Who's Oppressing Whom? Homosexuality, Christianity, And Social Work (Points & VIEWPOINTS)

Hodge's (2005) article, "Epistemological Frameworks, Homosexuality, and Religion: How People of Faith Understand the Intersection between Homosexuality and Religion," asserts a mutually exclusive irreconcilable worldview that will always separate Evangelical Christians and the gay and lesbian community. Despite Hodge's stated motives to increase tolerance of diversity, his deceptive arguments could potentially aggravate the hostility that already exists between some Christians and members of sexual minority groups. Hodge makes his assertions using certain frameworks and concepts to set the terms of the discourse in a preferred and skewed manner. Through a seemingly reasoned discourse, Hodge attempts a specious argument that people of faith are oppressed within the social work profession, the greater community, and most particularly by the gay and lesbian community. It is distressing that many of the problems with Hodge's writings continue despite having been addressed by others. These problems include incorrect definitions (Bennett, 2003), misquoting or misinterpreting sources (Canda, 2003; van Wormer, 2003), methodological issues, and use of outmoded frameworks (Liecthy, 2003). We will not attempt to deal with every fallacy, tautology, and misrepresentation in the article. Rather, we focus our critique of Hodge's work on four areas: (1) its erroneous definition of oppression; (2) unsubstantiated and monolithic generalizations about the beliefs of Christians; (3) its unfounded claims of oppression of Christian people; and on the bases of (4) freedom of speech, academic discourse, and social work ethics. Hodge's article brings to mind another instance of recasting history and social conflict; that of the "revisionist historians" more accurately called Holocaust deniers. Shermer and Grobman (2000) accurately renamed these individuals deniers of historical facts, not revisers. More importantly these authors, although noting the understandable outrage experienced by many Holocaust survivors and legitimate historians, insist that the critical issue is one of free speech. They respond with a careful analysis and deconstruction of what appears to be objective and scholarly. Their willingness to give deniers an authentic hearing is in the service of being able to deconstruct the false claims of individuals advancing a political agenda under the guise of scholarship. In like manner, we present our response to selected aspects of Hodge's article.