The fundamentalist objected. He objected to being called a murderer, and he objected to being told to keep his deeply held religious commitments under wraps. The issue was homosexuality, the place was a Park Ridge Center sponsored roundtable discussion among political activists who spend most of their time fighting each other, and the problem was this: Bob Patterson, an official with the Family Research Council, felt that liberals were telling him that it was uncivil to say that homosexuality was immoral and that homosexuals themselves were "a threat to the civil order." How could he make those arguments and still be a good participant in "civil" discourse?

The gays in the room, Christian and non-Christian, argued that the religious right's rhetoric contributes to a hostile atmosphere in which gays and lesbians are beaten and gay teens commit suicide at much higher rates than straight adolescents. The Christian right's words were, they believed, a public health menace.

Yet Patterson's plaintive plea—he wanted to be considered respectful of civility, yet he needed to express his most deep-seated beliefs—remained unanswered. How do conservatives say publicly that homosexuality isn't OK without signaling to young thugs that gay people are so bad that it's all right to beat them to death, as happened to Matthew Shepard in Wyoming last year? How do liberals say publicly that, for instance, the government's early response to the AIDS epidemic was criminally neglectful without implying that ACT UP protesters should take the law into their own hands?

No thoughtful proponent of civility would seriously argue that these passionately committed activists should censor themselves. True civility requires full, free and open dialogue. It requires that participants share their true convictions, often religiously based convictions, even when those ideas may offend other folks in the public square.

So are there times when a belief is so dangerous that civility must be thrown out the window? Perhaps. There's nothing wrong with demonizing your opponent when your opponent really is a demon. Not to call Hitler or Pol Pot or Slobodan Milosevic a menace to humanity is to soft-pedal the truth and commit a verbal injustice to the victims of their evil.

Fellow citizens
Still, most of the time in a healthy democracy we do not face totalitarian threats to life and liberty. Most of the time we simply face other Americans with whom we disagree, often passionately and deeply, but fellow citizens nonetheless. We still take the train with one another, vote in the same elections and read the same newspapers. After the debate, we still have to live together. Words do have lasting effects, and one of those effects is how we treat each other, often manifested in issues relating to health care.

So how do the activists on either side of the abortion and homosexuality and AIDS debates express themselves while remaining civil? For starters, by being conscious of the likely effects of their words and carefully circumscribing the exact meaning of those words. At the roundtable discussion with Bob Patterson, the most dramatic moment came when he casually listed homosexuality along with pederasty and bestiality. A lesbian activist in the room nearly burst out in tears, she felt so hurt. Patterson was clearly taken aback at this display of emotion; he had no idea his words could sting so badly and vowed to modify his rhetoric in the future.

After the meeting, Patterson and the tearful lesbian, activist Donna Red Wing, committed to get together for lunch, encountering each other as humans and not as opponents, the first time each of them would sit down and actually talk with someone from the other side. Two opponents' willingness to meet for lunch may not seem like much, but it's surely progress toward a world in which people can disagree with being disagreeable, a world in which fewer people are unfairly demonized, a world in which more of us see each other as fellow humans worthy of respect and dignity.