This month, the Center for Inquiry will bring in a speaker who is both atheist and queer. What she has to say is just as important to the LGBTQ community as it is to the atheist community.
Greta Christina was recently ranked by an independent analyst as one of the Top Ten most popular atheist bloggers. As a regular atheist correspondent for AlterNet, the online political magazine, she has been writing about atheism and skepticism since 2005. Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, including Ms., Skeptical Inquirer, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the anthology Everything You Know About God Is Wrong.
As well, Greta has written for years on topics including sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBTQ issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. On March 12th, that will be atheism and how it can impact sex and sexuality.
This is important as most of us with a religious background contend with traditional religion’s sexual morality, which tends to be based on a set of taboos about what kinds of sex God does and doesn’t want people to have, rather than being based on solid ethical principles. While the sex-positive community offers a more thoughtful view of sexual morality, it often still frames sexuality as positive by seeing it as a spiritual experience.
However, according to Greta it still shouldn’t be. Instead, as she told me, "our sexuality and our sexual ethics need to be reality based." It’s similar to, but an expansion on sex columnist Dan Savage’s concept that sexuality between two (or more) consenting partners need be "good, giving, and game". It speaks towards our core ethical values and how it impacts our sex life.
Core human ethical values have been recently researched by anthropologists, neuropsychologists, and psychologists. As Greta told me, from this data we need to consider, "what are the ethical values that seem to be wired into us as a social species from hundreds of millions of years of evolution." Throughout the world and throughout history, humans have developed recurring ethical principles such as preventing harm, being fair and just, and being honest, for example.
While different people and different cultures prioritize some values over others, over all these values are applicable to all areas of our lives: politics, money, family life, friendships, employment, and the laws we create to govern our society.
Therefore, it makes sense we apply them to our sexuality too. "When we’re looking at sexual ethics we need to look at what are our ethics in all areas of life and how can we apply them to sex," Greta stressed. This includes things like: are we being willing and open to try new things, are we adding to pleasure and satisfaction in the world or are we detracting from it? Are we being fair with our partner? Perhaps most importantly, is there clear consent? "Consent is a huge area of sexual ethics and it’s one I talk about."
Besides discussing atheist sexual ethics, Greta will discuss how we can achieve sexual transcendence without a belief in the supernatural. "I think that’s something that’s going to be of interest to a lot of Queers because Queer religion tends not to be very traditional." By not traditional she means spiritual new age mysticism; what she wants to do is offer us a secular alternative which doesn’t deal in these quasi-religious symbols, all while seeing sex as still magnificent and transcendent.
I asked her if she thought the LGBTQ community, because of their open-mindedness, was a bit more sexually ethical – a notion Greta dismissed. "What I do think...queer people are less likely to make their sexual decisions by default."
Our community, she asserts, has had to "reinvent the wheel"; we’ve had to make up our own expectations of what it means to be a man or a woman, what it means to be a lover and a partner. In contrast, heterosexual folk have a set of expectations handed to them from day one detailing how a man should act, how a woman should act, and how the two interact. With same-sex couples, there is a level of communication required to understand the other partner’s position; consequently, our community tends to have a higher rate of sexual satisfaction.
This is not to say there aren’t expectations in the LGBTQ community. For example, Greta and I vented our frustrations with the expectations of past sexual partners – i.e. are you butch/femme; are you a top/bottom. Neither of us fit into, nor like, these labels and it’s irritating to assume we are one or the other.
Yet Greta does think in the heterosexual world – especially among the more cosmopolitan set – they are starting to break away from the expectations of what it is to be a straight male, or a straight female. She suspects it’s because of the mainstreaming of the queer community – as more straight people are making LGBTQ friends, our ideas are rubbing off on them. "The questioning of gender roles, the questioning of relationship status, questioning of what sexual relationships have to look like," are starting to make it into our culture as a whole.
In Greta’s experience, the heterosexual world is also starting to equal and surpass our community, not only in breaking away from set sexual expectations, but in their growing affirmation of atheism. "My experience as a Queer Atheist has been that the atheist movement has been very accepting of me as a Queer person...and not just accepting, very welcoming...unfortunately it hasn’t worked the other way around."
