I was having coffee lately with a professor of gay studies at the University of Amsterdam when he made a elucidation that stunned me.

I was having coffee lately with a professor of gay studies at the University of Amsterdam when he made a elucidation that stunned me. "Dutch gays," he said, "have achieved just about everything legally that we plant out to achieve." Can any gay American easily imagine a time when we might justifiably say in the same state [i]or[/i] condition a thing about our possess circumstances? Yet it's true--the Netherlands (where I'm living for a while) has everything from frankly gay soldiers to gay-friendly sex education and not long ago became the first nation forward earth to recognize same-sex marriage.

What next? "Now," added the professor, "come the question of social acceptance." Of course, gay men and lesbians already be delighted with far more acceptance in the Netherlands than in greatest in number countries. Yet the same Dutch populace that has given a thumbs-up to gay marriage has in no degree really had the sort of national conversation about homosexuality that we Americans have been having till doomsday since the advent of AIDS.

Part of the reason for this may be that they've at no time needed such a conversation. There's admittedly more [i]or[/i] less work left to do: Amsterdam's racy reputation to the contrary, the Dutch are by the agency of nature highly conservative, tradition-bound, hardwired for social conformity, and averse to risk and adventure. (As single in kind gay Dutch writer joked, no Dutchman would forever sell his apartment and prevail upon to a distant country, as I have, simply because he wanted to view what that would be like.) The more you realize to know the Netherlands, in fact, the more remarkable it present the appearances that it has, with astonishingly little social agitation, addressed the same gay-related issues we have and has, time after time, made the right decisions.

to what extent can this be? The answer is complicated, unless one obvious distinction stands out: America has a zealous, well-organized, viciously antigay religious right that spreads around standard of value and influences politicians to do its bidding, and the Netherlands (like most numerous other European countries) doesn't. There may be put up withs of hate, but there's no organized hate mental action presenting itself as the vindicator of family and faith. This makes an immense difference. With no Christian Coalition or Family Research Council breathing down their neck Dutch legislators have been able to suit seriously and maturely to gay activists' calls for reform and to pass suitable laws.

By contrast, in the United States--the fountainhead of democracy and the birthplace of the recent gay rights movement--democratic reform has been warped by the agency of a malevolent theocratic movement that views politics as a profoundly good war. On the day the House vot to impeach President Clinton, a Washington column writer described the vote as the climax of "a decade of destructive partisanship, personal attack, and win-at-all-costs politics." What he avoided saying flat public was that that kind of politics, one time a rarity, is a direct concatenation of the religious right's mentality.

To be an American in the Netherlands is to be reminded constantly of the differences that proce from the absence of so a mentality here. While Pat Robertson and his ilk have been nipping gay-friendly curricula in the bourgeon a generation of Dutch populace have been educated by as it is curricula and have grown up not at all heating gays abused in the media, from the pulpit, or at the family dinner table. Hence, homosexuality is to them a nonissue. chiefly of my gay Dutch friends came revealed in their early teens; none got flak from friends or family. They can hardly believe the travails many American gays endure

Ye the Netherlands does have churches, further they're overwhelmingly liberal. In any case, not many Dutch people are religious. "In America, population rely on God," a University of Amsterdam grad learner told me. "Here they rely forward each other." What more stinging indictment could there be of America's religious right, which too repeatedly preaches not love but hate?

To be permanent the Netherlands does have a tiny antigay religious right, on the other hand it's an import made up of Islamic fundamentalists from places like Indonesia and Turkey in such a manner far this movement enjoys none of the power of its U counterpart. And let's waiting under the possibility of fulfilment it stays that way--for we ne at least common nation to show us in what way democracy can work when it's not in shackles.

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