Fundamentalists raise bar of intolerance

Before post-WWII homesteading and the late-1950s oil boom, Kenai was an isolated little Alaska coastal village off the road system. The population of 2,300 was half Dena'ina and half assorted Americans, Scandinavians, and a few Filipinos and Russians. The economy centered on the fish canneries at the mouth of the Kenai River, which operated full-throttle in the summer. Life quieted down in the winter: men trapped, women sewed, the kids attended the American Territorial School and everyone visited and went to church on Sunday. Life was pretty much like every similar-sized Alaska coastal village.

There were only a few professionals in town: a marshal, the priest, a few teachers, the cannery superintendent, at least in the summer, and the public health nurse. The nearest doctors were in Seward or Anchorage so the bulk of medical care fell to traditional health practitioners or the public health nurse.

She did what public health nurses do. She checked children for proper growth, administered medications, reported the occurrence of communicable diseases, gave advice on care for infants and the aged and a hundred other tasks all undertaken without the immediate support and counsel of the team of health professionals normally available in a larger town. In her off hours she attended community events and in the privacy of her home she was a lesbian.

Nobody cared about her sexual orientation.

In a town of a few hundred everyone knew about her sexual preference but there was no ridicule, no shunning, no condemnation. No children were emotionally scarred by being exposed to a lesbian. Kenai did not turn into the gay capital of the North with setnetters in pink rubber boots and drifters pulling their nets in chartreuse feather boas, although that might have given the place a little more character. Because of her medical service, Kenai was a better place for her having been there.

Not that there weren't injustices during that era in Alaska. Those were the days when some store owners overtly denied service to Natives and both the American dream and social mobility favored white Protestant males. But if old Kenai is an indicator, intolerance of sexual preference was not a significant injustice in early 20th century Alaska.

How sad that it has come to the point that Anchorage has had to introduce an ordinance to prohibit discrimination against gays and lesbians, something that should not have to be legislated but should be common practice.

How did we get to this level of intolerance?

The most recent rise of homophobia coincides with rise of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, each citing Old Testament passages to justify their dogma. Granted there is a lot of wisdom in these second and third millennium B.C. documents, but they have little to say about gender roles and alternate lifestyles that has any relevance for 21st century America. For Christianity the New Testament message of loving one another seems to be left out of the fundamentalist homophobic agenda.

In the U.S. organizations like the now defunct Moral Majority and Focus on the Family have transformed homosexuality from an alternative sexual preference to a sin, something not all Christians agree with, and are primarily responsible for the atmosphere of intolerance gays and lesbians endure today. Homosexuality threatens the patriarchal model of an ideal family that Christian and Islamic fundamentalists espouse. Some strident homophobes are the very people most inclined to homosexuality but deny it the loudest, some from the pulpit, because their church has construed it to be a sin and they are conflicted.

In effect what the fundamentalist leadership has done is raise the bar of tolerance to exclude any lifestyle that does not conform to their highly restricted definition of acceptable behavior. That is a subversive thing in a pluralistic, polytheistic democracy. There needs to be more room for tolerance and acceptance and it needs to include our gay and lesbian neighbors.

The Anchorage Assembly would do the right thing to add discrimination on the basis of sexual preference to its anti-discrimination package. It would be another step restoring Alaska to a time like 1930s Kenai when nobody cared about anyone's sexual preference, only about what they contributed to the community.

Alan Boraas is an anthropology professor at Kenai Peninsula College.