscal responsibility, Obama and his advisers recognized that having a dispirited Democratic Party is not an ideal place from which to begin the battle of this November’s midterm elections. So he threw liberals a bone that may help motivate them to turn out in the fall.

While there will certainly be a backlash to the decision from the right, it’s important to note that the one-year delay in its implementation means that the change will not have taken place when voters go to the polls in November. So while cultural conservatives will certainly be unhappy, there won’t be any photos or interviews of enlistees available to enrage the opposition until well after the elections. As the White House has learned from its experience on Guantanamo, a prospective decision not yet enacted may not eliminate political fallout, but it can certainly lessen its impact.

By Michael Buonocore, former Marine officer; served in Afghanistan from 2008 to 2009; graduate student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Some lawmakers’ opposition to repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” is rooted in the fear of how this singular issue will impact their popularity among certain groups. But they don’t have to worry about adversely affecting the military, creating additional backlash.

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, bravely endorsed repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” undermining critics who argue that such a policy shift is in conflict with commanders’ prerogatives. He could have guardedly responded to the president’s initiative without rebuke, but he chose to actively support the measure.

Many in the military don’t feel the way Mullen does. But that really does not matter. The military has never been an organization that entertains individuals’ petty concerns, and military units are unique in how quickly and to what extent they adopt their commander’s comportment. Good commanders carry out the orders of senior commanders as if they were their own, regardless of how they feel about them — because, in combat, executing quick, decisive actions against the enemy is what keeps our men and women alive.

This country has the most capable military the world has ever seen, and it’s nothing less than an outright insult to question whether our officers and enlisted troops have the will and ability to carry out the commander in chief’s directives.

By Douglas E. Schoen, Democratic pollster and author.

The Obama administration’s decision to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” may well be the right decision morally, ethically and militarily. But it could have a dramatic and deleterious impact on Democratic fortunes in November.

Despite the fact that military leaders such as Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen and former Joint Chiefs chairman John Shalikashvili have endorsed the repeal, the American people have not fully done so. The results of referendums in California and Maine and recent votes in the New York and New Jersey legislatures demonstrate quite clearly that mass opinion has not changed as dramatically as elite opinion apparently has on the role of gays in our society.

The Tea Party movement has been motivated to a very large degree by our struggling economy. But it is clear that social issues lie just beneath the surface. I fear that the Tea Party movement, social conservatives and what is left of the Christian right will use this issue to further mobilize opposition to Democratic control of the House and Senate as we approach the fall elections.

The political impact could well set back the goal of achieving full civil rights for gays and lesbians.

By Sue Fulton, communications director for Knights Out; graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in its first class to admit women; commanded an Army company in military intelligence in 1983-84.

Adm. Michael Mullen’s courageous statement on “don’t ask, don’t tell” has thrown the anti-gay right into a panic. It’s clear that the “threat to unit cohesion” argument made in 1993 was without base. Now opponents of gay service are madly casting about for any argument. Asked about the issue on Tuesday, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) launched into a discussion of “transgenders [and] hermaphrodites . . . that’s going to be part of this whole thing.” Oh, my.

If the right wing doesn’t formulate a coherent argument, it won’t slow the momentum for repeal. Meanwhile, we will continue to hear from Dan Choi, Victor Fehrenbach, Julianne Sohn and organizations such as Knights Out, Service Academy GALA, and Servicemembers United, representing thousands more gay and lesbian veterans. Their service — and their truthfulness — will be a tough argument to rebut

The election of Canon Mary D Glasspool as an Anglican bishop in the diocese of Los Angeles has been slated by some, praised by others. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, wants Episcopal church leaders to block her appointment, and has warned of “very important implications” if they do not. But to Giles Fraser, “This is another nail in the coffin of Christian homophobia.”

Along with Canon Diane Bruce, she has been chosen as a suffragan (assistant) bishop in the Episcopal diocese of Los Angeles. In some ways, Glasspool is an unsurprising choice, a gifted parish priest now in the senior clergy team supporting churches across Maryland. But she is also openly lesbian, and has been in a committed relationship for 21 years. Some believe that makes her unsuitable, at least while opinion is so divided. Others feel that turning her down just because of her sexuality would go against Gospel values and deny the promptings of the holy spirit.

The consecration of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people as bishops, and blessing of same-sex partnerships, have been hotly debated in Anglican circles in recent years. Most provinces disapprove of such relationships, at least publicly, though some – such as the Church of England – rely heavily on LGBT clergy and layworkers. The Episcopal church, with the Anglican Church of Canada, has gone further than most towards including LGBT people at all levels.

Some see this as arrogance, others as bold prophetic leadership. Yet the Episcopal church is more in tune with traditional Anglicanism than many of its critics and supporters would admit.

Anglican thinkers have long recognised that complex issues deserve careful study, drawing on scripture, tradition and reason, and that is possible to disagree yet remain in fellowship. While Anglican churches in different parts of the world have long been autonomous, the “duty of thinking and learning” is a theme that has come up repeatedly at international gatherings. In 1978 the Lambeth conference recognised the need for “deep and dispassionate study of the question of homosexuality, which would take seriously both the teaching of scripture and the results of scientific and medical research”, “pastoral concern for those who are homosexual” and “dialogue with them”.

Concern for justice and commitment to human rights was another theme, including from the 1980s those of “homosexual orientation“. Anglicans also acknowledged that laypeople as well as clergy, “share in the priestly ministry of the church and in responsibility for its work”, and each province should “explore the theology of baptism and confirmation in relation to the need to commission the laity for their task in the world”.

The Episcopal church faithfully acted on these recommendations. And so, over the decades, it came under increasing pressure from an informed and empowered laity to stop discriminating and hold LGBT people to the same standard as heterosexuals. Meanwhile senior clergy in some other churches such as Nigeria and Uganda ignored such resolutions and instead insisted that the whole communion should submit to their interpretation of the Bible. International divisions deepened, especially after an openly gay man, Gene Robinson, became a US bishop in 2003. Rowan Williams has been publicly highly critical of this and other attempts to include LGBT people while saying next to nothing about repeated attempts to deny them dignity and safety.

Taken aback by the uproar, the Episcopal church accepted a moratorium on further consecrations, but this did not appease their fiercest critics, who kept trying to take over parishes and dioceses in the US, contrary to Anglican tradition. In 2009, a gathering of representatives affirmed that most Episcopalians believed that LGBT people should not be barred from any form of ministry. As well as Glasspool, an openly gay candidate, John L Kirkley, was among the six candidates considered for the two suffragan bishop posts in Los Angeles.

In a sermon earlier this year, celebrating the festival of Pentecost, Glasspool spoke of the outpouring of the holy spirit on Christians of many languages and the importance of “unity in diversity”, which “involves listening to one another and learning from each other and honoring all of God’s great and gracious creation.” However the listening, learning and tolerance of diverse practices and beliefs (albeit grudging at times) which have been customary among Anglicans are anathema to some of the Episcopal church’s most vocal opponents.

The 1988 Lambeth conference recognised that “reformation and transformation of unjust systems is an essential element of our biblical hope”. Two years later the 1990 the Anglican consultative council urged “every diocese in our communion to consider how through its structures it may encourage its members to see that a true Christian spirituality involves a concern for God’s justice in the world, particularly in its own community.” It is ironic that, for holding to these and other Anglican principles, the Episcopal church may find itself exiled to the margins of the communion.

In the slow-moving train crash of international Anglicanism, a decision taken in California has finally brought a large coach off the rails altogether. The House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church (TEC) in the United States has voted decisively to allow in principle the appointment, to all orders of ministry, of persons in active same-sex relationships. This marks a clear break with the rest of the Anglican Communion.

Both the bishops and deputies (lay and clergy) of TEC knew exactly what they were doing. They were telling the Archbishop of Canterbury and the other “instruments of communion” that they were ignoring their plea for a moratorium on consecrating practising homosexuals as bishops. They were rejecting the two things the Archbishop of Canterbury has named as the pathway to the future — the Windsor Report (2004) and the proposed Covenant (whose aim is to provide a modus operandi for the Anglican Communion). They were formalising the schism they initiated six years ago when they consecrated as bishop a divorced man in an active same-sex relationship, against the Primates’ unanimous statement that this would “tear the fabric of the Communion at its deepest level”. In Windsor’s language, they have chosen to “walk apart”.

Granted, the TEC resolution indicates a strong willingness to remain within the Anglican Communion. But saying “we want to stay in, but we insist on rewriting the rules” is cynical double-think. We should not be fooled.

Of course, matters didn’t begin with the consecration of Gene Robinson. The floodgates opened several years before, particularly in 1996 when a church court acquitted a bishop who had ordained active homosexuals. Many in TEC have long embraced a theology in which chastity, as universally understood by the wider Christian tradition, has been optional.

That wider tradition always was counter-cultural as well as counter-intuitive. Our supposedly selfish genes crave a variety of sexual possibilities. But Jewish, Christian and Muslim teachers have always insisted that lifelong man-plus-woman marriage is the proper context for sexual intercourse. This is not (as is frequently suggested) an arbitrary rule, dualistic in overtone and killjoy in intention. It is a deep structural reflection of the belief in a creator God who has entered into covenant both with his creation and with his people (who carry forward his purposes for that creation).

Paganism ancient and modern has always found this ethic, and this belief, ridiculous and incredible. But the biblical witness is scarcely confined, as the shrill leader in yesterday’s Times suggests, to a few verses in St Paul. Jesus’s own stern denunciation of sexual immorality would certainly have carried, to his hearers, a clear implied rejection of all sexual behaviour outside heterosexual monogamy. This isn’t a matter of “private response to Scripture” but of the uniform teaching of the whole Bible, of Jesus himself, and of the entire Christian tradition.

The appeal to justice as a way of cutting the ethical knot in favour of including active homosexuals in Christian ministry simply begs the question. Nobody has a right to be ordained: it is always a gift of sheer and unmerited grace. The appeal also seriously misrepresents the notion of justice itself, not just in the Christian tradition of Augustine, Aquinas and others, but in the wider philosophical discussion from Aristotle to John Rawls. Justice never means “treating everybody the same way”, but “treating people appropriately”, which involves making distinctions between different people and situations. Justice has never meant “the right to give active expression to any and every sexual desire”.

Such a novel usage would also raise the further question of identity. It is a very recent innovation to consider sexual preferences as a marker of “identity” parallel to, say, being male or female, English or African, rich or poor. Within the “gay community” much postmodern reflection has turned away from “identity” as a modernist fiction. We simply “construct” ourselves from day to day.

We must insist, too, on the distinction between inclination and desire on the one hand and activity on the other — a distinction regularly obscured by references to “homosexual clergy” and so on. We all have all kinds of deep-rooted inclinations and desires. The question is, what shall we do with them? One of the great Prayer Book collects asks God that we may “love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise”. That is always tough, for all of us. Much easier to ask God to command what we already love, and promise what we already desire. But much less like the challenge of the Gospel.

The question then presses: who, in the US, is now in communion with the great majority of the Anglican world? It would be too hasty to answer, the newly formed “province” of the “Anglican Church in North America”. One can sympathise with some of the motivations of these breakaway Episcopalians. But we should not forget the Episcopalian bishops, who, doggedly loyal to their own Church, and to the expressed mind of the wider Communion, voted against the current resolution. Nor should we forget the many parishes and worshippers who take the same stance. There are many American Episcopalians, inside and outside the present TEC, who are eager to sign the proposed Covenant. That aspiration must be honoured.

Contrary to some who have recently adopted the phrase, there is already a “fellowship of confessing Anglicans”. It is called the Anglican Communion. The Episcopal Church is now distancing itself from that fellowship. Ways must be found for all in America who want to be loyal to it, and to scripture, tradition and Jesus, to have that loyalty recognised and affirmed at the highest level.

It is good news that those Anglican parishes that are strongly opposed to homosexuality are forming a new movement. The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA) was launched last year as a pressure group within the international Anglican communion, but only now is it trying to exert grassroots influence, raising awareness for its cause on the parish level. If it is successful, then it will be easy to identify the sexual politics of your local parish church. It will be impossible to deny that there is a church within the church, that division has become schism.

This is good news because honesty is better than dishonesty. The fact is that conservative evangelicals profess a different version of Christianity from other Anglicans. There are admittedly other divisions within Anglicanism, but this is the really big one. If opposition to homosexuality is a basic component of your idea of Christian truth, then you ought to be clear about this, and not cohabit with those who fudge the issue, or openly express disdain for your position.

Over the past 20 years or so we have seen huge amounts of dishonesty and evasion on this. The church’s leadership has been trying to build a home on the fence. The liberals and the conservatives must both be accommodated, it has said: as long as both sides are still part of the same communion, then there is hope of reconciliation. A pious sentiment, surely? Well, the piety is laced with self-serving evasion and hypocrisy.

The fault lies with the liberals. Their complacency and cowardice have been breathtaking. In the 1990s, liberal Anglicanism ought to have asserted itself, and called for reform on sexual teaching. For the traditional teaching, that sex was for straight marrieds only, was out of sync with liberal opinion. Instead of achieving reform, the liberals allowed the conservatives to tighten the rules. Despite employing disproportionate numbers of homosexuals, the church was now more explicitly discriminatory against homosexuals than ever. But still the liberals shrugged, and assumed that enlightenment would soon prevail. The evangelicals would soon get over their homophobia and reform would come.

Liberal Anglicanism therefore became tainted by an acute hypocrisy. It became defined by open contempt for one of its own rules. The rule that priests should not be actively homosexual is a rule that liberals see as sub-Christian, heretical. Instead of demanding its repeal as a matter of urgency, and daring to pledge to leave the church if it was not repealed, they retreated, smugly superior, full of camp little Oxford jokes about how ghastly the evangelicals are.

My background is liberal Anglican, but I gradually realised that I couldn’t have much respect for these people, whose liberalism was so timid, so political, so self-serving. I do not share the opinions of the evangelicals, but I can see that they are more honest: all they are saying is that this church has decided to proscribe priestly homosexuality, so let it stick by that.

The basic dishonesty of liberal Anglicanism is evident in the Telegraph today, in the form of Rev George Pitcher. Why can’t we all get on, he asks, why can’t the Evangelicals agree to disagree, but stay within the big tent? Why do they have to be so horrid about homosexuals, saying that they must repent? Why are they so sure they know the mind of God on this issue?

If Pitcher were serious about opposing discrimination he would leave a church whose official policy was discriminatory. Liberal priests of course reply that they are seeking reform from within. What a convenient position.

It is the liberals who are arrogant. They are so sure they know the mind of God on this issue that they think it legitimate to ignore the rules of their church, which must surely be on the verge of being reformed, because everyone they ever talk to agrees with them.

The big question for Christianity today is whether it is fully committed to liberal values, or whether it thinks that liberalism can be sacrificed to institutional authority. Pitcher follows his archbishop in loving to sound liberal, but ultimately putting the authority of priests and bishops first. This careful hypocrisy is admittedly very true to Anglican tradition, but that does not redeem it.

So let us hope for more honesty. The Church of England consists of two incompatible forms of Christianity. It is not pious to want this obscured, by spouting the old “broad church” rhetoric. It is dishonest. Let a new wave of honesty smash apart this rotten church with its homophobic legalism on one side, and its lazy-thinking smugness on the other.

I was born on the day of the Stonewall riots, June 27, 1969, so my life is an individual history of the 40-year-old modern gay rights movement. What makes my story particularly representative is just how conventional my life has become.

I grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania. My parents were liberal college professors, but I was aware in high school — in the 1980s, when AIDS had no treatment and hatred for gays reached a fever pitch — that they wanted both of their boys to be heterosexual. Logically, it seemed to be the only path to a happy, successful life. I knew I was gay but said nothing.

I applied only to urban universities, seeing the city as a place to find other people like myself. When I decided toward the end of college that it was time to “come out,” it seemed like a big deal — as any grand declaration would be. Back then, you couldn’t just live your life. You had to say “I’m gay!” and hope to be accepted or learn to live with the rejection.

Straight kids start experimenting with dating in high school. I didn’t really get going until I turned 21 and could start going to gay bars. There was no other way to safely meet other gay people. Basically, the entire trajectory of my romantic life was delayed by several years. My first relationship was the kind of stupid mistake that most people go through in their teens in high school. My 20s were a bit of a waste in terms of establishing an adult romantic relationship.

On the plus side, my 20s were a good start to a vibrant career. With an undergraduate degree in journalism and a graduate degree in public policy, I chose a profession that was more welcoming to gay people than most were in the early 1990s. In my first job out of college, I spoke cautiously but in a purposefully casual way about my life and my relationship with my (first) boyfriend. I was a little scared, since very few people I knew were out in their workplaces, even in relatively urbane Philadelphia. Most of my friends thought I was reckless, talking about my gay life at work. I did feel a bit like a rebel, but I knew I was incapable of hiding secrets, so I thought I might as well stand tall.

In the past decade, I’ve lived in Philadelphia, Washington and New York — encountering people from all over America and the world. Without compromising my identity or censoring my life, I have slowly moved up the ranks at prestigious policy organizations such as the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Harwood Institute and Public Agenda. I am director of communications for the Russell Sage Foundation, working on issues including behavioral economics, low-wage work, immigration, social justice and cultural diversity.

My experiences in the workplace and the wider world bear out what has been documented in public opinion research on gay issues. Without a doubt, as more gay people live their lives unashamedly, those who come in contact with gay people accept them as normal and say we are entitled to the same rights and responsibilities as others.

I’m having a 40th birthday party. My parents, my brother and his wife and children will be there, as will my boyfriend’s parents. My boyfriend, who is 14 years younger than I am, has had a much different experience than I did. I think his is representative of his generation. He never “came out” to his parents — he didn’t have to. He just lived his life, talked to his parents all the time and discussed what he was doing and who he was doing it with. No “I’m gay!” declaration seemed necessary. Almost all of his friends are straight, and he rarely goes to gay bars. He’s never felt that he needed to stay confined in gay circles to feel safe. He is just himself, with no apologies or explanations. Gay-circuit parties and the trappings of stereotypical urban gay life hold little allure for him. His straight friends are now my friends, and while I love my gay friends, I don’t miss gay bars and the ghettoizing culture that they represent to me.

Four decades ago, a group of gays and lesbians in New York pushed back against persecution. When my loved ones celebrate my birthday today, we will also be raising a glass to 40 years of progress on gay rights. Being in a quiet long-term relationship and having a disturbingly “respectable” professional life means that I’m basically boring. Gay marriage in New York is painfully just out of reach, but looking back on the 40 years since Stonewall, my staid domestic life is itself a major triumph.

This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York when, for the first time in history, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people fought back against ­decades of police harassment.

Previously, LGBT people worldwide had largely complied with arrest and criminalisation. But not in New York on the nights of 27 and 28 June 1969. What began as a routine police raid on a gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, turned into sporadic street battles. In the aftermath of this history-making queer resistance, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was formed in New York and similar groups sprang up across the US and the world. The modern LGBT rights movement was born.

