(Il)legitimate Minorities: The American Christian Right's Anti-Gay-Rights Discourse

Abstract

The American Christian Right (CR) has made an anti-gay politics central to both its world-view and immediate political agenda. What I hope to do in this paper is explain and analyse one dimension to this politics: the ways in which the CR constructs lesbians and gay men vis a vis its construction of what it ostensibly argues are 'true' or 'real' minorities deserving of rights. I hope to show, however, that this construction of the 'real' is itself very wobbly; in other words, I will argue that the CR's rights rhetoric is contradictory and ultimately quite problematic for them.1 At the same time, there may be more than a few grains of truth to the CR's understanding of social life, and also to its characterization of the lesbian and gay movement. If lesbian and gay movements ever hope to 'win the centre', these truths may need careful consideration. The paper is primarily a discourse analysis of several CR texts, including material from interviews I conducted with CR activists in 1994/95. In the concluding section, I address my remarks more directly to the question of lesbian and gay rights strategy. I first explore how one section of the CR those I term the 'rights pragmatists' have articulated powerful, secularized arguments to construct lesbians and gay men as a minority undeserving of rights. In considering this development, my argument is two-fold: first, that this newer discourse, and its accompanying retreat from older rhetorics of disease and seduction, has caused palpable tensions within the Christian Right. Second, in order to represent one group as 'counterfeit', others must be constructed as