Lady Gaga wields terrific power. She will mold the attitudes and instincts of teenagers across the world. Her most recent song, "Born This Way," slaps in the face many good-hearted Americans who have worked tirelessly to undermine her message.
A simple Google search will quickly bring up the lyrics of her new anthem, timed to respond to a still fairly recent rash of suicides by gay teens. In her lyrics, Gaga comes across as much more traditional than her outrageous costumes and antics might have you expect. Gaga believes in God and invokes him regularly. Gaga insists that God doesn't make mistakes. So far, so good. Jews, Catholics, and Protestants will agree.
But Gaga also insists that gay people do not choose to lust after the objects of their fantasies; gay people are just "born this way." Many Protestants disagree viscerally here. The shock or power of Gaga's song stems from Protestant disagreement: Many, although not all, Protestants insist that gay people affirmatively choose to lust after people of their own sex. Such Protestants want gay people to stop making this choice. On this logic, gay women would not actually enjoy the sex they have with other women. Gay women would be having this sex for a bad reason - many gay women are trying to hurt their parents or gain some sort of favor from the women they sleep with or, most likely, get us to think they are really cool because they dare to be different. Stop this insanity, conservative Protestants respond. Have the sex God wants you to have - with one (and only one) person of the opposite sex.
What strikes me as particularly interesting about Gaga is that, despite the outré look and act, she is still a convent school girl at heart. Catholic through and through, Gaga has written a song to trumpet the official line of the Roman Catholic Church: Gay people are born that way, they don't choose to feel sexual attraction to people of their own sex.
Ordinary Catholics usually know nothing about the 1975 papal document "On Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics." Way, way back in 1975, the Vatican was already saying that gay people are "born this way." The Vatican knew that well-meaning Catholic parents were forcing their gay and lesbian children into electroshock therapy (gruesomely filmed in the worthwhile documentary "Changing Our Minds") and then stuffing these "converted" children into loveless, traditional marriages. The Vatican tried to stop all that heartbreak. By no means did the Vatican condone gay sex (all gay people are called to live celibate lives - that's another story), but the Vatican called on society to accept gay and lesbian people and to understand that they were BORN THIS WAY. In 1975!
All this means that Gaga is less a cultural rebel than some might think. She is in some sense a really, really good Catholic school girl who completed a school project designed to explain Catholic beliefs to the rest of the world (including the vast majority of fellow Catholics who probably don't know that their church is arguably in some narrow way gay positive).
None of this changes the fact that conservative Protestants may object strenuously to Gaga's anthem. Scientists have yet to prove that there is a "gay gene," but teenagers don't know that. More so than any televised political debate, college course on sexual ethics, or grand pronouncement from St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, Gage possesses the power to influence the way teenagers learn about sexuality. That is her power, and that is the danger. It just got harder for advocates of "Family Values" to convince school kids that gay people choose to be that way.
Even though we still lack scientific proof of Gaga's claim, I applaud the way she has used her power.