There had been earlier homosexual law reform and welfare organisations in the US, Britain and the Netherlands. But these were small, discreet lobby groups. Their members were brave trailblazers but very defensive and mostly closeted.

The global GLF movement was radically different. It was a watershed in queer consciousness – the moment LGBT people discarded victimhood and stopped ­apologising. Instead of pleas for tolerance, the demand was unconditional acceptance. Thousands came out. This had never happened before.

I joined London GLF, aged 19. Our slogan: Gay is Good. These three simple words were revolutionary. Until then, nearly everyone – including many LGBTs – believed that gay was bad, mad and sad. Whereas mainstream society saw homosexuality as a problem, we said the problem was homophobia. Straight supremacism was, to us, the equivalent of white supremacism.

Our vision was a new sexual democracy, without homophobia and misogyny. Erotic shame and guilt would be banished, together with socially enforced monogamy and male and female gender roles. There would be sexual freedom and human rights for everyone – queer and straight. Our message was “innovate, don’t assimilate”.

GLF never called for equality. The demand was liberation. We wanted to change society, not conform to it. Equal rights within a flawed, unjust system struck us as idiotic. It would mean parity on straight terms, within a pre-­existing framework of institutions and laws devised by and for the heterosexual majority. Equality within their system would involve conformity to their ­values and rules – a formula for gay submission and incorporation, not liberation.

We argued then, and I still argue now, that accepting mere equality involves the abandonment of any critical perspective on straight culture. In place of a healthy scepticism, it substitutes naive acquiescence with the hetero mainstream. Discernment is surrendered in favour of compliance. While heterosexuality has its good points, it also has its downsides, like the machismo of many hetero men, which is linked to gang culture and violence against women.

In the 40 years since Stonewall and GLF, there has been a massive retreat from that radical vision. Most LGBT ­people no longer question the values, laws and institutions of society. They are content to settle for equal rights within the status quo. On the age of consent, the LGBT movement accepted equality at 16, ignoring the criminalisation of younger gay and straight people. Don’t the under-16s have sexual human rights too? Equality has not helped them. All they got was equal injustice.

Whereas GLF saw marriage and the family as a patriarchal prison for women, gay people and children, today the LGBT movement uncritically champions same-sex marriage and families. It has embraced traditional hetero­sexual aspirations lock stock and barrel. How ironic. While straight couples are deserting marriage, same-sexers are rushing to embrace it: witness the current legal fight in California for the right to marry. Are queers the new conservatives, the 21st-century suburbanites?

Don’t get me wrong. Despite my critique of marriage and my advocacy of a more democratic, flexible model of relationship recognition and rights, I oppose the ban on same-sex marriage. It is homophobic discrimination. Sadly, most of the LGBT movement in Britain is now too feeble to demand marriage equality. It meekly accepts civil partnerships instead of civil marriage. This is not equality. Separate laws are not equal laws. There would be riots if the government banned black people from getting married and offered them civil partnerships instead. It would be denounced as apartheid. Well, that’s what civil partnerships are: sexual apartheid. Same-sex couples are banned from civil marriage (homophobia) and opposite sex couples are banned from civil partnerships (heterophobia). Two wrongs don’t make a right.

The LGBT community’s retreat from radicalism signifies a huge loss of confidence and optimism. It has succumbed to the politics of conformism, respectability and moderation. What a shame. GLF dared to imagine what society could be, rather than accepting society as it is – and so should we.

I was perhaps the unlikeliest person in the world to cover the Stonewall riots for The Village Voice. It was June 27, 1969. I had graduated from West Point only three weeks earlier and was spending my summer leave in New York before reporting for duty at Fort Benning, in Georgia. After a late dinner in Chinatown, I was about to enter the Lion’s Head, a writers’ hangout on Christopher Street near the Voice’s offices, when I blundered straight into the first moments of the police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar a couple of doors down the street. Even a newly minted second lieutenant of infantry could see that it was a story.

Across the street from the Stonewall, a crowd of maybe 100 was watching the police march out a dozen or so bar patrons and employees into a paddy wagon. The young arrestees paused at the back of the waiting paddy wagon and struck vampy poses, smiling and waving to the crowd.

This was not the way gays were supposed to behave when they were arrested, and the officers started shoving them with their nightsticks. People in the crowd yelled at the police to stop. The officers responded by telling them to get off the street. Someone started throwing pocket change at the officers, and others began rocking the paddy wagon. Then, from the back of the crowd, beer cans and bottles flew through the air. In a hail of coins and street debris, the paddy wagon drove away with two patrol cars, and the remaining officers retreated inside the Stonewall, locking the doors behind them.

Soon enough, loose cobblestones from a nearby repaving site rained down on the bar’s windows. An uprooted parking meter was used to ram the club’s doors. Someone lighted a wad of newspaper and threw it through the bar’s broken window, starting a small fire. The policemen inside the Stonewall put it out with a fire hose, which they then turned on the crowd.

Instead of dispersing, the people in the street cavorted sarcastically in the spray, teasing the officers with suggestive come-ons. A few moments later, patrol cars came screaming down Christopher Street from Sixth Avenue. And at approximately 2 a.m. on Saturday, June 28, the gay men decided they weren’t going to take it anymore. The clash outside the Stonewall went on for 48 more hours and become famous as the riots that started the gay-rights movement.

Amazingly, there was no TV coverage and only a few paragraphs in the city’s daily papers. Myths and controversies have arisen in the vacuum left by the mainstream news media.

One involves the argument about who is, and isn’t, a “veteran” of Stonewall. A handful can prove they were there by pointing to themselves in the famous photograph, taken by Fred McDarrah, that was on the cover of the following week’s Voice, accompanying my article and another by a colleague, Howard Smith.

For the record, I orchestrated that image. Fred was famously parsimonious as a photographer, in the habit of taking only a few photos for a story. Outside the Stonewall that night, he took a look at the scene and asked me to get a bunch of rioters together. I rounded them up and posed them on a stoop, and Fred got his shot.

A prominent Stonewall myth holds that the riots were an uprising by the gay community against decades of oppression. This would be true if the “gay community” consisted of Stonewall patrons. The bar’s regulars, though, were mostly teenagers from Queens, Long Island and New Jersey, with a few young drag queens and homeless youths who squatted in abandoned tenements on the Lower East Side.

I was there on the Saturday and Sunday nights when the Village’s established gay community, having heard about the incidents of Friday night, rushed back from vacation rentals on Fire Island and elsewhere. Although several older activists participated in the riots, most stood on the edges and watched.

Many told me they were put off by the way the younger gays were taunting the police — forming chorus lines and singing, “We are the Stonewall girls, we wear our hair in curls!” Many of the older gay men lived largely closeted lives, had careers to protect and years of experience with discrimination. They believed the younger generation’s behavior would lead to even more oppression.

In part, at least, they were correct. It would take several more years before major New York political figures came out in favor of employment anti-discrimination laws, and much longer before other gay rights would be realized.

Another myth is that the police raid on the Stonewall was part of a broader crackdown on gay bars in the summer of 1969, a mayoral election year. In fact, the Stonewall operation was the work of a Police Department deputy inspector, Seymour Pine, and officers from the morals unit, and they carried it out without the knowledge of the officers of the local police precinct, whom they suspected of taking payoffs from the Stonewall and other Mafia-run gay bars in the Village.

Deputy Inspector Pine had two stated reasons for the raid: the Stonewall was selling liquor without a license, which it was, and it was being used by a Mafia blackmail ring that was setting up gay patrons who worked on Wall Street, which also seems likely.

The owner of the Stonewall, Tony Lauria, was reputed to be a front man for Matty Ianniello (known as “Matty the Horse”), a capo in the Genovese crime family who oversaw a string of clubs in the city. New York’s gay-bar scene at the time was a corrupt system apparently designed to benefit mobster owners, who served watered-down drinks at inflated prices, often made with ill-gotten liquor from truck hijackings.

It worked like this: citing disorderly behavior laws, the State Liquor Authority ruled that bars catering to openly homosexual patrons were not entitled to liquor licenses. Gay bars were thus made effectively illegal, which left them to the mob, which happily ran clubs without liquor licenses and paid the police to look the other way. Several more years would pass before the first clubs with openly gay owners would be licensed — places like the Ballroom on West Broadway and Reno Sweeney on West 13th Street — and the mob lost its stranglehold, an early legacy of Stonewall.

On Sunday, the third night of the riots, I ran into Allen Ginsberg on the street and accompanied him into the reopened Stonewall, where he talked and danced with some of the young revelers. Afterward, as the last of the riot police packed up to go home, I walked with him toward his home in the East Village. He said everything seemed different after the riots — how grim, even sad, gay bars were compared to the “beautiful” scene at the Stonewall that night.

As I turned south on Lafayette Street, he waved and cried out, “Defend the fairies!” His jolly farewell was obviously meant in jest, because after Stonewall, they didn’t need defending any more.

I was 19 years old when I met Craig Rodwell. He was 26. It was just after Thanksgiving in 1967, shortly after he’d opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on Mercer Street near the New York University campus.

One day in the shop — considered to be the first literary gay bookstore — the beat cop stopped by to tell us we needed to pay him off each week. Craig told him we wouldn’t pay; a few days later we had a break-in and the cash box was taken. For Craig, it was an opportunity to make the connection between police corruption and prejudice, a topic that he would bring up time after time in the shop’s newsletter, “The Hymnal.”

This was the backdrop to our lives in late June 1969, when we were on our way home from a Friday night dinner with friends in Washington Square Village. We swung by the Oscar Wilde because anti-gay vandalism was a continuing problem. Then we headed home. When we crossed Sixth Avenue we began to see people out on Christopher Street near the Stonewall Inn.

As we made our way down the street, I could hear the pings of the coins thrown against the paddy wagon parked outside the bar. Policemen were trapped inside and each time they ventured out the coins would fly. I remember thinking that the crowd was expanding into something I’d never seen before — it quickly grew into the hundreds. Usually in raids on bars, the employees were loaded into the wagon first, then those patrons who had been selected for arrest followed. Other patrons would be sent outside, where they would normally disperse quickly. But this time the customers weren’t fleeing. The police had misread the crowd and their ability to handle it.

After things settled down on Friday night, we decided that we had to take action — to bring a larger purpose to the evening’s events. And so the next day, we started to leaflet. It sounds primitive today, but in 1969 it was an effective means of communication. People were accustomed to getting leaflets, and they would read them. And Craig knew how to write them.

Craig also made calls to the newspapers, letting them know that there would be a lot of people converging in the Village on Saturday night.

Getting coverage was a challenge. The press had a bias against gays then, and it perpetuated the view of Stonewall as the time the drag queens fought back. But for Craig and for me, it was the moment the gay-rights movement shifted from what we thought of as a “letterhead” movement of press releases to one of action. Older gays saw the path to equality as going through the power structure. We saw it as going around the power structure. We wanted to exploit the attention this riot received, attention that we had not been able to get before.

That second night turned into a general melee — more police, more protesters — but Craig and I stayed until the end. For us, the end was the beginning. We had witnessed the crowd at work; we had been a part of it. It was not necessarily a crystalline moment and a conscious act of collective gay liberation, but gay liberation was at its heart. The word was out.

El Parlamento belga solicitó al Gobierno de su país que condenara las declaraciones del Papa contra los preservativos como remedio para combatir la pandemia del sida en África y que elevara una protesta oficial ante la Santa Sede por tan graves declaraciones de una personalidad tan influyente en el terreno religioso y moral. Una abrumadora mayoría de parlamentarios aprobaron la protesta, que el embajador de Bélgica envió al Vaticano. La reacción de la jerarquía católica belga no fue inculpatoria del Papa, pero tampoco exculpatoria. El arzobispo de Bruselas, Godfried Daneels, una de las personalidades más respetadas del catolicismo actual por su actitud reformista frente al integrismo reinante, ha cuestionado en repetidas ocasiones la doctrina oficial del Vaticano contra el preservativo. Ante la iniciativa de los parlamentarios de su país ha hecho dos aseveraciones: que el Papa podía haberse ahorrado unas declaraciones tan polémicas y que el uso del preservativo puede ser lícito cuando hay peligro de relaciones que pueden conducir a la muerte. Ejemplo, el caso de contagio del sida.

Muy otra ha sido la reacción de la jerarquía católica española ante la admisión a trámite de la Mesa del Congreso de una proposición no de ley de IU-ICV que reprueba al papa Benedicto XVI por sus declaraciones durante el viaje a África. Los altos dignatarios eclesiásticos no han podido contener su indignación ante tamaña iniciativa, que han condenado con agrias y descontroladas expresiones. El presidente de la Conferencia Episcopal, cardenal Rouco Varela, la ha considerado incomprensible. El vicepresidente y obispo de Bilbao, Ricardo Blázquez, ha acusado al poder legislativo de perseguir la libertad de expresión del Papa. El presidente de la Congregación para los sacramentos y arzobispo-primado de Toledo en funciones, cardenal Cañizares, ha calificado la medida de «ataque e ignominia hacia un hombre de Dios» y cree que es «una ofensa a España». Las declaraciones más extremas y desmesuradas han salido de la pluma del arzobispo de Sevilla, el franciscano cardenal Carlos Amigo, quien ha definido a IU-ICV como «una minoría de cuarto y mitad» que hace el ridículo en aras de una libertad que niega a los demás; ha acusado a la coalición de ser una «nueva inquisición fundamentalmente laica, y agnóstica y malhumorada», y de «rancio anticlericalismo para celebrar su particular fundamentalista auto de fe». El dedo acusador del cardenal de Sevilla, reencarnación del inquisidor de Los hermanos Karamazov, de Dostoievski, ha señalado al Parlamento, que, a su juicio, está a punto de convertirse en una especie de «ejército de salvación».
(La prudencia no ha sido en este caso la virtud practicada por los dirigentes eclesiásticos. Ni siquiera en sus polémicas con el Gobierno socialista a propósito de las leyes del divorcio exprés o del matrimonio homosexual habíamos oído un lenguaje tan montaraz, beligerante y nacionalcatólico, que refleja una falta de respeto por las reglas del juego democrático y por el Parlamento como expresión genuina de la voluntad popular).

Dando por descontado el derecho del Parlamento a reprobar a determinadas personas por conductas y declaraciones que considera lesivas, el problema no radica en cuestionar la libertad de expresión del Papa, que ejerce sin cortapisa alguna, sino en su impunidad cuando hace declaraciones contrarias a la dignidad de la persona y los derechos humanos. En esos casos, los poderes públicos están en su derecho a expresar su reprobación e incluso a establecer sanciones.
La jerarquía católica acostumbra a calificar el aborto de asesinato y de acto terrorista y a llamar asesinas y terroristas a las mujeres que abortan, al tiempo que reclama sanciones penales, amén de las canónicas, contra ellas. Y lo hace con total impunidad alegando que es la doctrina oficial de la Iglesia católica en correspondencia con la ley natural (que, al decir de Norberto Bobbio, ni es ley ni es natural). Este tipo de descalificaciones no son tolerables, ya que constituyen un delito, y deben ser reprobadas en y por las instituciones democráticas correspondientes.
La misma jerarquía tiende a considerar la homosexualidad como un desorden objetivo en la estructura de la existencia humana, una desviación del orden natural; el matrimonio homosexual, como contrario a la naturaleza, y a los homosexuales, como personas enfermas, inmorales e incluso perversas. Amén de una muestra de intolerancia, tal modo de hablar es vejatorio para los homosexuales. Como afirma el filósofo Richard Rorthy, fallecido recientemente, «la condena de la homosexualidad llevó a una gran infelicidad humana incesaria».
Más grave y delictiva todavía es la oposición al uso de los preservativos para evitar el contagio del sida, alegando, contra los más elementales principios sanitarios, que lo agrava. Tales afirmaciones, pronunciadas por el Papa, dada su influencia moral en África, el continente más afectado por el sida, pueden contribuir objetivamente a extender la pandemia, y constituyen una apología, al menos indirecta, de la muerte masiva.
Se apruebe o no en sede parlamentaria la iniciativa de IU-ICV, la reprobación ya se ha producido en la opinión pública y en organismos internacionales. A ver si el Papa y los obispos aprenden la lección y no vuelven a hablar con tanta irresponsabilidad de temas que exigen un tratamiento ética y científicamente más riguroso.

With the nation engaged in two wars and facing a number of potential adversaries, this is no time to weaken our military. Yet if gay rights activists and their allies have their way, grave harm will soon be inflicted on our all-volunteer force.

The administration and some in Congress have pledged to repeal Section 654 of U.S. Code Title 10, which states that homosexuals are not eligible for military service. Often confused with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” regulations issued by President Bill Clinton, this statute establishes several reasons that homosexuality is incompatible with military service.

Section 654 recognizes that the military is a “specialized society” that is “fundamentally different from civilian life.” It requires a unique code of personal conduct and demands “extraordinary sacrifices, including the ultimate sacrifice, in order to provide for the common defense.” The law appreciates military personnel who, unlike civilians who go home after work, must accept living conditions that are often “characterized by forced intimacy with little or no privacy.”

While there have been changes in civilian society since this statute was adopted by wide bipartisan majorities in 1993, the military realities it describes abide. If anything, they are more acute in wartime.

In our experience, and that of more than 1,000 retired flag and general officers who have joined us in signing an open letter to President Obama and Congress, repeal of this law would prompt many dedicated people to leave the military. Polling by Military Times of its active-duty subscribers over the past four years indicates that 58 percent have consistently opposed repeal. In its most recent survey, 10 percent said they would not reenlist if that happened, and 14 percent said they would consider leaving.

If just the lesser number left the military, our active-duty, reserve and National Guard forces would lose 228,600 people — more than the total of today’s active-duty Marine Corps. Losses of even a few thousand sergeants, petty officers and experienced mid-grade officers, when we are trying to expand the Army and Marine Corps, could be crippling.

And the damage would not stop there. Legislation introduced to repeal Section 654 (H.R. 1283) would impose on commanders a radical policy that mandates “nondiscrimination” against “homosexuality, or bisexuality, whether the orientation is real or perceived.” Mandatory training classes and judicial proceedings would consume valuable time defining that language. Team cohesion and concentration on missions would suffer if our troops had to live in close quarters with others who could be sexually attracted to them.

We don’t need a study commission to know that tensions are inevitable in conditions offering little or no privacy, increasing the stress of daily military life. “Zero tolerance” of dissent would become official intolerance of anyone who disagrees with this policy, forcing additional thousands to leave the service by denying them promotions or punishing them in other ways. Many more will be dissuaded from ever enlisting. There is no compelling national security reason for running these risks to our armed forces. Discharges for homosexual conduct have been few compared with separations for other reasons, such as pregnancy/family hardship or weight-standard violations. There are better ways to remedy shortages in some military specialties than imposing social policies that would escalate losses of experienced personnel who are not easily replaced.

Some suggest that the United States must emulate Denmark, the Netherlands and Canada, which have incorporated homosexuals into their forces. But none of these countries has the institutional culture or worldwide responsibilities of our military. America’s armed forces are models for our allies’ militaries and the envy of our adversaries — not the other way around.

