Devil may care Bush’s call to ban gay marriage and Gibson’s Passion: Two angry pieces of stagecraft whose creators disguise fear and confusion as faith and profundity BY MICHAEL JOSEPH GROSS

TWO WEEKS AGO, President Bush announced his support for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. The following day, many of the people whose hearts were lifted by the president’s remarks went to the movies. Thanks in part to advance ticket purchases organized by church groups, gross receipts for the five-day opening of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ were the second highest in Hollywood history.

The proposed amendment and The Passion evoke similar feelings of gratification in their audiences because they arise from similar impulses. Both are angry pieces of stagecraft whose creators disguise fear and confusion as faith and profundity. And — although this aspect of The Passion has received scant notice so far — both productions exploit their target audiences’ fear of gays with inflammatory specters of sin and evil.

The president’s most forceful argument for the amendment was that "marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious, and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society." His speech made no effort to explain the possible weakening of society’s "good influence"; and he dismissed without engaging the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision that focused the nation’s attention on this issue. Bush’s superficial showmanship climaxed with a subtle affirmation of religious bigotry, since it is usually the Vatican and Christian evangelical leadership, not the White House, asserting that gay love is not "natural."

These remarks cast the fight to amend our national Constitution as a drama, not a debate. In that drama, the president attempted to cast himself as the guardian of law, tradition, and righteousness. But his speech merely trafficked in fear. Bush ignored the substance of the issue he purported to discuss, and he deliberately fomented the outrage of fundamentalist voters who believe that gays should be barred from marriage because they are sinful.

With The Passion, Gibson, too, has produced a show that cunningly deploys fear of gays to reassure conservative Christians of their own righteousness. The script’s anti-Semitic messages have been detailed by writers such as Christopher Hitchens, who recently argued in Slate that The Passion relies for its effect on a fascistic spectacle whose components include "a hatred of silky and effeminate Jews."

The most effeminate character in Gibson’s gospel, however, is satanic, not Semitic. The devil, who plays no role in the biblical Passion narratives, appears frequently in The Passion. The character is played by a woman (the Italian actress Rosalinda Celentano) — a fact that most viewers will likely fail to appreciate, since she is costumed and photographed to look like an effeminate man. Given Gibson’s past remarks about gay people, and his violent treatment of gay characters in the film Braveheart — and given that, throughout history, Satan has almost invariably been depicted as male, because he was understood to be an angel and biblical angels are without exception male — it’s reasonable to assume that this conflation of evil and effeminacy is intentional. (Taking a cue from Jesus Christ Superstar, Gibson underscores the point by presenting King Herod as a plump, soft man in Cleopatra eye makeup, attended by a queeny courtier.)

In the Bible, Satan appears to tempt Jesus at the beginning of his ministry, but in The Passion, Lucifer’s primary purpose is to terrorize and spook. A maggot wriggles from his nose; he screams and thrashes on the bone-strewn floor of hell. Jesus is not afraid of Satan, but the figure is embellished with enough special effects that audiences will be.

Gibson wants them to be. The Passion personifies evil so that audiences won’t have to reckon with it. Gibson’s evil is foreign and strange, satanic and Semitic. Its homes are the synagogue and the underworld, not the Christian heart. This worldview has more in common with William Friedkin’s film The Exorcist than with the Bible. James Baldwin’s observations on that film, from a 1975 essay called "The Devil Finds Work," apply equally to Gibson’s movie: "The mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented in The Exorcist is the most terrifying thing about the film.... Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any black man, and not only blacks ... can call them on this lie; he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet."

Mel Gibson’s vision of the devil is frightening, but his misrepresentation of Jesus is profane. The film’s blood-letting blots out many crucial aspects of its central character, including one that fundamentalists might do well to contemplate: Jesus’ complex relationship to the traditions of his own society. In Matthew, Jesus states that he came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. He insists that he is preaching a new revelation in the religion of his birth. That it is time for Jewish law to be reinterpreted, to welcome outcasts into the kingdom of heaven.

Jurisprudence and spiritual discernment are distinct projects, but both are concerned with defining human dignity; and the dignity of a person’s legal standing shapes all aspects of that person’s sense of possibility as a human being. The reckless dramas of Bush and Gibson are no more than sideshows to the legal developments — and the love — that now frighten many conservative voters. Judges in Massachusetts and newlyweds in California, New York, New Mexico, and Oregon have not "severed marriage from its religious, cultural, and natural roots," nor do they want to. Regardless of their religion, they are united in one purpose: they seek not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.

Michael Joseph Gross, a former seminarian and speechwriter for William Weld, is a writer in Los Angeles. He can be reached at mjosephgross@yahoo.com