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American novelist, essayist and playwright, born 1925
" Where the Catholic Church has dominated, there has never been a democratic society. ...I would not allow any religious group to have schools. And without schools, there would be no Catholic Church in two generations because their doctrines are so insane that nobody in his right mind would accept them. Then I would tax all churches heavily. That would reduce their influence by 90 percent. "
1974, The Gay Sunshine Interview
" If one had set out deliberately to invent a religion that would effectively enslave a population, one could not have done much better than Judaeo-Christianity. "
January, 1979, "Sex is Politics", Playboy
" Although the founders of our republic intended the state to be entirely secular in its laws and institutions, in actual fact, our laws are a mishmash of Judaeo-Christian superstitions. One ought never to be surprised by the intolerant vehemence of our fundamentalist Christers. After all, they started the country, and the seventeenth-century bigot Cotton Mather is more central to their beliefs than the eighteenth-century liberal George Mason, who fathered the Bill of Rights. But it is odd to observe Jews making common cause with Christian bigots. "
January, 1979, "Sex is Politics", Playboy
"...to ignore the absence of evidence is the basis of true faith."
November, 1981, "Pink Triangle and Yellow Star", The Nation
" Although there is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person, there are, of course, homo- and heterosexual acts. Unhappily, it has suited the designers of the moral life of the American republic to pretend that there are indeed two teams, one evil and sick and dangerous, and one good and normal and--that word!--straight. This is further complicated by our society's enduring hatred of women, a legacy from the Old Testament, enriched, in due course, by St. Paul. As a result, it is an article of faith among simple folk that any man who performs a sexual act with another man is behaving just like a woman--the fallen Eve--and so he is doubly evil. "
March 1985, Introduction to Tennessee Williams Collected Stories
"Despite the best efforts of theologians and philosophers to disguise our condition, there is no point to us, or to any species, except proliferation and survival. This is hardly glamorous, and so to give Meaning to Life, we have invented some of the most bizarre religions that...alas, we have nothing to compare ourselves to."
October 1991, "The Birds and the Bees", The Nation
"The monotheistic religions from which we continue to suffer are fiercely grounded on the only fact that we can be certain of: Man plus Woman equals Baby. This, for many, is the Natural Law. Inevitably, if unnaturally, natural lawyers thought up marriage and monogamy and then, faced with the actual nature of the male and the female, they created numerous sexual taboos in order to keep the populations in line so that the senior partners in the earthly firm could keep the rest of us busy building expensive pyramids to the glory of the Great Lawyer in the Sky."
October 1991, "The Birds and the Bees", The Nation
"Those who would outlaw abortion, contraception and same-sex while extolling the family and breeding are themselves the active agents of the destruction of the species. I would be angrier if I had a high opinion of the species, but I don't, and so I regard with serenity Pope and Ayatollah as the somehow preprogrammed agents of our demise, the fate of every species. Hordes of furious lemmings are loose among us; and who would stay them, particularly if they have the Book to throw?"
October 1991, "The Birds and the Bees", The Nation
"When people were few and the environment hostile, it is understandable that we should have put together a Book about a Skygod that we had created in our own image--a breathtaking bit of solipsism, but why not? The notion is comforting, and there were no Book reviewers at the time of publication, while later ones, if they wrote bad Book reviews, were regularly condemned to death by natural lawyers employing earthly hit men, as Salman Rushdie can testify. Then our Skygod told us to multiply in a world that he had put together just for us, with dominion over every living thing. Hence the solemn wrecking of a planet that, in time, will do to us what we have done to it."
October 1991, "The Birds and the Bees", The Nation
"...monotheism in the United States. That is the source of all the problems."
September 1992, Interview by Larry Kramer
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