As former senior commanders, we know that the reason for this long-standing envy is the unsurpassed discipline, morale and readiness of our military. The burden should be on proponents of repeal to demonstrate how their initiative would improve these qualities of our armed services. This they cannot do.

Consequently, our recent open letter advised America’s elected leaders: “We believe that imposing this burden on our men and women in uniform would undermine recruiting and retention, impact leadership at all echelons, have adverse effects on the willingness of parents who lend their sons and daughters to military service, and eventually break the All-Volunteer Force.”

Everyone can serve America in some way, but there is no constitutional right to serve in the military. The issue is not one of individual desires, or of the norms and mores of civilian society. Rather, the question is one of national security and the discipline, morale, readiness and culture of the U.S. armed forces upon which that security depends. It is a question we cannot afford to answer in a way that breaks our military.

Hace algunos siglos, la Iglesia dirigía su atención al problema, diríase poético, del sexo de los ángeles. ¿Tiene hoy Benedicto XVI algún problema con el sexo de los mortales?

Nadie en su sano juicio espera que el Papa aliente la libertad sexual de los gays y las lesbianas, se sienta cómodo con los travestis o firme un manifiesto en favor del Orgullo Gay. No obstante, su toma de posiciones sobre estos asuntos, unas ampliamente difundidas, otras prácticamente desapercibidas, dan que pensar.

El reciente llamamiento del Vaticano a boicotear la despenalización universal de la homosexualidad propuesta el 18 de diciembre por 66 países es clara en su argumentación. Según L’Osservatore Romano, órgano de prensa del Vaticano, para el arzobispo Celestino Migliore, observador permanente de la Santa Sede en la ONU y autor del llamamiento al boicot, el documento presentado “va más allá”. Según Migliore, los autores de la proposición no se preocupan sólo de “condenar toda forma de violencia contra los homosexuales”, sino que buscan “cancelar la diferencia entre sexos”. El diario católico lo explica así: “Lo que este documento promueve es la ideología de la identidad de género y de la orientación sexual”.

Ya en 2000 y en 2004, Joseph Ratzinger, como jefe de la Congregación de la Doctrina de la Fe, había afirmado que “la inclinación particular de la persona homosexual constituye una tendencia, más o menos marcada, a un comportamiento intrínsecamente malo desde el punto de vista moral”. El entonces cardenal y futuro Papa también había afirmado que la transexualidad no existe sino como “un trastorno mental”.

Y menos de dos meses antes de morir, Juan Pablo II había estimado que el matrimonio homosexual forma parte de “una nueva ideología del mal”.

Esta reiteración en el ostracismo de los homosexuales no puede sino recordar las viejas persecuciones de todo tipo de infieles. Desde la separación del judaísmo y el cristianismo y el consiguiente paso desde un cristianismo primitivo judaizado a la instauración de una Iglesia católica, apostólica y romana, esta institución no ha cesado de perseguir a todo tipo de cristianos y no cristianos, cátaros, albigenses, relapsos, apóstatas y tantos otros. En una palabra, todo lo que no respeta el dogma de la Santa Iglesia o, más banalmente, lo que ésta quiere erigir como norma.

Es innegable que sobre la religión católica pesan muchas amenazas. La ciencia, desde luego. Desde Galileo hasta la biología moderna, pasando por Darwin y sus descubrimientos sobre la evolución de las especies, la ciencia le plantea rompecabezas permanentemente. Y desde hace menos tiempo, la escasez de vocaciones sacerdotales, la deserción de las Iglesias y hasta la competencia de las demás religiones del mundo -musulmana, protestante o budista, esta última considerada por muchos más adecuada a nuestras sociedades liberales avanzadas- contribuyen sin duda a su declive.

Pero he aquí que el papa Benedicto XVI encuentra una nueva razón para intentar levantar cabeza en la corriente de estudios de género, unos estudios que consisten en la búsqueda de una explicación de las desigualdades sociales entre hombres y mujeres y de la dominación de un sexo por el otro.

Es así que, el 22 de diciembre de 2008, durante la sesión tradicional de presentación de votos de felicidad a la Curia romana, Benedicto XVI declaró: “Lo que a menudo se expresa y se entiende por género se resuelve en definitiva en la autoemancipación del hombre respecto de la creación y del Creador. El hombre quiere construirse él solo y decidir, siempre y exclusivamente él solo, acerca de lo que le atañe. Pero de esta manera vive contra la verdad, contra el Espíritu creador”.

El Papa agregó en esa ocasión: “Si las forestas tropicales merecen nuestra protección, el hombre no la merece menos”.

Así que ya no es únicamente la familia la que corre hoy un riesgo, sino el mismísimo hombre.

Sobre el nuevo problema planteado por los estudios de género, vale la pena recordar que la última declaración del Papa evoca las precedentes. Por ejemplo, en la Carta a los Obispos de 2004, dirigida a la Congregación de la Doctrina de la Fe y aprobada por Juan Pablo II, en la que el asunto de la mujer y de la homosexualidad se halla ampliamente comentado, Joseph Ratzinger escribía: “La mujer, para ser ella misma, se yergue como rival del hombre… La dimensión puramente cultural llamada género se acentúa al máximo. Semejante antropología ha hecho que se sitúe en un mismo plano la homosexualidad y la heterosexualidad”.

Esta intrusión de la Iglesia en las disciplinas universitarias ha sido señalada, entre otros, por Jean-François Staszak, director del Departamento de Geografía de la Universidad de Ginebra: “Razonablemente no es posible creer y hacer creer que si los niños van vestidos de azul y las niñas de rosa, y si hay tan pocas mujeres en puestos directivos, todo ello es fruto de una voluntad divina”.

Amén de su fina ironía, Staszak encuentra inquietante que la Iglesia condene de nuevo una disciplina científica aduciendo que es una amenaza para la religión.

Generals are scolded for preparing to fight “the last war,” but if President Obama intends to keep his promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military, he would do well to study President Bill Clinton’s attempt of 16 years ago.

The Clinton argument, based largely on protecting the civil rights of gay troops, was systematically dissected by senior officers and legislators, who focused on how the presence of homosexuals could affect combat readiness. Generals circulated videos made by conservative groups depicting “gay agendas.” Senators brought television crews into cramped berthings. Congress reached a bizarre compromise: a law rendering homosexuality incompatible with military service, but allowing gays to serve under a closet-friendly “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

The lesson for President Obama is that this fight is not about rights, but about combat readiness. This is a propitious moment for seeking change: a nation at war needs all its most talented troops. Last year the principal architects of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” former Gen. Colin Powell and former Senator Sam Nunn, said it was time to “review” the policy.

That’s a polite way of saying they’ve changed their minds. So have many of us who wore the uniform in 1993 and supported a policy that forced some of our fellow troops to live a lie and rejected thousands who told the truth.

There are other aspects of history that may be helpful as well. The armed forces initially resisted President Harry Truman’s 1948 order to integrate the ranks. But the Korean War forced trials by fire — in fact, the units with the highest casualty rates in Korea integrated the swiftest — and the Pentagon ultimately acknowledged that recruiting from across America’s socio-economic spectrum produced the best force. After that, the military swiftly set the standard for race relations.

Servicemen continue to be fierce believers in the idea that diversity equals strength, yet during the Clinton effort on gay troops most of us rejected analogies to racial integration. The homosexual threat to good order and discipline was behavioral, we argued, not physiological, and therefore unrelated.

It was a flawed argument. The underlying fears were the same as with integration: homosexuals jeopardized unit cohesion not because of their own conduct — after all, military law and command discretion encompass behavioral breaches — but because of the perceived reaction of those xenophobic troops who didn’t want to cohabitate with people different from themselves. Today, this sounds like one of the “worn-out dogmas” President Obama identified in his inaugural speech. And it does a disservice to the ranks.

Maintaining “don’t ask, don’t tell” ignores a vast social shift since 1993. Only 26 percent of Americans supported Truman’s order, so it was little wonder that desegregation stalled. When President Clinton announced his initiative, 44 percent of Americans were in favor of homosexuals serving openly, which perhaps explains the split decision of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

But today nearly 80 percent of Americans feel that way. As our troops tend to reflect the values of our society, lifting the homosexual ban will be easier now.

In addition, six years of war have clarified priorities. The battlefield has its own values, starting with courage. Sexual orientation falls somewhere below musical taste. What a person chooses to do back stateside, off-duty, in his own apartment is irrelevant in a fight. For months I lived with 12 other American advisers on an Iraqi outpost. There was a single pipe shower next to a hole that masqueraded as a sewer. But the reality of combat dominated personality quirks — nobody wondered about sexual orientation.

Most military jobs are office-based and provide sufficient individual privacy. Even in Iraq many of our fighting forces are comfortably housed with compartmentalized showers.

A 2006 poll of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans showed that 72 percent were personally comfortable interacting with gays. Bonnie Moradi, a University of Florida psychologist, and Laura Miller, a sociologist at the Rand Corporation, summarized the study this way: “The data indicated no associations between knowing a lesbian or gay unit member and ratings of perceived unit cohesion or readiness. Instead, findings pointed to the importance of leadership and instrumental quality in shaping perceptions of unit cohesion and readiness.”

The other readiness argument concerns recruiting. To fill its swelling ranks, the military now grants one in five recruits waivers for disqualifications that run the gamut from attention-deficit disorder to obesity to armed robbery convictions. In a press conference last fall, Maj. Gen. Thomas Bostick, the head of Army recruiting, said the relevant question in considering such applicants was, “Does that person deserve an opportunity to serve their country?” That’s exactly right. And to choose a felon over a combat-proven veteran on the basis of sexuality is defeatist. Ask any squad leader.

In the end, however, there is one factor that outweighs public opinion, troop morale and recruiting combined. The military is a dictatorship, not a republic. It is built to win in combat. Its strict codes of conduct ensure good order and discipline.

If “don’t ask, don’t tell” is rescinded, military leaders will ensure smooth compliance, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, has said. Cohesion depends on leadership. Our troops will follow the lead of our combat-tested professionals who base their opinions on what a soldier brings to the fight, and little else.

Pasados los fastos y las fiestas, el jolgorio y el júbilo, la euforia, las lágrimas, las risas y el asombro, ya está asentado en el poder Barack Obama. En el poder frente a las duras realidades. Con ritmo trepidante ha empezado a cumplir sus promesas electorales. Probablemente, ningún presidente en la historia de Estados Unidos ha hecho tanto en tan poco tiempo. Llama la atención la exquisita cortesía con la que el nuevo ocupante de la Casa Blanca ha despedido al anterior inquilino y a su Administración, o sea, sin una sola palabra pública de recriminación, pero, eso sí, con un contundente rechazo implícito del pasado régimen.
No me cabe duda de que Obama es el líder religioso ecuménico, con tintes providenciales, que en estos momentos necesitan los norteamericanos… y el mundo. Digo “religioso” con plena intencionalidad. La retórica obamiana, a diferencia de la de Martin Luther King, no es insistentemente cristiana, pero en su esencia procede del Sermón de la Montaña. No se trata solo del énfasis que pone en los derechos humanos, la ética y el respeto al prójimo, sino del recurso de una potente llamada a la fe. A la fe, más que a una deidad hipo- tética, como mecanismo o actitud o filosofía vital para conseguir resultados positivos. Obama cree –lo ha revelado una y otra vez– en la necesidad de tener fe en la vida y fe en uno mismo, de tener confianza en ambas cosas, sobre todo en los momentos más sombríos. Su Yes we can! retoma el “todo es posible para quien cree”, atribuido a Cristo, quien solía increpar a sus discípulos precisamente por su falta de fe (a Pedro, por ejemplo, que, tras iniciar con sobresaliente su arriesgada caminata por las olas, empieza a hundirse cuando le entra el terror). El mensaje de Obama también remite al famoso best-seller de Dale Carnegie sobre el maravilloso poder del pensamiento positivo.
La fe que preconiza Jesús no es demasiado exigente. Basta con que tenga el mínimo tamaño de un grano de mostaza.
Obama da la impresión de saber lo que dice al respecto. Aunque no es exactamente el arquetípico self-made-
man norteamericano, que empieza casi sin nada, tampoco se lo dieron todo hecho, ni mucho menos. Me imagino que estaría de acuerdo con el refranero español, con su “a Dios rogando y con el mazo dando” o su “a quien madruga, Dios le ayuda”. En la crisis en que nos encontramos, un lider mundial así, encarnación él mismo de una fe capaz de mover montañas, puede cambiar o ayudar a cambiar muchas actitudes, muchas estructuras mentales.

ENTRE ELLAS la homofobia o, como prefiero llamarla, la homoaversión (una aversión puede incluir un factor fóbico, es decir, de miedo neurótico, pero no necesariamente). Ningún presidente de EEUU –de los recientes y, desde luego, de los anteriores– había demostrado, que yo sepa, su respeto a la comunidad gay y, por extensión, el entendimiento de sus problemas. Obama lo ha hecho. Y lo ha hecho justo en el momento en que la película de Gus van Sant, Mi nombre es Harvey Milk, con el fantástico Sean Penn en el papel del protagonista, está conmocionando a los públicos europeos, entre ellos, el español. El guión de Dustin Lance Black se basa en una rigurosa investigación de la vida y el asesinato, en 1978, del primer luchador por los derechos de los gais en Nortea- mérica que logró conquistar un puesto político (el de concejal del Ayuntamiento de San Francisco).
Fueron tiempos muy duros para ellos, con una feroz oposición no solo desde las filas de la ultraderecha cristiana, tanto católica como protestante, ambas enarbolando el Viejo Testamento, sino de sindicatos y empresarios. Estaba prohibido tener una relación homosexual, bailar con otro hombre o frecuentar ambientes explícitamente gais. Y con la amenaza añadida del sida, que ya causaba estragos. Es imposible ver este admirable filme en España sin recordar que aquí, a los 30 años del asesinato de Milk por un rival político homoaversivo, y pese a una legislación avanzada, pululan los inquisidores de siempre.

PULULAN y porfían, sí. Y no se amilanan o achantan ante el reciente fallo del Tribunal Supremo a favor de la asignatura obligatoria de Educación para la Ciudadanía, jurando por su Dios y por su Iglesia que lo recurrirán ante el Constitucional y luego, si hace falta, en Europa. Y ello porque la asignatura promueve la aceptación de los sexualmente “diferentes”, no su exclusión o su condena. Tal resolución confirma los resultados de estudios recientes, que demuestran que la homoaversión sigue siendo endémica en España y fuente de constantes agresiones, tanto físicas como psíquicas, sobre todo en las escuelas. Hay un momento en Mi nombre es Harvey Milk en el que este trata de consolar por teléfono a un joven gay al borde del suicidio, de convencerle de que su condición es normal. Ahí está el problema: los inquisidores siguen con el dogma de que un homosexual o bien es un degenerado o un enfermo, o ambas cosas al mismo tiempo, y se niegan a ver que los enfermos a lo mejor son ellos, y que la diversidad afectivo-sexual, lejos de ser una abominación, es natural. ¡Qué gentes! ¡Y a estas alturas!

The Christmas angel tells us: “Fear not, for I bring you good news of great joy for all people.” The pope, on the other hand, has been using this Christmas season to spread entirely the opposite message, a message of fear and exclusion that seems more bad news than good. For, apparently, gay people threaten the existence of the planet in a way that is comparable to the destruction of the rainforest. I guess the idea is that if we all were gay, then we wouldn’t be making any babies. Yes, it’s a bit like saying that if we all were to become celibate priests we wouldn’t be making any babies either. Except that would mean the Catholic church has itself become a threat to the planet. OK, that’s a cheap shot. But the Holy Father has the ability to put even a vicar like me in touch with their inner Polly Toynbee.

So where does this religious obsession with making babies come from? I had a moment of epiphany some years ago in a refugee camp in southern Gaza. So many families had so many children, often a dozen or more. It was explained to me that the Palestinians’ secret weapon against the Israelis was “the Palestinian womb”. That women were regarded as part of a wider demographic struggle, and that having babies was vital to the war effort.

The writers of the early Hebrew scriptures were similarly caught up in a struggle for survival that made having babies a part of one’s moral duty. Right at the beginning of the Bible, Noah is told by God to “be fruitful and multiply”. Later Abraham complains that “I continue childless”, to which God replies: “I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens, and all this land of which I have spoken I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it for ever.”

This is the great obsession of much of the early history of the people of Israel. From this perspective, fertile women are politically valuable, and infertile women, homosexuals and eunuchs considered almost traitorous. Thus, for instance, the rather bizarre stuff you get in Deuteronomy that “no one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord”.

But there’s a twist here. For when it comes to the book of Isaiah, Jesus’s favourite book of the Hebrew scriptures, this more enlightened biblical author realises that the obsession with children has warped the moral values of his culture. In direct opposition to the theology of Deuteronomy, Isaiah writes that “to the eunuchs that keep my Sabbaths and hold fast to my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name that is better than sons and daughters”. Note: better than sons and daughters. And what is true for eunuchs is true, by direct analogy, for people who are gay. Inclusion is not a piece of trendy modern theory. It is a biblical imperative.

Those who take the Bible as if it were a reference book cannot mentally accommodate the idea that the story being told is about the developing consciousness of the people of Israel, of how they got it wrong and how they are led to a new understanding by God. For Christians especially this new understanding is that God is there for all; that, as St Paul is very keen to insist, you don’t even need to be a Jew for God to be there for you. Which returns us to the message of the angel: that Christ is good news to all. This is the ultimate communication of religious inclusion.

The broader theme of the pope’s address concerns gender theory. His idea is that trendy philosophy has obscured the distinctiveness of male and female, which ought to be regarded as rooted in the order of creation. As it happens, evangelical Christians are often incredibly suspicious of this sort of line. They are afraid that it endorses the argument that, because homosexuality is actually prevalent in nature, and because people seem to be “born gay”, natural law ethics could be won round to regard homosexuality as natural and thus good.

In light of this, conservative evangelicals have begun to take an interest in precisely the sort of gender theory that the pope excoriates. It seems bizarre to me that evangelicals have started to read postmodern philosophers such as Michel Foucault with approval, but what they argue is that because our sexual inclinations are not stubbornly rooted in nature, they are more plastic and thus they are capable of being changed. In this way they can argue that gay people are not gay because of intransigent nature but because of wilful disobedience. Foucault would turn in his grave.

And one last thing. Why on earth did the pope think Christmas a good time to ignite this sort of row? For while we are all spitting tacks, those worryingly androgynous angels are trying to get their own message across: peace on earth and goodwill to all. And all means all.

It’s not often that a science writer gets to say this, but the Pope is right. It’s not as if he’s always right: where scientific matters are concerned, Benedict XVI has displayed precious little infallibility. He has shown a disquieting sympathy for the rebranded creationism of intelligent design, and his views on embryonic stem cells, IVF and contraception are inimical to medical progress. But in attacking the notion that sex roles are invariably ordained by culture and not biology, the Holy Father has said something that needed saying.

