Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-1-2006

Rights

In Copyright

Abstract

The language of “moral values” dominates contemporary political debates. As currently constructed, this language offers little room for those of us who believe in full sexual and gender equality for women, for people who are lesbian, gay or bisexual, and for transgender and intersex people. Indeed, it offers little room for anyone whose moral values do not fit into the Religious Right’s narrowly contrived meaning of morality.

The authors of this paper believe in full sexual and gender equality. We understand these goals as a moral agenda. And we believe a Moral Values Project can help to bring about the agenda of sexual and gender equality. This Project would bring new meanings to the language of morality. It would demand moral legitimacy for a diverse range of political aims. And it would help progressives find and raise their moral voices.

The Moral Values Project does not seek to displace our existing political framework, with its rhetorical focus on concepts like non-discrimination, equality, and fairness. Rather, it would offer a moral vocabulary as a “friendly amendment” – an incredibly important one – to our traditional language of non-discrimination, fairness, and equality.

This paper articulates why and how LGBT communities should deploy, as an additional quiver in their bow, a moral discourse to create social change. Our hope is that the needs identified and the strategies suggested here will invite thoughtful response and creative collaboration and support. In particular, we hope that this effort will be viewed by movement leaders as the friendly amendment that it is – one designed to deepen our ideological commitments, broaden our political base, and expand our rhetorical reach.

The audience for the Moral Values Project itself is very different from the audience for this paper. Our imagined readers for this paper, and for the meeting that will be held to elicit responses to this paper, are individuals who already believe that sexual and gender equality are important goals for our society. They also already believe that our country is failing in its attainment of these goals and they are themselves actively involved in trying to foster sexual and/or gender equality through various legal, political, educational, and artistic means.

The audience for the Moral Values Project, by contrast, consists of people who are neither completely comfortable with homosexuality nor rabidly opposed to some rights for gay people. They are the people who, in response to poll questions, say that homosexuality is immoral but that gay people should not be fired from their jobs, or that civil unions but not marriage should be available to same-sex couples. They are the people who are living with some cognitive dissonance right now in their beliefs about homosexuality and gay people, and who need a little push to realize that full equality for LGBT people is a moral imperative.

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