The Justice's Closet Case
A "Deeper Faith"
By Bob Elder, Fri., May 16, 1997
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Although the extent of his religious activities was known in some segments of the legal world, Gonzalez really sparked interest with his November 1995 speech to a Christian Coalition meeting in San Antonio. In accepting an invitation from the potent political faction of the religious right, Gonzalez took his place as the most publicly religious Texas jurist since Paul Pressler, the former Houston appellate judge who engineered the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in the late 1970s. "I am transparent," Gonzalez said after his speech to the Christian Coalition. "I acknowledge that this, my faith, is part of the mix."
From his first high court opinion in 1984, Gonzalez's religious fervor has permeated his writings, particularly when he sees an opportunity to write on abortion or when he perceives that Christianity is being denigrated. "Gonzalez, more than anybody I know, has been explicit in religious beliefs in his opinions," says Timothy Floyd, a Texas Tech University School of Law professor who has written extensively on faith and the law.
Gonzalez's Coalition speech was a little fundamentalist dogma and a lot of Bill Bennett, the virtues-meister whose best-selling books on values have become a conservative touchstone. Educators, Gonzalez said, give free condoms to schoolchildren because they view them as "animals in heat rather than children made in the image and likeness of God.... MTV and its Beavis and Butthead cartoon characters have more of a role than the family in forming children's values," he said.
Legal education has exacerbated the problem, Gonzalez told the Coalition. Led by Harvard University, which "discarded" its reliance on biblical principles, Gonzalez contends the mid-1800s age of enlightenment pushed scholars away from God and toward reason and the scientific method. Despite a plea for "spiritual warfare," the justice also called for tolerance. "Be aware that people of good will perceive things differently," he said. "...The evil in the world is committed by people who are absolutely certain they know what they are doing.
"Do not be so arrogant as to think that you and you alone have all of God's grace and wisdom, or that only you have the answers to very complex problems," Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez is the highest-profile judge to keep his faith in the public eye, but he's far from alone and, he maintains, "others are influenced more than they care to admit."
Texas, after all, is comfortable territory for fundamentalists, the judiciary included. Former Judge Pressler was such a fierce infighter in Southern Baptist Convention politics that former Baylor University President Abner McCall, no one's idea of a liberal, was moved to call him "an intolerant bigot." Other state judges have used Holy War campaigns to win election to the bench. Houston anti-abortion activist John Devine served a 33-day jail sentence in 1989 for his part in a Travis County abortion protest. In 1994, with abortion as his flash-point issue, he unseated Houston District Judge Eileen O'Neill, who had become prominent for her handling of a civil suit related to protests at a Houston abortion clinic, when she fined anti-abortion activists heavily and restricted their protests. And Judge Cynthia Stevens Kent of Tyler, an outspoken judge with ties to the religious right, has twice come close to convincing the State Bar's judicial section to overturn anti-discrimination language in the Code of Judicial Conduct. Kent argues that the language could stifle conservatives who are morally opposed to homosexuality.
Hot Topic: Abortion
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But whenever a case gives Gonzalez an opportunity to write about abortion, he grabs it. Two cases, 11 years apart, stand as bookends for Gonzalez's writings on the issue: In his first opinion after joining the court in 1984, Gonzalez ranted about abortion's contribution to a "disposable society." The case, however, was not directly about abortion; it was a wrongful life suit brought by parents who alleged that a physician was negligent when he told them their child was not a genetic carrier of a muscular dystrophy gene. The case prompted Gonzalez to write that such issues meant that "a merger of our concepts of morality and law is unavoidable." He closed with: "Hopefully the pendulum of public opinion will swing toward the recognition of the rights of the unborn."
In June 1995, Gonzalez again strayed from the issue at hand -- a suit over whether a woman who lost a fetus could recover for mental anguish caused by alleged medical malpractice -- to state his belief that "It is beyond dispute that human life begins at conception." The judge's evidence
was a 1965 Life magazine photo essay. Justice Gonzalez maintains that he keeps separate his religious beliefs and his judicial duties. This is, at best, debatable under ordinary circumstances, especially when the issue before the court even comes close to right-to-life matters. It is hard to see, however, what harm can come from such judicial writings. Gonzalez is, after all, only one of nine votes, and he says he feels "freer" to express religious views when he is dissenting in a case.
Gonzalez's crusade on behalf of Focus on the Family, and particularly PFOX, is a different matter. Hoping to trade on his position as a public figure, the justice and his wife have established an Austin chapter for PFOX, which was formed as a sort of counterpoint to the more established PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). PFLAG advocates acceptance of homosexuality and believes, with all good reason, that attempts to "cure" gays and lesbians can result in emotional damage.
On the other hand, groups like Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, and PFOX, among others on the religious right, are as responsible as any entity for the contempt and hatred many Americans feel toward gays and lesbians. Despite wrapping their message in terms of acceptance and love, the premise is that homosexuality is wrong -- and can, with enough faith, be remedied. These groups bolster their arguments for "conversion" with psuedo-science about the origins of homosexuality and the nature of gays and lesbians themselves. Starting in the 1950s, anti-gay psychoanalysts have recommended a course of study, faith, and prayer to make an admittedly arduous transition to heterosexuality. The religious right umbrella includes dozens of ministries that claim to have converted thousands of gays, yet these groups rarely address the fallout from these efforts -- the gays and lesbians who say their lives were severely damaged by "therapy" that boils down to brainwashing.