As the Pope is finding out, anyone who criticises this “gender theory” invites vitriol from its liberal champions. Scientists such as Simon Baron-Cohen and Steven Pinker, who suggest that differences between typical male and female behaviour may be biologically influenced, have been accused of rationalising patriarchy and discrimination.

The work of these researchers and others shows that gender theory is built on sand. Anatomical variations between the sexes are not the only ones with natural roots. Women tend to be better at empathising, while men are more likely to excel at understanding systems from motorbike engines to offside laws, and there is growing evidence that these traits are influenced by testosterone exposure in the womb. They may also be linked to the recent discovery of hundreds of variations in the way that genes are switched on and off in male and female brains. If social factors are important in shaping gender roles, it is increasingly apparent that biology matters too, and recognising this in no way justifies sexism. Sex differences in behaviour apply only on average, across populations, and people should be considered as individuals.

It is refreshing to see the Pope taking the right side in this argument – not least as it bucks the Jesuit maxim of “give me the child and I’ll show you the man”. This shouldn’t be taken, though, as a sign of new-found pontifical respect for the latest science. It is better seen as fresh proof that even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day. The reason is that while the Pope is willing to allow nature a role in shaping the sexes, and in requiring respect for the idiosyncracies of each, he has no time for its implications for sexual orientation.

Religious groups who object to homosexuality, including the Roman Catholic Church, like to present it as a moral choice that lies outside the norms of human behaviour. In October, a senior Vatican official described it as “a deviation, an irregularity, a wound”, and the Pope’s remarks betray similar sentiments.

There was a time when mainstream science would have agreed. Homosexuality, after all, was removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of disorders only in 1973. The Pope would be hard-pressed, though, to find a respected modern expert who thinks it is an irregularity, still less a wound. For evidence is mounting that it is at least as strongly guided by biology as gender roles are.

Homosexuality is natural, occurring across the animal kingdom. It is well documented in more than 450 species, from rams to swans and dolphins to giraffes. In humans, it is seen in every known culture.

Identical twins are more likely than fraternal sets to share a sexual orientation – a firm sign that genes are involved. The search for “gay genes” has so far drawn a blank, and there is certainly no gene that invariably makes people homosexual. But a consensus is building that genetic factors may predispose people to such preferences, in concert with environmental triggers. There are even good explanations for how such genes could have survived the obvious evolutionary drawbacks of gay sex. A genetic variation that promotes homosexuality in men, but makes their mothers and sisters more fertile, could easily thrive and spread.

The natural history of homosexuality, too, goes beyond genetics. Birth order, for example, is known to exert an effect. A man’s chances of being gay grow with every older brother he has, probably because successive male pregnancies affect the hormonal balance in the womb. The effect does not apply to men with older adoptive or stepbrothers, which implicates biology and not family circumstance. It would be mischievous to suggest that this might have affected the historical practice of youngest sons making a career in the Church.

Homosexuality is not biologically determined – almost no human behaviours are. But it almost certainly begins with a delicate combination of genetic, gestational, environmental and social cues, which together forge a person’s sexual orientation.

Few gay men and women feel they have chosen a way of life, and the science is with them. Their preferences are as much a part of normal human variation as traits such as height or intelligence, to which nature and nurture also both contribute.

In his address to Vatican staff, Benedict XVI declared the Church’s belief in a natural order of men and women, and asked “that this order, set down by creation, be respected”. Science has made it clear that homosexuality is part of the rich diversity of that creation. That is something we should all respect – the Pope included.

Being nominated for an award is supposed to be a nice thing, right? Well not for me. When I was told a few weeks ago that I had been shortlisted for a journalist of the year award by the gay rights organisation Stonewall, I knew I would not win. I was certainly a worthy contender, but I knew from that moment that all hell was about to break loose.

You need a little history first: in 2004 I wrote a column in this newspaper about a Canadian male-to-female transsexual who had taken a rape crisis centre to court over its decision not to invite her to be a counsellor for rape victims. I questioned whether a sex change would make someone a woman, or simply a man who has had surgery.

The article caused uproar among some sections of the transsexual community and, despite apologising publicly three times about the tone and inappropriate humour in the column, I have never been allowed to forget it.

Once the nomination became public I waited for the transsexual community to kick up a fuss. They did, and organised a massive campaign against me and Stonewall, culminating in a demonstration to protest my nomination outside the awards ceremony. The kerfuffle was not just about me, but deep-seated anger towards Stonewall for refusing to add the T (for transsexual) on to the LGB (for lesbian, gay and bisexual).

In the 1970s and 80s, lesbians were left to our own devices, and mainly organised and socialised separately from gay men. Then, in the late 1980s, along came Section 28, homophobic legislation which forbade schools to “promote homosexuality”. HIV/Aids was affecting increasing numbers of gay men, so lesbians offered support and solidarity.

We became “lesbian and gay”, but soon bisexuals shouted, “Us too”. Transsexuals, having received short shrift from heterosexual society, asked to be included in our rainbow alliance, followed by Queer (anyone who is into “kinky” sex), then Questioning (those having a think about who and how they might shag in the future), and finally (for now) Intersex (those born with biological features that are simultaneously perceived as male and female). The mantra now at “gay” meetings is a tongue-twisting LGBTQQI.

It is all a bit of an unholy alliance. We have been put in a room together and told to play nicely. But I for one do not wish to be lumped in with an ever-increasing list of folk defined by “odd” sexual habits or characteristics. Shall we just start with A and work our way through the alphabet? A, androgynous, b, bisexual, c, cat-fancying d, devil worshipping. Where will it ever end?

On various message boards discussing my nomination, one poster said of me: “She does not have the right to express an opinion on trans matters as she is not trans. Any more than someone who is straight can express an opinion on homosexuality. It’s not that her views are different, it is that she is expressing them at all. She has no right!”

Do you see the contradiction here? I am told I should not be nominated for awards from a gay organisation because I am part of one big “queer family” which should, they say, include transsexuals; but I am not allowed to comment on transsexualism. In the meantime, on the same websites, an intersex person was told to shut up by a transsexual, and lesbian feminists who were born women are being told they are neither of these things by a number of women who were born male but believe they make better lesbians than me.

I just want to be left alone. I am not in your gang, I did not ask to be, so please don’t tell me I am one of yours, and then tell me off for offending your orthodoxy. Let’s have an amicable split, instead of ending up carrying on like The Judean People’s Front. Or is it The People’s Front of Judea?

Did you know that your safety and security depend on gay men and lesbians?

An estimated 65,000 gay men and lesbians serve in the U.S. armed forces, though by law they cannot be open about their sexuality. As we fight two wars, our military is stretched thin. Those gay and lesbian soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and members of the Coast Guard are essential.

Without them, we would stretch to a dangerous point the length of time troops must spend in Iraq and Afghanistan. Without them, we would lose crucial military leadership, expertise and skills. Without them, we would have a hard time meeting our military commitments worldwide.

A hearing of a House Armed Services subcommittee yesterday offered a critical opportunity to break the silence surrounding how military preparedness has been hurt by the 1993 “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring gay men and lesbians from serving openly. The military has spent more than $363 million since 1994 to throw out gay men and lesbians whose expertise we desperately need, including expensively trained and hard-to-recruit linguists, jet pilots, cyber-warriors, doctors and combat-tested master sergeants. This purging of talent takes place at the same time the military, in order to meet its manpower quotas, feels compelled to increase the number of waivers it grants to people who have had problems with the law — in some instances almost twice as many as in years past.

These patriotic gay and lesbian warriors want to serve. Yes, some “out” themselves to leave the service, usually because they have been made to feel unwelcome, unappreciated or even unsafe in their units. An estimated 3,000 gay service members depart each year rather than continue to serve under a policy that forces them to deceive their fellow warriors and to contradict the honor and integrity that are core values in our services. Those members who stay make an incredibly difficult personal sacrifice.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” also damages our nation’s ability to recruit the best and the brightest. Competing with industry is hard enough already. The military estimates that only three in 10 high school graduates are qualified to serve; the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy further reduces the pool of eligible recruits. And would you want to serve when you have to hide an essential part of yourself or would be unable to tell the chain of command about discrimination or harassment without risking your career?

Some fear a backlash from heterosexual service members, but I don’t. I grew up in Mississippi and attended segregated schools until I was a sophomore in high school. Integration was tumultuous, but it led to respect, understanding and, ultimately, a greater opportunity for blacks and whites alike to succeed. I believe integration of lesbians and gay men in the military will be easier: It has already taken place. Sadly, we just don’t recognize the gay service members among us for who they are.

It is up to Congress and the president to craft policy on gay men and lesbians serving in the military, but it is the responsibility of senior military commanders to advise our nation’s leaders on how law and policy affect military readiness. I raised this issue in 2003 when a task force I served on worked on the Navy’s diversity strategy. Senior leaders must state plainly how “don’t ask, don’t tell” affects recruiting, retention and our ability to develop essential military skills. They should speak up about how it affects military honor and integrity. It is our duty, something military leaders understand well, to speak openly of how “don’t ask, don’t tell” injures our military and weakens our preparedness.

Los puritanos ingleses del siglo XIX, que pululaban por todas partes, lo tenían muy difícil con la segunda égloga de Virgilio. En los viejos y famosos colegios privados de la aristocracia y la alta burguesía, conocidos popularmente como Los ocho –Eton, Rugby, Winchester, etcétera–, y los centenares de establecimientos de la clase media que los imitaban, el estudio de los clásicos latinos y griegos era obligado. Y Virgilio, con Homero, era el más célebre de ellos. Sus otras églogas no ofrecían un problema demasiado grave para las remilgadas conciencias victorianas. En ellas, los amores se daban entre hombres y mujeres, como Dios mandaba. Eran convencionales, si bien, a veces, excesivos. No así los de la segunda égloga, con su verso inicial tan explícito: Formosum pastor Coridon ardebat Alexim.
No le costaba trabajo ni al alumno más torpe descifrar la escandalosa oración de cinco palabras. La m acusativa final de Formosum y Alexim vinculaba inexorablemente nombre propio y adjetivo (hermoso Álex) como objeto del verbo. Pastor Coridon quedaba como sujeto gramatical, no había más opción. ¿Y ardebat? ¡Ah, ardebat! Imposible esquivar el sentido del vocablo. Coridón ardía por el hermoso muchacho de marras, y punto. Los traductores de la época hicieron lo que pudieron por obviar lo obvio, pero de poco les sirvió. “Arder por” es “arder por”, el amor es fuego, quema, consume, y siempre será así hasta el final de los tiempos, pese a censores e inquisidores.
Los siguientes versos del poema, además, ratificaban la naturaleza de aquel fuego atormentador. El lector se entera de que la causa de Coridón es imposible porque el dueño (dominus) de Álex tiene reservado al efebo para su uso personal y exclusivo. Venga, pues, el solitario llanto del pastor entre las frondosidades del bosque más a mano. Un especialista victoriano en el lírico de Mantua comentó: “Nos gustaría poder creer que se trata de una historia puramente imaginativa, pero aun así descalifica gravemente a Virgilio”.
He aquí una buena muestra del talante de los descalificadores ho- mófobos ingleses. Se entiende el desprecio que suscitaban en el poeta Algernon Charles Swinburne –feroz enemigo del Dios judeocristiano– y, más tarde, en el pobre Oscar Wilde, a quien le hicieron pagar, y tanto, su fama y su apego al amor que no se atrevía a decir su nombre.

A LO LARGO de dos milenios, los sacerdotes de dicha deidad, protestantes o católicos, han sido enemigos acérrimos del sexo en general y, en particular, de la homosexualidad, “aquel pecado horrible que entre cristianos no se nombra”. Ya lo recordaba Gregorio Marañón en su importante libro Los estados intersexuales de la especie humana (1930): “Nada menos que el fuego de Dios fue la sanción impuesta a Sodoma y Gomorra. Y hasta bien entrada la edad moderna se seguía quemando vivos en todos los países a los reos de este llamado pecado nefando“.
Hoy mismo, pese a lo mucho que se ha avanzado en España, la homofobia persiste. Se nota, sobre todo, en el rechazo del Partido Popular a la nueva asignatura de Educación para la Ciudadanía y a la utilización de la palabra matrimonio cuando de los enlaces gais se trata. Acabar con el dogma de que la homosexualidad va contra natura no es cuestión de días ni de años. Son muchos siglos de odio y de incomprensión.
Estas consideraciones son producto de las noticias recientemente aparecidas en la prensa sobre la crisis que amenaza hoy con dividir en dos la Iglesia anglicana. Tal comunión, capitaneada por el monarca británico de turno (¡al menos al papa de Roma lo eligen!), tiene en el mundo, como consecuencia del que fue inmenso imperio británico, 70 millones de adheridos, muchos de ellos en EEUU.
Los 38 primados anglicanos están escindidos entre progresistas y tradicionalistas, sobre todo en relación con el espinoso problema gay. Los progres abogan por permitir la ordenación de sacerdotes homosexuales –hoy prohibida– e incluso su matrimonio con otro hombre. Los tradicionalistas, con el Viejo Testamento en la mano, discrepan radicalmente, y el problema, o uno de ellos, es que los más vehementes, los norteamericanos, están recibiendo de fuentes neocon financiación abundante para su campa- ña contra los propuestos cambios.

EN MEDIO de las fuerzas contendientes se encuentra el moderado Rowan Williams, arzobispo de Canterbury y, como tal, líder espiritual de la comunión anglicana, que dentro de unos días abrirá el congreso de Lambeth, en Londres, acontecimiento celebrado cada 10 años y que reúne a unos 800 obispos del globo entero. Bueno, que solía reunir. Este año van a faltar 200, sobre todo africanos, que se niegan a acudir a orillas del Támesis porque consideran que el liderazgo de Williams es flojo y que, en relación con el tema gay, ha hecho demasiadas concesiones. Se va abriendo, pues, un cisma en el seno de la Iglesia anglicana, y todo debido a la homofobia, latente o consciente, que sigue haciendo la vida intolerable a millones de seres que, no por culpa suya, ni por ninguna enfermedad, arden por alguien del mismo sexo.

Hoy sábado tendrá lugar en Madrid la ya tradicional manifestación estatal del Orgullo Gay, ese acontecimiento de visibilidad colectiva en que se conmemora la violenta sublevación contra el abuso policial que estalló en Nueva York la noche del 28 de junio de 1969. Una redada policial en el ahora célebre bar Stonewall fue el detonante de aquellos disturbios, que se prolongaron a lo largo de varios días y que dieron lugar al actual movimiento de liberación gay.

Por motivos puramente comerciales, este año la manifestación que algunos ingenuamente ya denominan «cabalgata», por primera vez no tendrá lugar en torno al 28 de junio: la gente tiene más dinero para gastar a principios de mes que a finales. Esto es claramente indicativo de los intereses que empiezan a dominar en lo que hasta hace poco era fundamentalmente un acto reivindicativo por la justicia y la igualdad.

Aunque la expresión Orgullo Gay da por sobreentendido que incluye a hombres y mujeres, este año más que nunca habría que hablar específicamente de Orgullo Lésbico, pues el centro de atención serán las mujeres. En el mundo gay, las lesbianas permanecen aún muy en segundo plano, en buena parte debido a la extraordinaria visibilidad de los gays, y hasta podríamos decir que a su exhibicionismo. Basta pensar en el número de establecimientos y publicaciones dirigidas a los gays, así como el descomunal negocio de la pornografía gay, para darse cuenta de que las lesbianas son comparativamente invisibles. También contribuye a esa falta de visibilidad el hecho de que numéricamente -tanto en términos relativos como absolutos- hay menos lesbianas que gays (aproximadamente la mitad).

Este año la celebración del Orgullo viene precedida de la sensacional noticia de que un grupo de científicos del Instituto Karolinska de Suecia ha descubierto diferencias entre el cerebro de las personas homosexuales y heterosexuales. Concretamente, dicen que el cerebro del hombre gay presenta características que son típicamente femeninas, tales como el tamaño del hemisferio derecho, y ciertos patrones neuronales que influyen en cómo se procesan las emociones. También dicen haber observado características inversas en el cerebro de las lesbianas, que lo hace similar al de los hombres heterosexuales.

Esas supuestas observaciones, acompañadas de la manera ramplona y simplista con que se han proyectado sobre una opinión pública desconocedora de las extraordinarias complejidades de la anatomía cerebral, han tenido el mero efecto de una difamación -una más- contra las personas de orientación gay y lésbica. El cerebro es un órgano mucho más misterioso de lo que tanta información simplista -a veces promovida interesadamente por los mismos científicos- nos pretende hacer ver. Como bien ha señalado algún experto español en sus comentarios a la mencionada noticia, cuando se trata de la relación conducta-fisiología cerebral es prácticamente imposible saber cuál es la causa y cuál el efecto, o si nos encontramos ante una mera correlación.

Dicho de otro modo, en los cerebros de un gran pianista, un gran deportista o de una persona con intensos sentimientos religiosos podremos encontrar determinadas protuberancias, diferencias de tamaño entre los hemisferios o estructuras microscópicas que los diferencian de otras personas sin tales aptitudes artísticas, deportivas o sin tal fervor religioso. Dada la plasticidad del cerebro, sin embargo, no es posible saber con certeza si esas protuberancias, estructuras neuronales o diferencias de tamaño son la causa o el resultado de las conductas artísticas, deportivas o religiosas que observamos. La duda se basa en que se sabe con certeza que la cultura y las conductas humanas producen efectos adaptatorios en la anatomía cerebral. La permanente agresión cultural y la sutil represión social a que están sometidos el hombre y la mujer de orientación homosexual -cada uno de modo diferente- dan lugar a estrategias de superviviencia que podrían explicar las diferencias que se observan en sus cerebros, si es que se puede llegar a constatar que tales diferencias son auténticas.

El hombre de orientación gay se ve obligado desde pequeño a esconder sus sentimientos, a sufrir en silencio una brutal agresión cultural a través de los medios de comunicación, el sistema educativo y la Iglesia, que excluyen su realidad de forma sistemática. Y, claro, siempre está presente el temor a ser rechazado por su familia, sus amigos o sus compañeros de trabajo. Esas condiciones de vida hacen necesariamente del hombre de orientación gay una persona profundamente introspectiva, que desde pequeño se ve obligado a calcular y medir escrupulosamente cada palabra y cada expresión de sus sentimientos para no ser descubierto. Y es precisamente a esa intensa vida intelectual que desarrolla como estrategia de supervivencia a lo que se atribuye el que el hombre homosexual puntúe más alto que el hombre heterosexual en los tests de inteligencia, como muestran los varios estudios comparativos que se han llevado a cabo. Ese tipo de gimnasia intelectual e intensidad emocional que se ve obligado a desarrollar el hombre de orientación gay es lo que puede explicar esas supuestas diferencias en su cerebro. En otras palabras: no es gay porque su cerebro sea así, sino que su cerebro es así por las condiciones intelectuales y emocionales que le impone la sociedad.