Greta finds the LGBTQ community tends to be uncomfortable with outspoken atheists. While our community has been shifting in the direction of progressive spirituality (especially progressive Christianity, progressive New Age religions etc.), it’s still leaving LGBTQ atheists out in the cold.
What’s worrying is a lot of the newer atheists are drawn from the younger generations. As someone who’s talked to young Queer atheists at speaking engagements, Greta has discovered both her and LGBTQ youth are getting the same message: atheists love the Queer atheists but the Queers want the atheist Queers to shut up. And this is alienating the youth. "I think it’s driving them away from the Queer movement."
Greta herself feels alienated by the Queer community, especially when she goes to conferences for the LGBTQ community and there is all this God-talk. She doesn’t want to silence these people, rather, she’d like to find a way for believers in the LGBTQ community to express their beliefs without making it the default standard for being Queer. In America, the mainstream is still staunchly religious, so as the American LBGTQ community becomes mainstream it is likewise adopting religion. Greta suspects some factions of the LGBTQ community have pushed religion to the forefront to be more appealing to the average American.
As well, Greta has experienced Queers themselves passing on inaccurate (if not bigoted) information about atheists. As Greta recounted some of the misconceptions LGBTQ people had about atheists, I had a feeling of deja vu, thinking wait a minute...isn’t this the kind of tactic the Christian right pull on the LGBTQ community? Often, as Greta told me, this comes from the same place – fear and ignorance: "...they haven’t bothered to sit down for five minutes and talk with an Atheist."
Sometimes these misconceptions can get downright insulting. Greta has even heard the accusation within the LGBT community that, without the guidance of a higher power, atheists have no moral directive.
"That’s so frustrating to hear that from people who are on our side. Especially because the atheist movement is so gay positive." She doesn’t mean just welcoming – lots of heterosexual atheist activists are passionate about LGBTQ issues. She knows straight atheists who were blogging about Prop 8 before she was. "They are a very powerful ally for the LGBT movement, and it’s very frustrating to see the LGBT movement treat us (atheists) as an embarrassment."
Strategically, Greta is worried about this attitude because as atheism grows and makes inroads – especially among the younger generations – the LGBTQ movement may shoot itself in the foot by alienating them.
Furthermore, to those who think that without God, humans would have no morals, Greta says, "Is that the only reason you don’t kill or steal, is because you’re afraid you’ll go to hell? If I could prove to you with absolute certainty God didn’t exist, would you suddenly kill me?" One would hope the answer to be no, as beyond religious belief, most people still have ethics and a sense of compassion. Yet the assumption is still, without the fear of punishment, we’d be terrible people – and Greta argues this is simply not true. "If religion is such a defence against unethical behaviour, why are so many religious people behaving so badly?" Not that Greta thinks religious people behave worse than Atheists, but they don’t necessarily behave better.
Granted, some of the resistance that the atheist movement faces may be specific to the United States. When preparing this article, I read news stories detailing how one soldier in Iraq was harassed because he admitted he was an atheist - this included ominous warnings that he just might catch some "friendly fire" one day because of his non-belief in a higher power. The atmosphere in the States is highly political, and for someone to state he or she is an atheist seems almost as bad as (or to some people, worse than) a declaration of one’s homosexuality.
Canada tends to be a bit more open and respectful of others’ opinions. If an atheist in Canada experienced the same bigoted reactions they would get south of the border, there would be a minor media outrage. Atheism is one more idea to challenge the status quo and call upon our society to rethink and improve.
As members of the LGBTQ community we need to remember we challenge the status quo on a daily basis...and that’s not a bad thing. Additionally, because of the wide variety of people in our community, we usually try to practise inclusion. Queer Atheists, much like most of our LGBTQ religious friends, act and behave just as good and just as bad as the people in the general populace. For the religious among us to assume everyone believes in a god is no different than the straight community assuming everyone is straight. No matter your spiritual beliefs, atheists deserve the same as anyone else – respect and equality.
Greta Christina will be speaking at the University of Calgary the afternoon of Saturday, March 12th – see the end of this article for details.