Focus on the Family's publications condemn homosexuals for "preying" on today's "confused" and vulnerable youth. The group's founder, James Dobson, is fond of quoting a study that shows -- so he claims -- that of "2,000 cultures that have existed in world history," only 55 contained a "blurring of masculinity and femininity.... Not one of those unisexual societies survived for more than a few years," Dobson warned. (The gay-to-straight theories and histories are in line with the rest of the religious right's scientific work in areas such as creation science -- one example of this is the recent book "Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study," which includes three chapters that purport to demonstrate how Noah got rid of animal excrement on the ark.)
Coming Out, Going Back In
It's always tricky to wade into a family's debate over faith and homosexuality. In a 1994 interview with National Public Radio, Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God, a terrific study of the three dominant monotheistic religions, warned that "God-talk is always impossible.
"And one of the things I discovered while researching my book was how endlessly monotheists remind us that we cannot talk about God in simplistic terms," said Armstrong, a former nun. "If we start talking about God as though we know exactly what `he' thinks and approves of, and what `he' forbids and condemns, it's all too easy to simply make God a projection of our own prejudices and get him to give a divine stamp of approval to our own limited conceptions."
For many gays and lesbians of faith, there is an inherent tension between sexuality and beliefs, just as there is for many heterosexuals. Religious right groups exploit that tension by hiding their true message.
The Gonzalezes portray their message of homosexuality and Christianity in benign, loving terms: "Homosexuals are no different than anyone else," says the justice. "They're people that we need to give dignity and worth and respect and tolerance... We as a church ought to do everything we can to fight hate crimes. To be a homosexual is not a sin. The behavior is what we condemn." Raul Gonzalez says he is a "recovering homophobe," and blasts his church, and all churches, for its intolerance toward homosexuals.
Jaime agrees his father has made progress. "He used to look at a lesbian couple and scoff. He'd say, `Who's going to hold the door for whom?'" Jaime says.
But here's the rub: "The behavior is what we condemn." Jaime Gonzalez says he is following that dictum. He considers himself a homosexual, but one who now leads a "chaste, celibate life," and a person who some day might be on his way to heterosexuality. The PFOX conference, he says -- the love and acceptance he felt from members he had expected condemnation from -- transformed him into someone who is at peace with God, despite his homosexuality.
What kind of faith motivates a lay person to -- if not deny who he is -- then to exist in a middle ground in which no intimacy can exist? The Gonzalezes say that middle ground can exist for gay and lesbian Christians. Father and son both say that their belief is in the inerrancy of Scripture and the Roman Catholic Church's teachings that homosexuality is a sin.
Yet neither wants to debate theology. They can't debate, because to hew to the literal meaning of the Bible leads down some scary Old Testament paths: not only death for homosexuals, but death for a long list of sinners -- a child who curses his parents, adulterers, a person who works on the Sabbath. The oft-quoted story of Lot, the righteous resident of Sodom who rescues messengers from the men of Sodom, has a disturbing outcome: to stave off the mob, Lot offers them his virgin daughters, who are gang-raped.
In the family's op-ed piece, Justice Gonzalez on the one hand condemns the "lack of love and the repeating of negative stereotypes" about homosexuality. Such "hate and hostility" is "not scriptural," he writes. But his answer is to advise the church to judge a number of other sins to be as great a threat as homosexuality: "We have erroneously made practicing homosexuality as the greatest of all sins," he says. "The truth is that it is not more sinful than adultery, fornication, or divorce and remarriage, yet we rarely hear about those sins."
Jaime, who works as a legal assistant at an Austin law firm and plans to enroll at Texas Tech University School of Law this fall, says he is troubled by that part of his father's argument, and by much of the rhetoric of anti-gay groups. Yet, he says, "The Bible says we should stand upright before God."
Jaime says he and his father have had many discussions lately about Jaime's childhood and how Raul was busy building a career and not at home enough for his children (the Gonzalezes have four children). Jaime says the PFOX conference taught him that that is one reason he is a homosexual; no surprise there -- the absent-father argument is a canard usually dragged out by anti-gay groups. The father-son relationship was also strained by Jaime's lack of interest in sports and, the son says, by his reserved nature. Jaime didn't fit what his father wanted -- he wasn't rough-and-tumble, he didn't have a swagger. He had no machismo and that, Jaime says, left him feeling out of place in his family and in the culture at large. Jaime says that when he and his father returned to Austin after the PFOX meeting, they had another heartfelt talk while waiting at baggage claim. They spoke of Raul's lack of attention when Jaime was young. Jaime says his father apologized, they hugged and dissolved into tears.
As Jaime describes it, it was an important moment of reconciliation. But for that moment to have occurred, Jaime first had to submerge his homosexuality to meet the demands of his faith. The family's story seems to be about acceptance, but with some very heavy conditions attached.
Bob Elder is a senior editor and columnist for Texas Lawyer.
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