En el caso de las lesbianas se puede hacer el mismo tipo de análisis. Pero hay que tener en cuenta que la forma de represión a que están sometidas es diferente. Entre los expertos, el término «homofobia» se considera ya desfasado. Hay una lesbofobia y una gayfobia, y ambos fenómenos se manifiestan de modo muy diferente. En una sociedad donde rige de modo absoluto, en lo cultural y en todo aspecto, la supremacía del hombre heterosexual y su visión del mundo es imposible que el gay y la lesbiana sean mirados con los mismos ojos y sufran el mismo tipo de represión. La experiencia de la mujer lesbiana dará lugar a sus propios mecanismos de supervivencia, que posiblemente se plasmen de modo diferente en su cerebro.

Pero la cuestión previa a estas explicaciones es si las observaciones del Instituto Karolinska son fiables o no. Como es sabido, para que un descubrimiento tenga auténtica validez ha de ser corroborado por grupos independientes de científicos. A principios de los años 90, Simon LeVay dijo haber encontrado diferencias entre los cerebros de hombres homosexuales y heterosexuales, concretamente en una sección del hipotálamo (INAH-3) que controla la conducta sexual. Su supuesto descubrimiento dio la vuelta al mundo, fue noticia de portada en los principales periódicos, y LeVay fue invitado a dar conferencias en muchos países, incluido España. Sin embargo, aparte del consabido problema de si esas supuestas diferencias cerebrales eran causa o efecto, las observaciones de LeVay nunca fueron corroboradas por ningún otro laboratorio, con lo cual perdieron validez y cayeron en el olvido. Exactamente lo mismo se puede decir de las observaciones de Dean Hamer, que, también en los 90, dijo haber encontrado el «gen gay.» Poco después, LeVay, gran amigo mío, publicó Queer Science un libro que recomiendo lean los interesados en esta cuestión. En él pasa revista a todas las disparatadas teorías «científicas» sobre la homosexualidad que hubo a lo largo del siglo XX.

Lo preocupante, en última instancia, es el empeño por averiguar la causa de la homosexualidad. Eso es en sí un signo de fobia hacia gays y lesbianas, y una forma más de opresión. ¿Por qué no preguntarse qué causa la heterosexualidad? La cuestión es igual de intrigante: ¿por qué se siente un hombre atraído por una mujer o una mujer por un hombre? Sabemos que no son las hormonas, que sólo regulan la intensidad del deseo, pero no la dirección. ¿Es acaso una estructura cerebral?, ¿una disposición genética?

No tenemos ni idea de lo que causa la heterosexualidad. Y lo sorprendente es que no haya ninguna teoría ni nadie trabajando en ello. Es a todas luces obvio que es más urgente averiguar la causa de la heterosexualidad pues afecta a muchas más personas.

Archbishop Rowan Williams has tried to take the issue of gay marriage off the table at the Lambeth Conference, which begins in three weeks. But the celebration of a gay relationship at one of London’s oldest churches last month, and the well-publicised gathering of anti-gay Anglicans in Jerusalem this week, suggest the controversy must eventually be faced squarely.

Conservative Christians say opening marriage to gay couples would undermine an immutable institution founded on divine revelation. Archbishop Henry Orombi, the primate of the Church of Uganda, calls it blasphemy. But, theologically, support for same-sex marriage is not a dramatic break with tradition, but a recognition that the church’s understanding of marriage has changed dramatically over 2,000 years.

Christians have always argued about marriage. Jesus criticised the Mosaic law on divorce, saying “What God has joined together let no man separate”, but even that dictum appears in different versions in the Gospels, and was modified in the letters of Peter and Paul. Christians had to square the ecstatic sensuality of the Song of Songs with Paul’s teaching that marriage was a fallen estate, useful primarily in saving those who could not be celibate from fornication.

This tension is indicative of the church’s long struggle to reconcile the notion that sexuality is a gift from God with its deep suspicion of the pleasure of sex. As the historian Stephanie Coontz points out, the church did not bless marriages until the third century, or define marriage as a sacrament until 1215. The church embraced many of the assumptions of the patriarchal culture, in which women and marriageable children were assets to be controlled and exploited to the advantage of the man who headed their household.

The theology of marriage was heavily influenced by economic and legal considerations; it emphasised procreation, and spoke only secondarily of the “mutual consolation of the spouses”. In the 19th and 20th centuries, however, the relationship of the spouses assumed new importance, as the church came to understand that marriage was a profoundly spiritual relationship in which partners experienced, through mutual affection and self-sacrifice, the unconditional love of God.

The Episcopal Church’s 1979 Book of Common Prayer puts it this way: “We believe that the union of husband and wife, in heart, body and mind, is intended by God for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and, when it is God’s will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord.”

Our evolving understanding of what marriage is leads, of necessity, to a re-examination of who it is for. Most Christian denominations no longer teach that all sex acts must be open to the possibility of procreation (hence, contraception is permitted). Nor do they hold that infertility precludes marriage. The church has deepened its understanding of the way in which faithful couples experience and embody the love of the creator for creation. In so doing, it has put itself in a position to consider whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.

Opponents of gay marriage may raise other objections – that it is unsuitable, for instance, to raise children with two mothers or two fathers. I believe these arguments are easily refuted, but they are arguments about effective social policy, not sound theology. Christians who want to deny others the blessings they claim for themselves should not assume they speak for the Almighty.

Maybe it’s being in a company of saints – a most un-Anglican communion of the like-minded. But the rhetoric of the gathering of conservative churchmen in Jerusalem seeking to wrest control of worldwide Anglicanism from the woolly nuances of Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the wicked, gay-friendly liberalism of the Church of England and US Episcopal Church is already spiralling upwards on a vicious current of hot air.

Two days into the great realignment, we’ve already had the archbishops of Nigeria and Uganda denying that gays are ever persecuted in their countries – and failing to find the words to condemn the violence if they are; voices calling for biblically lethal punishment for homosexuals; and lip-smacking assertions that the old church has fallen prey to apostasy, brokenness and turmoil, in its attempt to “acquiesce to destructive modern, cultural and political dictates”.

Adding to the fervour, Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester (who flies in today), has announced his tender conscience will not allow him to associate with those Americans who ordained the openly (as opposed to privately) gay bishop Gene Robinson five years ago. He also says he will boycott next month’s gathering of the world’s Anglican bishops, called by Williams in Canterbury.

You may find it hard to recognise the C of E in all this. It runs counter to most of the tolerant traditions Anglicanism espouses as part of its constitutional accommodation with the secular state that founded it. The trouble with the coalition of interests meeting in the Middle East – in defiance of the wishes of local bishops who thought more religious conflict was the last thing Jerusalem needed – is they have Got Religion.

Theirs is an insurgency united in what they don’t like – homosexuality – and elevating it to a litmus test of orthodoxy in a way that other divisive theological issues – divorce, say, or women’s ordination – have not been. The thing is that many conservatives know women – some have even married them – and not a few of the righteous have been divorced as well. They don’t know gay people, and what they think they know of them is viscerally distasteful.

Had things stopped there, it might be no more than a muttered grievance; but what is happening is a power struggle in which the conservatives of the US church – and, to a lesser extent, English evangelicals – have summoned up the developing world to seize the church from the forces of liberalism and relativism. If the battle over gays is lost, they say, everything is lost. The visit of many African bishops to the conference has been facilitated by US money.

African moral outrage is necessary, not only because they have the burgeoning congregations, and no necessity of consulting their flocks through bloody-minded synods, but also because the conservatives fear their message is lost on western congregations. They are puzzled that their fervour is met with indifference, even though, in the words of the principal of Wycliffe Hall, the Oxford theological college, 95% of the population is in danger of damnation.

Homosexuality is a useful unifier for conservative flocks. The little-noticed irony is that those meeting in Jerusalem agree on very little else: some American conservatives are more high church than the Pope, whereas the conservative archbishop of Sydney says he could never see himself attending mass.

Despite the huffing, they maintain they don’t want to leave Anglicanism: in the old evangelical phrase, it’s a convenient boat to fish from. But many other Anglicans would like to see them go.

Su espontaneidad y frescura me sorprendieron gratamente. Marta tiene ocho años y es reflejo de lo que hoy es la sociedad española. Una sociedad que en su gran mayoría ha superado muchos debates en los últimos años. Una sociedad moderna, abierta, tolerante, respetuosa, comprometida, solidaria y sin ningún tipo de complejos.

Hace unos días, después de una agradable comida, se nos quedó mirando a Enrique, mi pareja, y a mí. Nos preguntó si éramos hermanos. Sinceramente, nos quedamos un tanto descolocados porque no sabíamos qué intención llevaba su pregunta. Le dijimos que no, pero le preguntamos por qué creía que éramos hermanos. Porque siempre estáis juntos, nos respondió. Fue entonces cuando Elena, la madre de Marta, le comentó al oído que éramos novios. A Marta se le abrieron los ojos y con una sincera sonrisa de complicidad exclamó: “Entonces, ¡sois gays!”. “Claro, Marta, somos gays”. “¿Y estáis casados?”, siguió preguntando.

Vengo a contar esta significativa anécdota porque a mí mismo me llamó poderosamente la atención la naturalidad con la que una niña de ocho años trata un asunto que para muchos mayores y determinados sectores de la sociedad todavía supone cierto tabú, mientras que otros prefieren mirar hacia otro lado. Éstos son los niños que dentro de unos años serán los jóvenes españoles y, créanme, ese talante ante la vida nos debe de llenar a todos de satisfacción.

Mi generación ha sido la generación en la que, por fin, se han ido abriendo armarios a medida que la luz te permitía salir de las tinieblas de la soledad. Después de toda una vida de luchas diversas, los gays españoles hemos conseguido ser ya un referente en todo el mundo. Pero lo que es más importante, nos hemos abierto a nosotros mismos, nos hemos abierto a la sociedad, a nuestras familias y a nuestros amigos.

El simpático comentario de Marta, y también la similar reacción que tuvieron mis sobrinas Paula y Lucía, no es sino otra cosa que tratar lo natural con naturalidad. Los avances legales en los últimos años han ido acompañados de grandes avances en lo que llamamos la igualdad social, es decir, el reconocimiento social y el respeto a lo que somos: homosexuales. A ello ha contribuido, sin duda, el gran trabajo desarrollado por los distintos colectivos sociales que, incluso en tiempos muy difíciles, han mantenido un fuerte compromiso, un activismo que se ha visto recompensado. También ha sido destacable la gran labor desarrollada por los medios de comunicación que han ayudado, y mucho, para que la sociedad asimilase la normalidad de una situación.

Todavía queda mucho por hacer, por supuesto, pero lo conseguido ya está ahí. Somos una sociedad que ha conquistado nuevos derechos, que ha sido pionera en el mundo en lo que, a buen seguro, dentro de algunos años será un ejemplo a seguir. Se ha regulado por el derecho civil lo que es una relación civil. No hay que darle más vueltas. Ya no sirve el buscar argumentos que sólo crean estériles polémicas que nos complican la vida a muchos ciudadanos. Es el momento de adquirir un mayor compromiso, por parte de todos con nuestros derechos. Un mayor compromiso con los derechos civiles de millones de ciudadanos. Un compromiso sincero y desinteresado por la igualdad de todos.

Ahora toca seguir trabajando, seguir reivindicando, seguir implicando a todos. Hace falta más visibilidad, hace falta trabajar más para que también a las lesbianas y transexuales se les empiece a reconocer en igualdad de condiciones. Hace falta, sobre todo, que se dejen aparcados debates faltos de rigor y que haya más compromiso desde los ámbitos políticos y sociales, especialmente desde aquellos que no quieren adaptarse a lo que hoy en día es la realidad social.

Hace ya tres años que entró en vigor la reforma del Código Civil por la que, con una iniciativa valiente, se equipara en derechos a todos los ciudadanos, sin distinción alguna por su tendencia sexual. En aquel momento, al inicio del debate político, muchos pensamos que hubiese sido bueno haber llegado a un consenso de todo el arco parlamentario para definir la figura jurídica que debía traer la igualdad legal. Ahora bien, también es verdad que cuando se aprobó la reforma y se apostó mayoritariamente desde el Parlamento por la figura del matrimonio, yo mismo dije que debíamos ponernos todos detrás de la bandera y empezar a legitimar en la sociedad lo que ya empezaba a estar en la ley.

Hoy voy más allá y pido más. Creo que es un buen momento para dejar atrás ciertos complejos y ciertas posturas nacidas, muchas veces, del desconocimiento y otras, de la frivolidad. Es un momento en el que el primer partido de la oposición puede situarse, ahora que va a definir su ponencia política para su próximo congreso, junto a la opinión mayoritaria de la sociedad española. Es un buen momento para replantearse el inoportuno e injustificado recurso ante el Tribunal Constitucional.

Aún dejando de lado las exageradas cifras de previsibles asistentes que anuncian los organizadores, el hecho es que el acontecimiento constituirá una auténtica apoteosis para un movimiento social que, hace justamente 20 años, apenas lograba reunir a algo más de un centenar de personas. Será, sin embargo, una apoteosis no exenta de sombras. Significados activistas que se entregaron por completo a la lucha por la igualdad de gays y lesbianas han sido marginados, e incluso objeto de conspiración, por parte de aquellos compañeros de lucha que han acumulado provecho personal y poder como resultado de la enorme proyección social y política que ha adquirido la cuestión gay en los últimos años.

El escritor Ricardo Llamas, uno de los intelectuales más valiosos en ese movimiento, hace años que abandonó el activismo. Lo mismo se puede decir de otras figuras significativas que, en medio de una profunda decepción, han dejado de colaborar con las organizaciones del mundo LGTB y, en particular, con la Federación Estatal de Lesbianas, Gays y Transexuales (FELGT). Es el caso, por ejemplo, del teniente coronel Sánchez Silva, cuya sonada salida del armario contribuyó significativamente a la normalización de la cuestión gay en la sociedad española. Y es también el caso del sacerdote José Mantero, otra persona que se lo jugó todo con una salida que tuvo una enorme repercusión internacional, y cuyas duras críticas y acusaciones hacia el activismo organizado han causado perplejidad. Es, por tanto, ahora un momento adecuado para recapacitar.

La ya famosa FELGT asumió un papel hegemónico en el proceso que llevó a la legalización del matrimonio entre personas del mismo sexo en 2005. Dicho papel de liderazgo le vino dado en parte por una brillante estrategia de marketing, de imagen. Su impresionante nombre -Federación Estatal- sugiere un carácter oficial y representativo que, de hecho, no tiene (al menos no más que otras organizaciones y federaciones). Tales organizaciones y federaciones, en buena parte como resultado de la estrategia de la FELGT, han sido sistemáticamente marginadas por los medios de comunicación y por las instituciones, al haberse generado la impresión de que la FELGT es el portavoz único del movimiento LGTB. Tal ha sido el éxito de su estrategia que ha logrado catapultar a uno de sus ex presidentes -Pedro Zerolo- al mundo de la alta política, lo que ha tenido resultados indiscutiblemente positivos para el movimiento gay español, especialmente en lo concerniente al matrimonio.

La Federación Colegas y la Fundación Triángulo son ejemplos de federaciones, también estatales, es decir, que están implantadas por todo el país, y llevan a cabo una intensa labor política y educativa. Además, existen otras federaciones a escala autonómica, como la Coordinadora Gai-Lesbiana de Cataluña, y organizaciones, como el Colectivo No Te Prives, de Murcia, que van por libre en sus ya décadas de activismo. De un modo ciertamente injusto, tales organizaciones, con sus múltiples actividades, algunas de ramificaciones internacionales, han permanecido invisibles para los medios de comunicación.

La labor de las organizaciones que componen la FELG ha sido, no hay duda de ello, decisiva para la consecución de toda una serie de logros por la igualdad. Por ejemplo, la organización asturiana Xega fue pionera allá por 1997 (cuando aún no era miembro de la FELGT) en reivindicar el derecho al matrimonio. Pero la Federación, como tal entidad, con el reconocimiento y privilegios que ha obtenido, ha generado ya superestructuras en las que entran en juego el poder, el dinero y las ambiciones políticas. Y ello ha hecho que los intereses personales y corporativos comiencen a primar sobre los de aquellas personas a quienes dicen representar. Cuando la sana crítica interna se sustituye por la autocomplacencia y la exigencia de incondicionalidad quedan abiertas las puertas al fanatismo y a los favoritismos.

De varios países latinoamericanos han llegado quejas de acciones partidistas de la FELGT, tales como invitaciones pagadas a activistas de organizaciones ideológicamente afines a la FELGT a venir a España (con fondos procedentes de subvenciones estatales) y marginación simultánea de otras organizaciones, lo que ha generado divisiones y enfrentamientos entre los activistas de esos países. Pero no sólo de Latinoamérica han llegado tales protestas. Como ya señalaba antes, incluso dentro del activismo afín a la FELGT se producen quejas de activistas que se han visto marginados, e incluso objeto de conspiración. Como en un suma y sigue, las acusaciones de incompetencia y corrupción se suceden.

Publicaciones de base, como la revista Nación Gay (ahora NacionGay.com), ya venían advirtiendo desde hace años de lo que veían como alarmantes signos de la situación a la que ahora se ha llegado. Pero el activismo gay y las multitudes de simpatizantes ponían en aquel entonces toda su energía en la consecución de los objetivos legales, de modo que la necesidad de estar unidos se veía como más importante que la crítica interna.

Afortunadamente, existe todavía un sano activismo de base, movido por personas idealistas y sin pretensiones de ganancia personal. La organización Milhomes de A Coruña, por ejemplo, lleva a cabo desde hace tiempo una intensa campaña de reivindicación de la figura de Tomás Fábregas, un activista gallego que en los momentos más difíciles de la era del SIDA contribuyó al reconocimiento en Estados Unidos de ciertos derechos para personas con esa enfermedad. Falleció en San Francisco y, mientras que allí ha sido objeto de público reconocimiento, en su tierra natal permanece prácticamente ignorado. También, por encima de conspiraciones y partidismos, se mantienen figuras ya casi legendarias como Jordi Petit, que cuenta con un merecido prestigio internacional, y con el reconocimiento oficial de la ciudad de Barcelona, y que de toda una vida dedicada al activismo no ha sacado -ni buscado- ningún beneficio personal. Figuras como ésa no deberían ser nunca relegadas a un segundo plano.

Para el mundo gay, la obtención del derecho al matrimonio más que un logro histórico ha supuesto una salida de la prehistoria, esa tremenda prehistoria en que se encuentran millones de homosexuales en el resto del mundo. Por eso es, a mi modo de ver, muy importante la eliminación del requisito de residencia para la celebración de un matrimonio entre dos extranjeros. Con independencia de que tal matrimonio sea o no reconocido en sus países de origen, ello tendría un doble efecto. Por una parte, permitiría ver realizado un sueño de la máxima importancia a muchas parejas de otros países, principalmente de nuestro entorno geográfico, debido a la cercanía, y, seguramente, también de Latinoamérica, por la cercanía cultural. En segundo lugar, podría dar lugar a litigios en sus países de origen por el reconocimiento de tal vínculo, lo que podría conducir a la larga a su reconocimiento legal. El requisito de residencia no es en absoluto necesario, como lo demuestra el hecho de que Canadá no lo tenga. Es tan solo un modo de dificultar la realización del matrimonio.

