Mar 25, 2005  |  By: Johanna Lunglhofe  | COMMENTS     

THE LATEST BOOK by Richard D. Mohr, a gay professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois-Urbana, is a clever and insightful explanation of how and why political and social conservatives opposed to gay civil rights are wrong about gay and lesbian issues.

But sometimes the book, “The Long Arc of Justice: Lesbian & Gay Marriage, Equality, & Rights,” is debatably too clever for its own good.

Mohr’s arguments feel tricky and even distracting at times, although in the end, they support his position well. The peculiar and colorful analogies scattered throughout the text are accessible and interesting, but generally more memorable than the author’s conclusions.

FOR EXAMPLE, MOHR points out that derogatory slurs fall into several categories, including those that refer to a person’s actions and those that refer to their social/cultural status. He draws this distinction to advance the argument that gay people, especially gay men, are called names that point out their place in society, rather than their actions. Examples of these slurs include “pansy,” “fruit,” and “fruitcake,” terms most likely heard among much older generations.

Mohr intends to demonstrate that gay men do not exhibit any actual, behavioral similarities to the images these insults literally denote. He points out that people who use these “vegetative” slurs would probably realize the literal absurdity of comparing man with fruit, a flower, or a holiday dessert if only they bothered to think about it.

One of several underlying problems is that people using slurs like these often fail to consider how the metaphor gay-man-as-fruit affects the place of all gay people in society. With this in mind, Mohr argues that the origin of anti-gay sentiments is both elusive and illogical.

“Stereotypes and [other] hostile attitudes toward gay men and lesbians are not so much the effects of misperceiving … of getting lesbians and gays wrong, but more so are what causes the misperception of them, and in turn the mistreatment of them,” he writes.

From this it follows that in America, “Real [straight] men are unassailable,” Mohr writes. “Their antipode down at the bottom of the human heap is vegetable existence — pansies, fruits, and the physically challenged, who, like gay men, are also typically … demoted with vegetative slurs.”

The point of this passage is easy enough to grasp, and the argument’s contents are familiar to most. But Mohr goes on to spell everything out in a concise, if lofty, conclusion: “All of [these slurs] derive from the cosmic order ‘vegetable,’ and vegetables don’t do anything.”

In a subsequent passage, Mohr highlights the absurdity of denying parents’ rights to gay men and lesbians in child custody cases with a more resonant but equally colorful analogy.

“No one would seriously suggest that a fat mother or a Mormon mother should lose custody of her child because the child’s friends might well tease the child about her mother’s size or religion,” he writes.

Throughout the book, Mohr makes his points well. But then he makes one chuckle by elaborating about entertaining images like animate vegetables and fruitcake. The flaw is a particularly unfortunate one, since the quest for gay and lesbian rights isn’t very funny.

“The Long Arc of Justice” isn’t going to change the world, but people who read and understand it will be better equipped to do so.