Be Not Afraid, Ctd.

David Link finds Dreher's response to Damon and me underwhelming:

His second post asks whether gay marriage will strengthen same-sex unions or undermine the concept of marriage – a binary formulation that leaves unexamined the possibility that it might strengthen same-sex unions and strengthen marriage as well; or leave marriage unchanged in the minds and relationships of most heterosexuals.

Ta-Nehisi compares what can only be called Rod's Manichean panic to the racial-sexual panic that once defined opposition to African-American equality:

So you'd have some black dude who'd been born a slave, in some one room shack, but had risen to become a lawyer, arguing for, say, school funding for black kids in rural Alabama. And then you'd see some bigot responding with, essentially, the following, "If we give the nigras school funding, they'll take our women! Do you want a nigra marrying yer daughter?!?!?" I would read that and think, "What? The dude just wants some textbooks, WTF??"

There's this great riff in Wattstax where Richard Pryor talks about Southern whites accusing a black dude of raping some white guy's wife. The guy brings out his wife and says something like, "The nigger raped her!" The assembled black folks look at the guy's wife who, let's just say is not Scarlett O'Hara, and go, "You sure??" But in the white male paranoid mind, the deepest ambition of all black men lay between the two legs of some white woman--any white woman. And white women, of course lacking any real agency in the narrative, joyfully go along. Or are forcibly carried along. From that perspective, white racism really is a fear of a black planet--and (paradoxically) of white women.

Or to put it another way:

One could even argue that being black is queer. You're subject to arbitrary violence, you are over-sexualized, and there are legal structures put in place to deny you equal rights. That sounds like gay folks to me."

I'm working on my response to Rod. Stay tuned.