Esperemos que la apoteosis del Europride sirva para dar fuerza a objetivos como éste y, en general, a todo aquello que sirva para eliminar la injusta discriminación que siguen sufriendo gays, lesbianas y transexuales, así como para reforzar un activismo ético cuyo objetivo sea la lucha por la justicia y no la ambición de poder.

IMAGINE for a moment an American soldier deep in the Iraqi desert. His unit is about to head out when he receives a cable detailing an insurgent ambush right in his convoy’s path. With this information, he and his soldiers are now prepared for the danger that lies ahead.

Reports like these are regularly sent from military translators’ desks, providing critical, often life-saving intelligence to troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the military has a desperate shortage of linguists trained to translate such invaluable information and convey it to the war zone.

The lack of qualified translators has been a pressing issue for some time — the Army had filled only half its authorized positions for Arabic translators in 2001. Cables went untranslated on Sept. 10 that might have prevented the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. Today, the American Embassy in Baghdad has nearly 1,000 personnel, but only a handful of fluent Arabic speakers.

I was an Arabic translator. After joining the Navy in 2003, I attended the Defense Language Institute, graduated in the top 10 percent of my class and then spent two years giving our troops the critical translation services they desperately needed. I was ready to serve in Iraq.

But I never got to. In March, I was ousted from the Navy under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which mandates dismissal if a service member is found to be gay.

My story begins almost a year ago when my roommate, who is also gay, was deployed to Falluja. We communicated the only way we could: using the military’s instant-messaging system on monitored government computers. These electronic conversations are lifelines, keeping soldiers sane while mortars land meters away.

Then, last October the annual inspection of my base, Fort Gordon, Ga., included a perusal of the government computer chat system; inspectors identified 70 service members whose use violated policy. The range of violations was broad: people were flagged for everything from profanity to outright discussions of explicit sexual activity. Among those charged were my former roommate and me. Our messages had included references to our social lives — comments that were otherwise unremarkable, except that they indicated we were both gay.

I could have written a statement denying that I was homosexual, but lying did not seem like the right thing to do. My roommate made the same decision, though he was allowed to remain in Iraq until the scheduled end of his tour.

The result was the termination of our careers, and the loss to the military of two more Arabic translators. The 68 other — heterosexual — service members remained on active duty, despite many having committed violations far more egregious than ours; the Pentagon apparently doesn’t consider hate speech, derogatory comments about women or sexual misconduct grounds for dismissal.

My supervisors did not want to lose me. Most of my peers knew I was gay, and that didn’t bother them. I was always accepted as a member of the team. And my experience was not anomalous: polls of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan show an overwhelming majority are comfortable with gays. Many were aware of at least one gay person in their unit and had no problem with it.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” does nothing but deprive the military of talent it needs and invade the privacy of gay service members just trying to do their jobs and live their lives. Political and military leaders who support the current law may believe that homosexual soldiers threaten unit cohesion and military readiness, but the real damage is caused by denying enlistment to patriotic Americans and wrenching qualified individuals out of effective military units. This does not serve the military or the nation well.

Consider: more than 58 Arabic linguists have been kicked out since “don’t ask, don’t tell” was instituted. How much valuable intelligence could those men and women be providing today to troops in harm’s way?

In addition to those translators, 11,000 other service members have been ousted since the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was passed by Congress in 1993. Many held critical jobs in intelligence, medicine and counterterrorism. An untold number of closeted gay military members don’t re-enlist because of the pressure the law puts on them. This is the real cost of the ban — and, with our military so overcommitted and undermanned, it’s too high to pay.

In response to difficult recruiting prospects, the Army has already taken a number of steps, lengthening soldiers’ deployments to 15 months from 12, enlisting felons and extending the age limit to 42. Why then won’t Congress pass a bill like the Military Readiness Enhancement Act, which would repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell”? The bipartisan bill, by some analysts’ estimates, could add more than 41,000 soldiers — all gay, of course.

As the friends I once served with head off to 15-month deployments, I regret I’m not there to lessen their burden and to serve my country. I’m trained to fight, I speak Arabic and I’m willing to serve. No recruiter needs to make a persuasive argument to sign me up. I’m ready, and I’m waiting.

The bigots still have a loud voice and they’re not being shouted down. On December 21 2005 I was legally bound to the man I love – as is my legal right and my human right. I wanted to shout about it, but I still felt nervous of the public’s reaction. I was, therefore, delighted and relieved on leaving the register office in Windsor to find the crowd outside cheering and supporting our union. I had feared that abusive, banner-waving bigots would try to spoil the occasion. I felt so proud that day to be British.

owever, in some countries my voice would have been drowned out – maybe even stamped out. For many, basic rights are still a matter of life and death. Individuals suffer because of their sexuality every day. Last year William Hernandez had a gun pressed against his neck, as he stood in the street outside the El Salvador offices of his gay rights organisation, Entre Amigos. William and his colleagues speak out for gay rights in El Salvador and had been protesting against political moves to amend the constitution to formally prevent gay marriage.

“We will kill you before you can get married,” said his attacker.

The offices of Entre Amigos had been broken into and ransacked two nights before. Nothing of value had been stolen, but details of planned events were taken and written homophobic threats were left in the offices. It was the seventh such break-in in five years.

These aren’t isolated incidents. Attacks on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are commonplace and those responsible are seldom brought to justice. Men and women are persecuted and attacked every day, all over the world, just because of those they love. Amnesty International has documented laws which criminalise gay sex in over 80 countries.

Homophobia impacts very badly on health education. Information that could help prevent the spread of HIV and Aids is suppressed – or those providing it, or seeking it out, are persecuted. William and his colleagues are targeted partly because they provide sex education for gay people in El Salvador.

In September 2006, on stage in Warsaw, I made a statement about homophobia: “Twenty-two years ago I came to Gdansk and met Lech Walesa in his home. At that time he was a hero to everyone in the world as he fought for freedom and his own human rights,” I told the crowd. “I am just a musician. I play and I hopefully make everyone’s troubles disappear for a couple of hours … I am also a gay man … and I know that in Poland recently there has been a lot of violence towards gay people. And I urge you … this is a time for compassion. There is enough hatred in the world. Leave gay people alone. We are just trying to be ourselves. Love is what it’s all about … and the Polish people have always been full of love.”

This weekend is my 60th birthday, 40 years since the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK, and yet sadly outlawed still in many parts of the world. I want to take this opportunity to shine a spotlight on William Hernandez, his colleagues and the many individuals who stand up for human rights around the world, at great risk to their own safety. People like William are far braver than I am, because when bigots shout abuse, he shouts back. With enough support, they’ll shout the bigots down.

My voice has served me pretty well over the years; I hope maybe it can do him some good too. But we need more voices. Whether the bigot is in our local pub or miles away, we should all stand up and speak out for basic human rights. I want to ask you, today, to add your voice. Go to the address below to sign up to Amnesty’s campaign.

· A longer version of this article appears in this week’s New Statesman

Hollywood y el mundo del celuloide son desinhibidos, pero dentro de un orden. Este año, la reciente ceremonia de los Oscar ha tenido como anfitriona a Ellen DeGeneres, una popular presentadora de televisión, que declaró abiertamente hace muchos años su condición de lesbiana. En los años 30, coincidiendo con el arranque del sonoro, el cine empezó a tratar -incluso de forma patente en algunas ocasiones- el tema de la homosexualidad.

Uno de los primeros ejemplos fue el personaje del gangster Rico , interpretado por Edward G.Robinson en Little Caesar (Hampa dorada), de 1930. Sin embargo, la tónica general del cine durante las siguientes décadas fue mostrar las inclinaciones homosexuales con extraordinaria discreción. Cómo no acordarse de las secuencias del patricio romano interpretado por Lawrence Olivier echándole los tejos al bello esclavo Tony Curtis en Espartaco, o las alusiones veladas de pasiones homosexuales en El halcón maltés o Gilda.

Era la larga época en que imperaba la autocensura y el famoso Código Hays, y en la que el borrador de un código moral de los estudios establecía que «el amor impuro no debe parecer ni bonito ni atractivo, tampoco debe ser presentado de tal forma que despierte pasiones o una curiosidad mórbida en la audiencia. En general no debe ser detallado ni en el método ni en el modo».

Afortunadamente, mucho han cambiado desde entonces las cosas. El año pasado, el público de medio mundo acudió masivamente a las salas de cine a ver la premiada Brokeback Mountain, y la Academia de Hollywood la colocó entre las cinco finalistas de los Oscar, siendo una película en la que el amor abierto -sin tapujos entre dos cowboys- aparecía como atractivo y era presentado en detalle. Y este año, la magnífica actriz británica Judi Dench ha sido candidata a la estatuilla como mejor actriz por una cinta, Notas de un escándalo, en la que representa de forma soberbia a una lesbiana.

Es éste de Hollywood otro mundo, pero incluso éste se sigue manteniendo dentro de un orden. La Academia no vacila en confiarle el papel de presentadora a DeGeneres -una de las protagonistas de Sexo en la ciudad, que anuncia que abandona a marido e hijos porque ha encontrado la felicidad junto a una mujer maravillosa-, pero los casos de admisión abierta de homosexualidad en el mundo del espectáculo siguen siendo absolutamente minoritarios.

Greta Garbo o Marlene Dietrich fueron en su momento consideradas lesbianas o bisexuales. Hattie McDaniel, la primera negra en conseguir un Oscar, interpretando a la sirvienta en Lo que el viento se llevó, tuvo un conocido affair con la devoradora de mujeres y hombres, la descocada Tallula Bankhead. Bastantes actores masculinos eran, dentro de su círculo íntimo, reconocidos homosexuales (Montgomery Clifft…), pero es un hecho que ninguno lo confesó en el cenit de su carrera.

El caso más conocido es de Rock Hudson. Fue una estrella absolutamente idolatrada por mujeres de diversas edades desde que hiciera un par de melodramas con Jane Wyman, seguidos del inmortal Escrito en el viento. El guapo Hudson fue el actor más taquillero en el año 1959, el segundo en 1960 y 61, y se mantuvo en uno de los tres primeros puestos hasta 1965. Algo sin precedentes en EEUU. Había que impedir que tal filón de oro, cebado sobre todo por el público femenino, es decir, los productores no querían que el éxito se esfumase con la revelación de su homosexualidad. Ante la posibilidad de que el hecho trascendiera, con efectos devastadores para el actor y la economía de las productoras, los estudios decidieron que debía casarse.

La lista de los actores que simularon ser heterosexuales por temor a las repercusiones de que se hiciera pública su condición homosexual es bastante nutrida (Tab Hunter, Sandy Denis). En realidad, y a pesar del progresismo de Hollywood, prácticamente ningún astro en la cima de su carrera ha admitido serlo. Ello a pesar de que ya en 1973 la Asociación Americana de Psiquiatría, de la mano de Judd Marmor, había votado borrar la homosexualidad de la lista de enfermedades mentales.

Es claro que la opinión pública y la taquilla dictan su ley, por ello Hollywood progresa, pero, insisto, dentro de un orden.

Los prejuicios son enormemente más acentuados en el campo del deporte. Ningún jugador en activo se ha atrevido en EEUU a salir del armario. Lo explica bastante bien el baloncestista retirado, John Amaechi, en el libro recientemente publicado, Man in the middle. Ahora que ya no es un deportista en activo, ha reconocido que es gay, y ha aprovechado su incursión editorial para narrar los problemas que encuentra una persona como él en la Liga profesional. El libro ha causado un gran revuelo en el país. Shaquille O’Neal, preguntado por la cuestión, ha dicho que si tuviera en la cancha un compañero gay trataría de protegerlo. Pero otro deportista muy conocido, Tim Hardaway, fue claro y rotundo: «No me gustan los gays ni quiero tenerlos cerca».

Este comentario lo excluyó de la fiesta de All Star. Sin embargo, la reacción de jugadores en general, y de la NBA en particular, ante el libro de Amaechi, ha sido de notoria frialdad. Le Bron James, cara conocida de la Liga, explica que «los jugadores viajan juntos, se duchan, tienen una relación de camaradería, se tienen confianza. Si eres gay y no lo admites, rompes la confianza; es el código del vestuario».

Ese código del vestuario fue, asimismo, lamentablemente utilizado para apartar a los negros de los deportes profesionales. En el fondo, lo que hay que preguntarse es si el ocultamiento de la condición de gay viene de un temor al vestuario o de un temor al público, si el comentario hiriente de Hardaway refleja sólo su pensamiento o un sentimiento extendido en el conjunto de la sociedad.

Además de Amaechi, sólo cinco jugadores estadounidenses han hecho pública su orientación sexual: los beisbolistas Burke -al que los Dodgers también quisieron casar- y Bean, y los futbolistas Tuaolo, Kopay y Simmons. Todos ellos lo han hecho después de retirarse. Como en el cine, nadie lo admitió estando en el candelero.

Pensemos por un momento en nuestro fútbol. Una plantilla tiene 22 jugadores. Presumiendo que la población gay masculina de España sea de un 4% -¿exagero o me quedo corto?-, nos daría que, de promedio, en cada vestuario hay, al menos, un homosexual. No descarto que, salido del armario, sus compañeros lo aceptasen, pero, ¿lo harían los hinchas? ¿Qué pasaría -y no bromeo- si uno de ellos, delantero de sustancial ficha, fallara un penalti importante? ¿O si a un defensa, asimismo gay, le hicieran un caño humillante precediendo a un gol? ¿Qué oiríamos? ¿Dónde llegaría la mofa si en un mismo equipo se alineasen dos o tres homosexuales?

Amaechi ha manifestado que no escribió el libro para purificar la NBA, sino para que «el defensa adolescente de un colegio no piense en que tiene que colgarse porque la sociedad no le deja asumir ser gay». El comentario tiene su miga: un estudio oficial estadounidense afirma que de los chavales y chavalas suicidados en Estados Unidos, el 30% es homosexual.

Demasiadas cuestiones para reflexionar hasta dónde se ha avanzado y lo que aún nos queda por avanzar.

Oh , the heart sinks! The Times revealed yesterday some radical proposals to reunite the Anglican Church — or part of it — with Rome. Twenty years ago this outbreak of ecumenicism might have caused unaffiliated Christian believers like me to cry “Halleluiah!” and whirl thuribles round our heads in glee: it is a scandalous absurdity, in an increasingly secular age, to have the loving simplicities of the Christian faith fragmented into squabbling cliques.

The obsession with authority structures and ritual quibbles always was irritating, so moves towards unity and cooperation were once welcome. One fondly remembers the twin bishops of Liverpool, Worlock and Shepherd, and their kamikaze attacks on the nastier aspects of 1980s market capitalism.

But this time, we know what it’s all about, don’t we? Not joyful, simplified Christianity but a pulling-up of drawbridges. Anglican archbishops in Dar es Salaam are struggling to avoid “schism” in their vast communion over the issue of ordaining, or indeed tolerating, Christians whose unsought orientation is to pair up with others of their own gender. And it will be the illiberal, genitally-fixated wing of Anglicanism that sidles towards unity with Rome. It will do this because it thinks — accurately, more’s the pity — that Rome is where you find the most intolerant attitudes towards homosexuality.

We have seen this crab-scuttle towards Rome before. When the Anglican Synod accepted women priests in 1992 numbers of high-profile Anglicans turned Catholic in disgust. The other theological differences — the Real Presence in the Eucharist, Papal infallibility, priestly celibacy — seem suddenly no longer to matter, compared with the horrible prospect of women priests. That weaselling flexibility was echoed by the way that Rome accepted Anglican priests even if they were married with children; meanwhile, lifetime Catholic priests continue to suffer (and sometimes give up) because of the strict enforcement of celibacy. Neither side covered itself with glory.

And now we have the threatened schism over homosexuality, and another drift towards Rome. For the detail of the leaked report — some of it, in fact, quite encouraging — I can only direct you to Ruth Gledhill’s blog on The Times website . For myself, as an irritable cradle Catholic on the run, all I can express for now is frustrated rage at both Churches’ incurable obsession with genital sexuality. It cripples every good intention, impedes every good work.

You can see why the obsession began. Nomadic Old Testament Judaism had to differentiate itself from ritual pagan and Greek practices; even so, translations of the interdict in Leviticus are uncertain. In the Christian era various earthy, bundling peasant values needed to be corseted and codified, as much for the sake of social coherence and property law as for any moral reason (priestly celibacy has its origins in the difficulty of providing for large Catholic families on priestly stipends: the theology is merely bolted on). Cruelty, snobbery, avarice and injustice have been tolerated (at times practised) by clergy and their cohorts, while sexual sins were berated with unholy glee.

It would be refreshing if the Churches would step back from this stance, and make it clearer that the evil in adultery is not the sexual act but the betrayal of trust, the cruelty, the endangering of children’s happiness. The deep wickedness of rape and paedophilia is not about desire but about misuse of power, invasion, oppression and injury. The sinfulness of promiscuity and prostitution is not about sex but about using another human being for transient pleasure without caring for the physical and emotional damage you do. The Church’s ministry to gays could preach only honesty, gentleness, and commitment, rather than agonising about genital practices. Christianity could just grow up, and stop treating sex as if it were innately toxic or radioactive and yet irresistibly interesting.

Science is trying harder than religion to make sense of the genuine mystery of why some people are hard-wired to love their own sex, in defiance of biological usefulness. From the study of gay penguins in Bremerhaven zoo to numerous psychobiological, genetic and neurological findings, we edge ever closer to an explanation of gayness: the conviction grows that being homosexual is not “unnatural” but just something that occurs in creation, whether we like it or not. The present Pope’s use of expressions such as “objectively disordered” is not only cruel, but unfounded in any solid fact. Nor is real homosexuality, as evangelicals love to claim, “curable”. You can persuade, inspire or bully people out of committing crimes, but not out of perceiving a particular kind of beauty, loveability, caressability and companionableness more in one sex than another. You can condemn people for doing bad things, but you cannot dictate where they will see beauty, a reflection of divinity.

Let the Churches concentrate on condemning promiscuity, infidelity, exploitation, predation — whether gay or straight. Nobody asks them to go the full Gay Pride, bathhouse-culture route; but let them recognise kindness and mutual support as virtues, and bless all honest unions. Let them condemn proselytising from either side, making it clear that there is nothing cool or clever about random sexual tourism, any more than there is anything evil in being born gay. It just happens. Being gay can, without doing any violence to the Gospels, be accepted as a potential route to holiness.

It won’t be. They’ll squabble and fudge and cling to their hierarchies and their terrors, and some will scuttle to Rome and Rome will feel smug. And the rest of society will sigh and turn away, thinking that Christianity has nothing to offer. Howl, howl, howl!

The issue of the Roman Catholic adoption agencies, and their refusal to arrange adoptions for same-sex partnerships, I find altogether fascinating. It involves fundamental questions of liberty, of freedom of religion, of European law and of political philosophy. In our collapsing political society it may prove to be only one week’s wonder, but it is important to think it through.

