You can't be an underdog if all you do is win: How Tim Tebow undercuts Rick Perry's Culture War nonsense →

Here’s a variation on the old theological question about whether God could make rocks so heavy that he couldn’t lift them: Could you have an overwhelmingly privileged segment of the population so utterly unrestrained by anyone else in the country, and so capable of doing anything that it wants, that it can even declare itself an oppressed minority?

This is the question that first occurred to me after watching Rick Perry strut around in Heath Ledger’s Brokeback Mountain jacket to complain about how icky gay people have more rights in America than good, old-fashioned Christian schoolchildren whose interlocked prayer hands are being pried apart by secular humanist teachers. You’ve seen the ad by now, and probably the parodies that followed. “There’s something wrong in this country,” Perry smirks, yanking the “oppressed minority” badge off of the 30-40% of gay and lesbian students in America who’ve attempted suicide,  and placing it firmly on the 76% of them who identify as Christian. After all, they have to hear school officials acknowledge the existence of people who celebrate other holidays that occur this time of year.

It’s a neat trick, and one that he — and his fellow culture warriors — are able to pull off by virtue of having their voices amplified and opinions taken seriously precisely because they’re not members of an oppressed minority.

But that’s the thing about the Great American Culture War: Everybody likes to feel like a victim, and there’s no way to actually keep score. Except, with Tebow, there is.

In this week’s Down And Distance column, it’s time to talk about how Rick Perry and Tim Tebow are actually at odds in the Great American Culture War.

The only time it’s okay for a straight person to try to out a gay person is when that person has signed the Defense Of Marriage Act into law.

That was my argument, anyway, a few years ago. I was reminded of a particular bit of personal history by this article on Huffington Post, which I saw linked around a bit after the rumblings of Michelle-Bachmann’s-Husband-gate. It’s about will-he-or-won’t-he Republican Presidential candidate and Texas governor Rick Perry, and the potential for the rumors about his sexual orientation that flared up down in Austin in 2004 to come rarin’ back in the light of a Presidential campaign.

Back when those rumors were fresh, I was a 23 year old unemployed performance poet living in Austin with too much time on my hands, a burgeoning interest in political activism-as-street theater, and an immature sense of humor. I’d had some surprising success combining those things in January of 2004, and talking with a friend a few weeks later, we got on the subject of the Rick Perry rumors. They were potent, but no one was reporting them, because they were rumors — it would be half a decade before I would start working as a journalist, but I understood that a reporter couldn’t write a story about the fact that there were unsubstantiated rumors. I knew they could, however, write about a big group demonstration outside of the Governor’s Mansion encouraging the governor to stop living in shame and be open about who he was. So we organized one.

The hook was that we were going to be extremely supportive of Governor Perry. This was not a “get out of our Capitol, homo” protest. This was a group of people coming together to say that, if the Governor of Texas was living in the closet, he could come out and it would not change our perception of who he was. That was important to me, because the way that same-sex political scandals are usually framed, there’s a strong gay=bad undertone. We wanted Rick Perry to be fabulous.
This was early 2004, mind you, so the event was organized via the nascent social media of the day — Friendster and LiveJournal, mostly. Austin had a thriving general-interest LiveJournal community, and the post there got a lot of interest. Some people started arguing with me that it was unfair and mean-spirited, that if Rick Perry really were gay, that was his business and coming out was a private, personal thing. That’s when I made the determination that straight folks had no business attempting to out gay folks, unless the person in question has also signed a DOMA bill. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but it felt right at the time. I figured if he were a gay hypocrite who signed DOMA, then he deserved the truth to come out. And if he were a straight asshole who signed DOMA, then he deserved whatever shit came his way.

Because I was the one who posted this on LiveJournal, I became the public face of the event. My LiveJournal wasn’t under my full name (I was “mysterywhteboy,” with no “i” because that was already taken, named after the Jeff Buckley live album), but enterprising media people from Austin, and then around the state, and then nationally, figured out who I was and my cell phone number pretty quickly. I got at least a dozen phone calls the Sunday that I posted the call to action. The demonstration was set for Monday morning. It was educational — clearly, the media was pretty horny for this story. They asked me all sorts of questions I had no answers to — how many people would be there? What did we expect to accomplish?
I got a second education on Monday. Because while all of those reporters were so psyched about getting the chance to report on the hundreds, maybe thousands, of demonstrators who’d traveled from as far as Mexico and Canada to urge the Governor to come out of the closet — our numbers were pretty meager. Maybe 20 of us showed up? Mostly just my friends, and then some folks from Code Pink and a couple of gay and lesbian organizations. Quickly, the reporters who couldn’t wait to talk to me on Sunday night decided that I was a big asshole for making them get up early on Monday morning. (This article from the Austin Chronicle, which disdainfully declares that we were outnumbered by the reporters and photographers, about sums it up. None of the outlets who covered it were introspective enough to reckon that if the demonstrators were dwarfed in number by the media, that might say more about them than it did about us.)

But it was fun! The now-defunct Texas Triangle, Austin’s gay and lesbian magazine, liked us, and we stood around chanting things about acceptance and loving yourself for who you are, which isn’t a terrible way to spend a morning, under any circumstance. By coincidence, that same morning President Bush announced that he’d be seeking a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, so it all felt very timely. Some papers, like the Chronicle, overcame their disappointment and spun off of the demonstration to cover the rumors in print. TV news framed us as a protest against the constitutional amendment, which we were all comfortable with, as well.

And now that Governor Perry is considering leaping into a much larger spotlight? I suspect that when these rumors resurface, it won’t just be some jag-off kids who are trying to make a point about it, and whoever brings it up is going to be a lot more sophisticated than we were. Really, they would have to be.