The dispute all starts with a European regulation — with one of those European incursions into British sovereignty that hardly one British person in a thousand was aware of at the time it happened. We think that we are free people, but 80 per cent of our laws come from Brussels, and cannot be rejected by the British Parliament or, indeed, by the British electorate.

If we do not like what Brussels decrees, there is only one thing that we can do. We can lump it. We certainly have no power to repeal it. Christopher Booker, who reports on European law very thoroughly, has told us where the story did actually begin. Brussels adopted a general directive, 2000/78, that gave a framework for equal treatment in “employment and education”. It outlaws any “discrimination based on religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation”. There is a feast of possible future litigation in those words.

Brussels was, in fact, rather more cautious than usual. Having in mind the Roman Catholic populations of Poland, and perhaps of Malta, where almost everyone goes to church at least on every Sunday, it added a clause stating that the EU “respects and does not prejudice the status under national law of churches and religious associations”. Brussels left the member states free to make specific provisions for religion. As a result, the Polish Government exempted Catholic adoption agencies from having to arrange adoptions for single-sex partnerships.

The British Government would have none of this. It chose to redefine “employment” and “occupation” to include the work of adoption agencies. It also chose not to exempt the Catholic agencies in respect of single-sex partnerships. This is a secular Government with a secular programme. It is also a Government that is very open to influence by lobbies. Rightly or wrongly, it is more afraid of the gay than the Catholic lobby.

The response of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, who are moderate men with a somewhat left-of-centre view of society, was to ask for an exemption. The Church does not accept gay marriages as valid. Ruth Kelly, the Minister for Equality and herself a Roman Catholic, did want to make an exception; indeed she still does. Tony Blair would have liked to support her; the Cabinet wanted a fully secularist policy, of a universal character, except in Scotland, where Catholic agencies would, reasonably enough, be allowed to refer single-sex partners to non-Catholic agencies.

There has been much talk of rejecting discrimination, although the civil partnership law itself discriminates in favour of gays and against family members and unmarried heterosexuals, who are excluded from the benefits.

The likelihood is that the Cabinet will maintain its position. The Catholic agencies, who do a very good job, would eventually have to close. Whose liberties will then have been taken away? Not the same-sex partners. They already have an advantageous position, which is not available to family carers or to heterosexual, but unmarried, partners.

Same-sex partners have the legal right to adopt, which is available through the great majority of adoption agencies. Their rights are therefore fully protected by existing laws, and will be reinforced when the Equality Act 2006 comes into complete effect. The people who will lose their liberty are, in the first place, the parents and families of children being placed for adoption.

Why do people go to Catholic agencies rather than to the more readily available Anglican or civil agencies? It will often be because they hope that children they can no longer care for will still get a Catholic upbringing in a Catholic family. That cannot always be arranged, but the intent will often be there. The Catholic Church does not accept single-sex partnerships. That is a matter of religious doctrine. One does not have to agree with it to defend its right to be stated.

No doubt the secular character of the present Government has reinforced its decision: There is to be no exemption. In its philosophical chain of thought, European ideas have played a guiding part. The historic basis of the English common law is one of pragmatism and precedence. Our law has been moulded over time to the shape of our English society. It represents the consensus of the English people over the generations. It has also been influenced by strong individual personalities, going back to the time of Henry II.

The philosophers of English liberalism have concentrated on the liberty of the individual, where the European philosophers have emphasised universal propositions. John Stuart Mill’s great work On Liberty makes his overriding concern for the individual absolutely clear. “If all mankind, minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

The Cabinet, less Ruth Kelly and Tony Blair, is trying to impose its will on the Roman Catholic Church, which has become the representative of liberty as such. I do not doubt that the Catholic hierarchy will stand up for themselves. They have the full support of the Anglican Archbishops of York and Canterbury. They deserve everyone’s support. The European philosophers are represented by the universalism of Immanuel Kant, who believed in the “categorical imperative”, which he defined in this way: “I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.” How English Mill seems; how un-English Kant was; how Kantian our human rights law has now become; how rapidly we are losing our liberties. Is it not strange that the weakest Government in modern memory should also represent the most insidious threat to our liberties?

Let a hundred flowers bloom, Chairman Mao once said to China’s repressed intellectuals, inviting diverse ideas. Sure enough, when the intellectuals obliged, Mao ruthlessly mowed them all down. Our rulers do not believe in diversity either, although they are constantly nagging us to join them in celebrating it. What they really believe in, on the contrary, is orthodoxy and they are increasingly prepared to enforce it. That is the alarming lesson of the uproar about Catholic charities and gay adoption.

For our orthodox masters in parliament and in the public services it is not enough that gay couples have the right to adopt children like anyone else. It is not enough that they do indeed successfully do so, with the help of various agencies and with public funding, like any other couple. It’s not enough that they have the right to have surrogate babies, too, like anyone else. It’s not enough that Catholic adoption charities are willing to help gay couples find other agencies to arrange adoptions, although they will not do so themselves. The orthodox want more. They want to force those who deviate from the new orthodoxy to recant and to bend their heretic knees to it publicly, or face excommunication.

The orthodoxy holds that gay couples should have the same rights as everyone else and that is the law, too. I subscribe to this part of the orthodoxy myself. I don’t know of any reason why gays should not make as good (or as bad) parents as straights and there are two lesbians in my extended family who are the parents of two happy girls. I hate Catholic and Muslim attitudes to homosexuality, although I believe they are entitled to their views, just as I’m entitled to mine. All that concerns the rest of us is whether these views actively harm anyone.

The answer is clearly no. There are plenty of places, starting with local authorities, for a gay couple to go to arrange an adoption, other than to the homophobic church of Rome and its charities. In fact it would surely be rather peculiar for any gays to turn to the church as prospective parents. However, some do. In a conversation straight out of Alice in Wonderland, the Bishop of Birmingham said last week that his agencies do place children with single gay people, but not with gay couples. The jaw drops at the folly of this position. One gay good, two gays bad? One parent better than two? One can only suppose it has to do with some sophistry about a single gay parent being celibate. Whatever the reasoning, the Catholic position on gays is untenable.

What’s more, I don’t think anyone should be given formal exemption from the law, as the Catholic church is asking in this case. It is and should be illegal to discriminate against gay people. However, there is (or used to) be a sensible British tendency to tolerance, which does not always insist on the letter of the law. In a very diverse society it is sometimes wise to turn a blind eye; there is a fine British tradition of fudge.

It’s a sort of acceptable wriggle-room; it’s offered to doctors who refuse on principle to do abortions, to doctors who ease people’s deaths, to Orthodox Jewish and Islamic butchers, to state schools where Muslim parents don’t allow mixed-sex sport, to state schools which accept children of one faith, to gay clubs which exclude straights, to black organisations which exclude whites (even in the police). This benign tradition has developed for just such a case as this, so that a private charity should not be forced to do something it thinks (wisely or foolishly) is wrong.

The significant words here are private and charity. There is an important difference between public and private, between state provision and private charity. Charity begins as a personal impulse, sometimes but not always linked with religion. It might be a determination to help street children, like Dr Barnardo, it might be a wish to raise money for cancer research, it might be a drive to support an old people’s club; all of these impulses are specific and of their nature discriminatory.

Barnardo was excluding adults, cancer research excludes other illnesses, the old people’s club excludes Asbo teenagers and so on. A charity and its donors are working to an end which, however good, is discriminatory, according to the beliefs of the well-meaning people involved. Since many charities are based on religious faith, their values are somewhat exclusive.

To try to change that is to try to destroy the charity. That is what is likely to happen to the Catholic adoption charities. The losers will be the most hard-to-place children, whom Catholic charities have an excellent record in helping. Those like Gordon Brown and David Cameron who want to make use of the energies of charity should be careful not to repress them instead.

I call them charities because they are not agencies of state. Increasingly, though, they are becoming so. For many years I have been involved with a charity for adults with learning disabilities, for some of those years as a trustee, and I have watched it being turned into a provider of services for the state sector and, in effect, an agency of state. It does excellent work, but its services and its clients are largely decided by local authorities. Its development has been both driven and restricted by the requirements of local authorities, who pay the clients’ fees and call the tune; the original pioneering ideal of the parent-founders, no longer politically correct, has been subsumed.

For some time there has been an orthodoxy in social work training and thinking; the result is that this orthodoxy is imposed, via social services’ funding, on private charities. If the Catholic charities are deprived of state funding by local authorities, they will have to close. That’s not blackmail on their side — the bullying boot is on the other foot entirely.

True charity is heartfelt and personal and for that reason may well be unorthodox, or even politically very incorrect. Charities should be allowed to do what they believe is right and not forced to do what they believe is wrong. Isn’t it enough they do good in some way, if not in all? The green shoots and flowers of charity are tender and very diverse; the state should not be allowed to mow them all down.

The issue of gay adoption seems to be peculiarly toxic in British politics. First it did for Iain Duncan Smith, marking the beginning of his demise as Conservative leader. Now it looks like doing the same for Tony Blair.

“Going, going, gone”, would be a good description of the Prime Minister’s authority. The atmosphere has changed markedly since Christmas. Mr Blair has taken to saying to colleagues “Well, I won’t be around for that”, when they discuss policy together. In return, they have ceased to defer to him.

Several ministers would have voted against any exemption for Catholic adoption agencies from the requirement to place children with suitable gay couples, had it come to the Commons. But there was no chance that it would. Mr Blair was forced to back down.

Even his closest consigliere, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, went on the airwaves to pronounce that no exemption was possible. Such an act would have been unthinkable a few months ago. The Lord Chancellor might have disagreed privately with the Prime Minister, but he would not have made it public. “Tony’s weakness is the issue now,” admitted a senior Cabinet minister yesterday. “You need somebody at the helm.”

Some also criticise the way the controversy has been handled. It was never discussed in Cabinet committee, let alone in full Cabinet. “Government by sofa?” I ventured to a minister yesterday. “More like government by taking fright, I’m afraid,” was the reply.

The last time the State allowed itself to be overruled by the Church, over the percentage of non-believers allowed into faith schools, there was deep resentment among Labour MPs. It looked as if the Government was caving in under pressure. They were not going to allow this to happen again — and particularly when the Church concerned was Catholic.

The amount of vitriol being whispered in Westminster corridors this week shows how shallowly buried are the old prejudices. “I’m not going to have some bloody reactionary German Pope dictate the law of our land,” said one minister. Another admitted, only half-jokingly, that his mother had always told him: “Never trust a Catholic.” And a third asked: “Where’s all the child abuse and paedophilia? In the Catholic Church. They should get their own bloody house in order and sort out the way paedophilia lies hidden.”

But this is not a strict division between Catholic and non-Catholic MPs. John Hutton, for instance, the Work and Pensions Secretary, is Catholic but he opposed the idea of the agencies being exempted from the law. Mr Blair is not Catholic, but often behaves as if he is.

Many Labour politicians now believe that the Church-State relationship should change. Expect the position of Anglican bishops in a reformed House of Lords to be more precarious than now. As one minister puts it: “We’re getting a sense of victimhood from the Church. But look at the House of Lords! They’re the Established Church. If they’re going to make what look like unreasonable demands, it’s going to be difficult.”

Oddly, had the Catholic position been more hardline, it might have stood more of a chance. But once Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Birmingham, admitted on Tuesday’s Newsnight that his agencies were happy to place children with single gay people, but not couples, his argument fell apart. Surely two parents are better than one? If single homosexuals are acceptable, why not a couple committed to each other? The widespread view was that he couldn’t have it both ways: either homosexuality was wrong or it wasn’t. Equally, Catholic agencies are prepared to place children with cohabiting heterosexual couples, even though the Church disapproves of sex before marriage. As one Cabinet minister put it: “If there was a religious principle at stake here, they sold the pass several years ago.”

The Department for Education, which is in charge of adoption, is convinced that a short transition period — say six months — would be ample to ensure that no child in the system suffered if any agencies did in fact close. Those on the other side of the argument believe it needs to be measured in years, not months.

The more liberal ministers claim that the disruption will, in practice, be minimal. People working for Catholic agencies will probably switch to secular ones. And anyway, the chances of a gay couple suing a Catholic agency and winning are vanishingly small. As long as the agency followed correct procedures, kept proper records and concluded that a placement was not in the best interests of a child, a court would be extremely unlikely to find against it.

So the best solution would be for the Catholic agencies to accept a transition period and begin quietly, perhaps in a secular guise, to accept the new law.

Will there be other political repercussions, though? Already MPs are murmuring again that Mr Blair should set out a timetable for his departure, as if that would settle matters. It won’t. We already know that he will be gone by October and, much more likely, the summer recess. Authority is hardly going to flow back to him if he announces an exact date.

There are still, though, the Scottish elections in May. The sectarian divide is greater there than in England. When two new Scottish MPs sit down together for the first time at Westminster, the first thing they ask each other is where they went to primary school — the easiest denominational marker.

Which is why, perhaps, Gordon Brown has said nothing publicly, or even privately to his colleagues, about the gay adoption issue. When asked by my colleague, Greg Hurst, what his opinion was, the Chancellor’s office replied: “That’s not a matter for the Treasury, as far as I’m aware.” Mr Brown is prime ministerial when he wants to be, but his instinct to run away from toxic issues is as strong as ever.

The dilemma that confronts Tony Blair and Ruth Kelly over the Roman Catholic Church and its stand on homosexuality has the making of grand tragedy. Conflicts of personal faith and public duty are the kind that appeal to French playwrights in particular — Corneille, Racine, or perhaps, more accurately, the ardent Catholic Paul Claudel. They would have warmed to the theme of a man and a woman, driven by deep convictions, confronting the harsh requirements of the State and its administration of the law. That they represent the State, and are indeed responsible for the law in question, makes the outcome of the final act a matter of high drama.

Here is the story so far. Both the Prime Minister and Ms Kelly, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, are supporting the Roman Catholic Church in its stand against new regulations that will forbid it from discriminating against homosexuals. Ms Kelly is a staunch Catholic and a member of Opus Dei, its most conservative sect. Mr Blair is married to a Catholic, and is a serial adopter of moral causes. So their instincts are to agree with Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’ Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, when he pronounces his outright opposition to regulations that would force the Church to accept the adoption of children by gay couples. There are other requirements, such as forbidding hoteliers to refuse accommodation to homosexuals, but it is the adoption laws that go the heart of the affair.

The cardinal has written to every member of the Cabinet saying that it would be “unreasonable, unnecessary and unjust” for Catholic adoption agencies to have to act against the teachings of their Church and their consciences by allowing homosexual couples to become adoptive parents. He has argued that the 12 Catholic adoption and fostering agencies, which between them account for almost a third of the harder-to-place adoptions in England, may have to close if they are required to implement the new laws. The issue is now urgent, since the regulations are due to take effect from April 6. In Scotland, where local authorities have, since Christmas, been allowed to place children with gay couples, the voice of the Church has been loud in condemnation. “We are descending into a spirit of immorality,” thundered Cardinal Keith O’Brien.

The Government, however, is committed to its Equality Act which, in every respect, is the embodiment of new Labour values. It forbids discrimination on the grounds of religion, belief and sexual orientation, and speaks of the “mutual respect for groups based on the understanding and valuing of diversity, and shared respect for equality and human rights”. As the minister responsible for equality policy, Ms Kelly should be its protagonist. It is up to her to produce the detailed regulations that will give the Act its force, and most other members of the Cabinet have indicated that they want to see them pushed through. A powerful group of backbenchers, led by Angela Eagle, the party’s vice-chairman, is campaigning for the implementation of the Act and against what is being described as “the Catholic tendency”.

They oppose, in particular, the idea that there may be an exemption clause for Catholic adoption agencies. It is one that Ms Kelly and Mr Blair favour, but it would take a determined stand on their part to push it through in the teeth of outright opposition from the Labour Party, and the humiliating possibility of defeat.

This, then, is where a full-blown tragedy would normally require the moment of catharsis — an action that occasions the downfall of the principal character in circumstances arousing pity and terror, with considerable backchat from the chorus. I doubt if Mr Blair will rise to the occasion — he has more than enough tragic denouements to deal with already. Ms Kelly, on the other hand, may. If her obligations to the Church outweigh her responsibilities to the Cabinet, then she may feel that she had no alternative but to keep the faith and resign. You cannot be both minister and one-woman opposition at the same time.

But what kind of message would her resignation send out? Catholic teaching on homosexuality remains intolerant, backward, illiberal and morally questionable. By insisting that it is a condition that is “intrinsically disordered” because it does not allow for the procreation of children, the Church places homosexuality outside the ambit of acceptable society. Even that wisest and most compassionate of Catholics, the late Cardinal Basil Hume, who explained that the term “ disordered” should not be taken literally, and who insisted that homosexuality itself was understood and accepted by the Church, was forced to concede that the homosexual act itself was “morally wrong”. Only if homosexual couples lived chaste lives, unimpaired by sex, could they be included by the Church.

That is as remote from reality as the Catholic position on abortion and contraception, both of which require a form of moral blindness to sustain them — no compassion for victims of rape, no understanding of the threat of HIV. It also militates against rather than in favour of the child, because statistics show that where gay couples are allowed to adopt, they are more likely to cope with those children who, because of various difficulties, have been the hardest to place. By excluding homosexuals from the adoption process, the Church’s agencies are closing off the humane approach to a fraught social problem.

When Ms Kelly decided to take her son, who has learning difficulties, out of his state school and have him educated privately, she was acting against her party’s orthodoxy in the interests of the child rather than political principle. She should adopt the same approach now, and, in the process, help to move her religion towards a more tolerant position. It might spoil the climax of an absorbing political drama. But it would be the right thing to do.

Media atheists are fast becoming the new best friends of fundamentalist Christians. For every time they write about religion they are doing very effective PR for a fundamentalist worldview. Many of the propositions that fundamentalists are keen to sell the public are oft-repeated corner-stones of the media atheist’s philosophy of religion.Both partners in this unholy alliance agree that fundamentalist religion is the real thing and that more reflective and socially progressive versions of faith are pale imitations, counterfeits even. This endorsement is of enormous help to fundamentalists. What they are really threatened by is not aggressive atheism – indeed that helps secure a sense of persecution that is essential to group solidarity – but the sort of robustly self-critical faith that knows the Bible and the church’s traditions, and can challenge bad religion on its own terms. Fundamentalists hate what they see as the enemy within. And by refusing to acknowledge any variegation in Christian thought, media atheists play right into their hands.

Fundamentalism was invented only in the 20th century. None the less, in their struggle for secular values, commentators such as Polly Toynbee are effectively handing fundamentalists the title of official opposition. In the context of the fight to extend anti-discrimination legislation to homosexuals, that’s a dangerous gift. For it grants the fundamentalist’s worldview unwarranted extra lobbying power with government.

Many Christians don’t believe homosexuality is a sin. Far from it. We think it’s a gift of God – a means by which many show love and commitment and compassion. This is not an eccentric view within the church. It’s also the view of the Archbishop of Canterbury, though, admittedly, he is insufficiently bold in expressing it. Indeed, a great many Christians are deeply committed to the sexual-orientation legislation. They would have no truck with those who want to ban homosexuals from Christian boarding houses or classrooms. But bigots who dress up in the clothing of faith are being encouraged by media atheists in the view that orthodox biblical Christianity is intrinsically anti-gay. That’s rubbish. And the only people who benefit from this line of argument are the religious gay-bashers.

Ignoring the fact that Christianity invented secularism, on these pages last week Toynbee described the row over sexual orientation regulations as “a mighty test of strength between the religious and the secular”. Christians of the loony right will have been nodding their heads in agreement. For the more fundamentalists can set up the disagreements concerning religion in terms of a Manichean struggle between the forces of God and “atheistic secularists”, the more troops they can summon to the defence of conservative Christianity.

The media generally made a great deal of Christians protesting outside parliament against the passage of anti-discrimination legislation through the Lords. And it was easy to be left with the misleading impression that all Christians oppose it. Not a bit of it. As the editorial in this week’s Church Times, effectively the Church of England’s trade paper, rightly complains, the “broad support for the Equality Act from the Church of England and the Board of Deputies of British Jews has been drowned out by a small group of conservative Christians”. It goes on to point out that “mainstream Churches do not share the views of the protesters, and the majority of Christians will have no truck with discrimination on grounds of this kind”. And thank God for that.

The religious are rallying by torchlight outside parliament this evening. In the Lords they are trying to strike out regulations in the new equality act that outlaw discrimination and harassment of gays, making it illegal to discriminate in providing any goods and services to anyone, from healthcare to hotel rooms. This is a mighty test of strength between the religious and the secular. Any peers against discrimination, get on down the Lords: the vote is at 7.30pm. Will the Tories prove to be gay-friendly?

Christians, Muslims and Jews are all fighting against the sexual orientation regulations with a wrecking clause that would render them meaningless: “Nothing in these regulations shall force an individual to act against their conscience or strongly held religious beliefs.” Anyone could use their “conscience” to discriminate against gays.

Get one thing clear: this law does not stop religions from banning gays joining their congregations or becoming priests. (Though they don’t seem to be very good at it.) But it does oblige any organisation or business offering services to the public to offer them equally to all comers. Bizarre and repugnant ads in newspapers from Christian organisers have spread outright lies about what this law does. Their campaign, strongly supported by the Daily Mail, has whipped up a degree of homophobia still lurking under an apparently tolerant surface. The gay rights group Stonewall has been horrified at the resurgence of threats and obscene abuse.

To make their case, the religious have struggled to think up extreme scenarios where the law might affect them, but each has proved to be wrong, as ministers have refuted them all.

They claim the law will “force all schools to actively promote homosexual civil partnerships to children (from primary-school age) to the same degree that they teach the importance of marriage”. No it won’t: the curriculum does not “actively promote” homosexuality, nor even make sex education compulsory. They claim the law will “force a printing shop run by a Christian to print fliers promoting gay sex”. No it won’t, unless the same printers promote heterosexual porn too. Or how about this one? “Force a family-run B&B to let out a double room to a transsexual couple, even if the family think it in the best interests of their children to refuse to allow such a situation in their home.” Oh no it won’t: it doesn’t even cover transsexuals – and what a daft scenario anyway. The National Secular Society has complained to the Advertising Standards Authority. But on and on go the prurient situations the religious homophobes dream up. The Christian Concern for Our Nation, petitioning the Queen, claims they “love their neighbours”, but “Christians, of course, earnestly desire the repentance and salvation of homosexuals”.

None of this might matter much if it were just about the strange practices in private of religious bigots. But faith groups already run and are bidding to take over many more social services. If they win this debate, free to discriminate as they please, they will prove themselves utterly unfit to provide state services or receive state funding.

Lord Ferrers in the last debate said hospitals should be allowed to discriminate if they had a Christian ethos. Does that mean they do now? Are they turning away gay Aids patients? He said a pro-life Catholic hospital should be allowed to turn away a lesbian for fertility treatment. (Though any non-Catholic turning to Catholics for fertility treatment needs their head examined.) The Catholic adoption society said it will shut up shop if it has to allow gay couples to apply. Churches say they will never let out a hall to a gay organisation. Christians running soup kitchens say they want to refuse gays shelter and soup. (Soup!) The Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool threatens to withdraw all cooperation over schools and charity programmes if the law goes through. The Bishop of Rochester says it will damage church work in inner cities. (Only if his church shuts down services.) The C of E pretends that the law would force it to bless civil unions (it won’t).

Listen to all these good reasons why the state should step back from its current infatuation with faith provision of social services. In a democracy, public services paid for out of general taxes can’t be held to ransom by the weird sexual fantasies of unelected service providers. These faith groups are now showing exactly why they should not be running an ever growing number of schools and academies. Homophobic bullying is rife in schools: 15-25 children a year kill themselves due to bullying, many, if not most, tormented because they are perceived to be gay. So why are we putting state schools into the hands of organisations that openly preach homophobia as a creed so holy it trumps all their other good works?

Recently there has been an organised upsurge of religions protesting at secularism. Nothing surprising about a fightback from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the rest against what they claim is militant secularism. That’s their job. The recent Guardian ICM poll showed 63% are non-believers, with 82% regarding religion as the cause of division. Fighting back on these pages, Tobias Jones intemperately called secularists totalitarian dictators pretending to be tolerant. However, secularists are not threatening to deny services to the religious: it is they who want to discriminate. Keeping the public sphere free of dogmas is not a denial of the right of anyone to act as they please – so long as they don’t harm others.

More alarming is the backsliding of liberal and left thinkers on religion. Neal Lawson, an atheist from leftist pressure group Compass, laid into secularism on these pages. He is right that many religious groups do good work in the toughest inner-city areas. But how depressing to suggest that moral leadership now only resides among the faiths. Indignation about social injustice may be lacking in politics, but today the faiths use their greatest firepower not to challenge gross inequality. No, what ignites their torchlit excitement is, yet again, other people’s sexuality. Given an ounce of power they abuse it to deny basic liberties. Last year, they rallied to refuse the right to die with dignity. Now they are back harassing gays. Religion may appeal to some on the left yearning for moral certainty in a complicated world. But today’s debate will be a sharp reminder of the intolerance and illiberalism that comes with it. Get on down the Lords for 7.30, you peers!

In the 21st century, we have decoded human DNA, we can examine the stars of distant galaxies and we have even begun to unlock the myriad mechanisms inside the human brain, but of one universally natural phenomenon we still know virtually nothing. That phenomenon is homosexuality.

When I was a teenager trying to find out how or why I turned out gay, there were very few reference books to help me. The phenomenon itself had been scientifically documented by the American social scientist Alfred Kinsey — but he proffered no explanation of its origins. It had befuddled Freud.

The scientific consensus had been laid out in the Wolfenden report in 1957, which solemnly concluded that homosexuality was “compatible with full mental health”. But the tantalising questions endured. Are people born gay? Is it genetic? Is it related to hormonal variations in the womb during pregnancy? Could it be affected by early childhood environment? Or is it a function of some other unknown factor?

We still don’t know. All we know is that it appears to be fixed by about the age of three. This lack of precision is partly due to the complexity of the phenomenon. Who knows whether sexual orientation isn’t multi-determined by any number of genetic, environmental or hormonal factors?

But our ignorance is also due to ideology. Neither the right nor the left has really wanted to know. Anti-gay social conservatives have long been uninterested in research that might prove the genetic basis of homosexuality — because it would “normalise” it. And the post-modern left insists that sexual orientation is socially constructed, and so scientific research is irrelevant. This politically correct right-left pincer has essentially slowed research on homosexuality to a crawl. Even now, a gay teen has barely more knowledge than I did 25 years ago.

Yes, there are some recently uncovered, tantalising genetic clues, gleaned more from the maternal DNA lineage than the paternal one. There are studies pointing to clear differences between homosexual and heterosexual hypothalamuses in the brain.

There’s a huge new volume of data about animal homosexuality, revealing it to be ubiquitous and complex. And as more and more gay people have emerged into the sunlight of public life, the range of their own stories has added to our collective understanding of what being gay, in all its varieties, can mean.

The trouble is: whenever science gets closer to figuring out the puzzle, politics intervenes. And so last week, Martina Navratilova and the usual suspects protested against new research on gay sheep being conducted at Oregon State University.

The researchers have been adjusting various hormones in the brains of gay rams to try to see if they can get them to be interested in the opposite sex. The indifference of many rams to otherwise attractive and fertile ewes is a drag on sheep-breeding, it seems. We don’t have any peer-reviewed studies yet, but reports of success in manipulating the sexual behaviour of some rams have led to an outcry.

The gay rams have a right to be what they are, Navratilova complains. She may be a little defensive about the breeding of farm animals — but you can see her broader worry. If you can figure out how to flip the gay switch off in sheep, how long will it be before someone tries to do the same in humans?

The good news, then, is that the empirical origins of sexual orientation are slowly being discovered. The bad news is that once discovered, they could be manipulated. There seems no likelihood in the foreseeable future of a hormonal treatment that could affect sexual orientation in adult humans. It’s been tried to no avail for decades — and once drove great men like the brilliant codebreaker Alan Turing to suicide.

But it’s not unimaginable to see scientific insight into the origins of animal homosexuality being abused if directed towards human beings in their first months and years. Maybe hormonal manipulation in utero could make homosexuality less likely in a sheep — or a child. Or maybe in the future, research like that being done now on sheep could be used to detect homosexual orientation in foetuses or babies — and prevent it. Why not, if that’s what parents wish?

The answer, of course, is an ethical no-brainer. Experimenting on other human beings crosses a bright moral line — even when that other human being is in your own womb. There is no medical reason for meddling with anyone’s sexual orientation, let alone in the crucial first months of a human being’s life. And the potential for all sorts of unintended consequences is huge. Most ethical doctors would abhor such practices. And rightly so. Laws could even be passed, and enforced, to ban them.

But what of the darker scenario in which we merely discover scientific clues to the origins of homosexuality in human embryos and allow the potentially gay ones to be selectively aborted? That, it seems to me, is by far the likelier scenario. In fact, we’d be naive not to expect something like it.

We already have widespread gender-selective abortion, with fewer and fewer girls being born in the developing world. And most parents across the globe are far more hostile to the idea of a gay child than of a daughter. Tests that could infer even a slightly higher probability of homosexuality in foetuses could lead to the equivalent of a “final solution” to the existence of gay people — the dream of bigots for millenniums.

In such a world, liberals and conservatives would be at sea. America’s religious right would have to make a choice between its goal of ridding the world of homosexuality and its strong opposition to abortion. Liberals would have to concede that genetics do indeed matter — and deal with the consequences. But how could they square their support for the right to abortion if it meant the deliberate extinction of a beleaguered minority?

Libertarian-minded conservatives like me would be equally conflicted. Who am I to tell someone what kind of child she can have if she wants to? Once I have conceded the possibility of legal abortion, and the rights of a woman to do with her own body as she sees fit, what case can I make against the potential of a quiet gay genocide — imposed and executed by parents?

The truth is: I don’t have such a case, and the combination of expanding human knowledge and human freedom can indeed be a perilous one. That much we already know. But the point is: it need not be. Science and morality are not necessarily at odds. It is not an insane position to support unfettered scientific inquiry into the origins of sexual orientation, while insisting at the same time on ethical norms that protect the dignity of each human person, gay and straight.

Scientific truth, after all, is neither morally good nor bad. It just is. How such truth is used is the question. With nuclear physics, we can choose between carbon-free power and Hiroshima. With jet airliners, you have the option of easy global travel . . . and 9/11. With ultrasounds, you can either lower infant mortality or permit a global culling of unborn girls. The scientific breakthroughs are morally neutral. What we do with them isn’t.

Maybe deeper scientific knowledge could even lead us away from moral dangers rather than towards them. A better understanding of foetal development, for example, might prod us to do far more to reduce the number of abortions, because we can see more intimately the humanness of the life at stake. Deeper knowledge of the emotions of animals can persuade us to alleviate cruelty towards them in farming.

Similarly, the natural origins and ubiquity of homosexuality suggest a deep evolutionary purpose behind it, which we interrupt at our peril. Knowing more, in other words, need not mean hating more. Complete ignorance of homosexuality gave us centuries of brutality, bigotry and murder. Could greater knowledge lead to something far more benign?

I’m prepared to live with that hope, along with the fear. Besides, I also simply want to know why I am the way I am. Wouldn’t you?

We’re all familiar with the headlines involving homosexuality. The names of Jim McGreevey, Mark Foley and now Ted Haggard have become known throughout America because of admitted or alleged homosexual “indiscretions.” We have not heard as much about their families. That’s where I come in. I understand something of what their families are going through because I’ve been there.

We all understand that reputations were ruined, careers lost and families hurt by these scandals. Apparently what we don’t understand is that we are all part of turning these disclosures into scandals. And our clucking and condemnation after they emerge, while a contributing factor, isn’t where our real culpability lies. The root of the problem is in our denial that gays and lesbians are as worthy and unworthy, flawed and gifted, as heterosexuals. The root belief that homosexuals are “less than” the rest of us stretches long and deep in this society.

Our condemnatory attitudes began in the latter part of the Middle Ages. Until then the Christian church in Western Europe, and thus the general culture, had largely tolerated or ignored homosexual acts. But everything changed when Thomas Aquinas and other religious writers labeled not only homosexual acts but all non-procreative sexual behavior “unnatural.” The Roman Catholic Church continues to promote this idea today, even though most critical thinkers appreciate the relational bonding, tension release and joyous pleasure that sexuality affords along with the possibility of procreation. Of course any practice of sexuality that harms, takes advantage of or demeans another person is wrong, no matter who is involved. Nonetheless, instead of dealing with this and other related issues in a straightforward way, many join the church in simply rejecting gays and lesbians.

Let me hasten to say that I do not intend to single out the Roman Catholic Church for criticism. For several years my own denomination, the United Methodists, has presented invitational ads on national television proclaiming the church to be one of “open hearts, open minds, open doors” while declaring in its Book of Discipline that “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” Thus the United Methodist Church, like many others, remains deeply divided over this issue.

It took the Catholics 171 years to accept Copernicus’s insight that Earth revolves around the sun. Today too many people are hurting and too much damage is being done to continue to wait for any church to step up and admit it is wrong about its condemnation of the “practice” of homosexuality. It’s time we did our own critical thinking and rejected outdated science and theology. For, ironically, the anguish of our rejection of gays and lesbians, as horrible as it is for them, affects us all.

I know this because I have suffered deeply as a result of America’s prevailing views about homosexuality. You have as well. I was married to a closeted gay man for 15 years, and we had three children before the truth of his sexual orientation emerged. The emotional devastation of that revelation and our subsequent divorce has been profound for me, my children, my former husband, our extended family and our friends.

I was fortunate to be able to move forward with my life instead of remaining, as one friend recently put it, “a puddle of violated humanity.” I remarried, became an ordained clergywoman and served the church for 25 years as a pastor, district superintendent and dean of the cabinet of the Northern Illinois Conference of the United Methodist Church. Broken relationships with family have been largely, if not totally, healed.

But many people are not as fortunate. They, and our society at large, miss out on the fullness of life that is tragically denied to so many because the rest of us don’t want to deal fairly and fully with such a difficult and embarrassing subject. Families are torn apart, careers ruined, gifts and graces underutilized, and lives destroyed. Thus, ironically, the anguish that gays and lesbians suffer because of their rejection isn’t visited just upon them, as horrible as that is. It affects us all.

This Election Day the citizens of our country demanded change by voting for different leadership in Congress. Now I would urge us all to seek actively to inform ourselves and change our attitudes about gays and lesbians. For only in this way will we begin to address the real problems that our condemnation has visited upon them, upon those who love them and, indeed, upon us all.

In recent years the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and Spain have recognised marriages between people of the same sex. Several other countries recognise civil unions with similar legal effect. An even wider range of countries have laws against discrimination on the basis of a person’s sexual orientation, in areas such as housing and employment. Yet in the world’s largest democracy, India, sex between two men remains a crime punishable, according to statute, by imprisonment for life.

India is not, of course, the only nation to retain severe punishments for homosexuality. In some Islamic nations – Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, for instance – sodomy is a crime for which the maximum penalty is death. But the retention of such laws is easier to understand in countries that incorporate religious teachings into criminal law than in a secular democracy like India.

Anyone who has visited India and seen the sexually explicit temple carvings there will know that the Hindu tradition has a less prudish attitude to sex than Christianity. India’s prohibition of homosexuality dates to 1861, when the British ruled the subcontinent and imposed Victorian morality upon it. It is ironic that Britain long ago repealed its own similar prohibition.

Fortunately prohibition of sodomy in India is not enforced. Yet it provides a basis for blackmail and harassment of homosexuals, and has made it more difficult for groups that educate people about HIV and Aids. Vikram Seth, the author of A Suitable Boy, recently published an open letter calling for repeal of the law that makes homosexuality a crime. Many notable Indians, including the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, have given it their support. A challenge to the law is before the high court in Delhi.

Around the time when India’s prohibition of sodomy was enacted, John Stuart Mill was writing his celebrated essay On Liberty, in which he put forward the principle that: “… the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant … Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

Mill’s principle is not universally accepted. The 20th-century British philosopher of law, HLA Hart, argued for a partial version of it. Where Mill says that the good of the individual, “either physical or moral”, is “not sufficient warrant” for state interference, Hart says the individual’s physical good is sufficient warrant, if individuals are likely to neglect their own best interests and the interference with their liberty is slight. For example, the state may require us to wear a seatbelt when driving, or a helmet when riding a motorcycle.

But Hart sharply distinguished such legal paternalism from legal moralism. He rejected the prohibition on moral grounds of actions that do not lead to physical harm. The state may not, on his view, make homosexuality criminal on the grounds that it is immoral.

The problem with this is that it is not easy to see why legal paternalism is justified but legal moralism is not. Defenders of the distinction often claim that the state should be neutral between competing moral ideals, but is such neutrality really possible? If I were a proponent of legal moralism, I would argue that it is, after all, a moral judgment – albeit a widely shared one – that the value of riding my motorbike with my hair flowing free is outweighed by the risk of head injuries if I crash.

The stronger objection to prohibiting homosexuality is to deny the claim that lies at its core: that sexual acts between consenting people of the same sex are immoral. Sometimes it is claimed that homosexuality is “unnatural”, and even a “perversion of our sexual capacity”, which supposedly exists for the purpose of reproduction. But we might as well say that artificial sweeteners “pervert our sense of taste,” which exists to detect nourishing food. We should beware of equating “natural” with “good”.

Does the fact that homosexual acts cannot lead to reproduction make them immoral? That would be a particularly bizarre ground for prohibiting sodomy in a densely populated country like India, which encourages contraception and sterilisation. If a form of sexual activity brings satisfaction to those who take part in it, and harms no one, what can be immoral about it?

The underlying problem with prohibiting homosexual acts, then, is not that the state is using the law to enforce private morality. It is that the law is based on the mistaken view that homosexuality is immoral.