Rodriguez, who is Mexican-American, gay and a practicing Catholic, refuses to let any single part of himself define the whole. Born in San Francisco in 1944 and raised by his Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrant parents to embrace mainstream American culture and the English language, he went on to study literature and religion at Stanford and Columbia. His first book, “The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez,” explores his journey from working-class immigrant to a fully assimilated intellectual — angering many Latinos with his view that English fluency is essential. “Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father,” which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1993, continued his investigation into how family, culture, religion, race, sexuality and other strands of his life all contribute to the whole, a complex “brownness” of contradictions and ironies. “Brown: The Last Discovery of America” completes the trilogy — but not his insatiable intellectual curiosity, which he is now shining on monotheism.

Rodriguez’ stinging critiques of religious hypocrisy are all the richer for his passionate love of Catholicism and the Most Holy Redeemer parish in San Francisco, where he and his partner of 28 years are devoted members. Today, Rodriguez is at work on a new book about the monotheistic “desert religions” — Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Ever since Sept. 11, “when havoc descended in the name of the desert God,” Rodriguez said in one of his Peabody Award-winning radio commentaries for PBS’s News Hour, he has been trying to understand the strands of darkness that run through these religions.

Salon spoke to Richard Rodriguez by phone at his home in San Francisco.

What was your reaction to California voters’ going heavily for Obama and also passing Proposition 8, banning gay marriage?

I was like a lot of other Americans at the moment when the West Coast tipped the balance in favor of Obama. I didn’t so much think it represented the end of racism but the possibility of change. At the same time, I also knew that large numbers of Californians in religious communities were voting against gay marriage and that Latinos and blacks were continuing to take part in this terribly tragedy. We persecute each other. The very communities that get discriminated against discriminate against other Americans.

The Spanish language newspaper La Opinión called the results an “embarrassment,” saying “California still has two faces.” Do you agree?

La Opinión represents the opinion of a lot of Latinos who are more educated and — what should I say? — more cosmopolitan. But Latinos in both my family and the Catholic Church belong to a more traditional America. This is a troubling aspect of the way our country is formed right now. It is a time of great change but also a time when people are afraid of change.

You said recently the real issue behind the anti-gay marriage movement is the crisis in the family. What do you mean?

American families are under a great deal of stress. The divorce rate isn’t declining, it’s increasing. And the majority of American women are now living alone. We are raising children in America without fathers. I think of Michael Phelps at the Olympics with his mother in the stands. His father was completely absent. He was negligible; no one refers to him, no one noticed his absence.

The possibility that a whole new generation of American males is being raised by women without men is very challenging for the churches. I think they want to reassert some sort of male authority over the order of things. I think the pro-Proposition 8 movement was really galvanized by an insecurity that churches are feeling now with the rise of women.

Monotheistic religions feel threatened by the rise of feminism and the insistence, in many communities, that women take a bigger role in the church. At the same time that women are claiming more responsibility for their religious life, they are also moving out of traditional roles as wife and mother. This is why abortion is so threatening to many religious people — it represents some rejection of the traditional role of mother.

In such a world, we need to identify the relationship between feminism and homosexuality. These movements began, in some sense, to achieve visibility alongside one another. I know a lot of black churches take offense when gay activists say that the gay movement is somehow analogous to the black civil rights movement. And while there is some relationship between the persecution of gays and the anti-miscegenation laws in the United States, I think the true analogy is to the women’s movement. What we represent as gays in America is an alternative to the traditional male-structured society. The possibility that we can form ourselves sexually — even form our sense of what a sex is — sets us apart from the traditional roles we were given by our fathers.

I think Proposition 8 was also galvanized by insecurity around gay families.

I agree. But the real challenge to the family right now is male irresponsibility and misbehavior toward women. If the Hispanic Catholic and evangelical churches really wanted to protect the family, they should address the issue of wife beating in Hispanic families and the misbehaviors of the father against the mother. But no, they go after gay marriage. It doesn’t take any brilliance to notice that this is hypocrisy of such magnitude that you blame the gay couple living next door for the fact that you’ve just beaten your wife.

The pro-8 campaign calls itself the Protect Family Movement, even though the issue of family was the very reason gays needed to have marriage. There are partners in gay unions now who have children, and those children need to be protected. If my partner and I had children, either through a previous marriage or because we adopted them, I would need to be able to take them to the emergency room. I would need to be able to protect them with the parental rights that marriage would give me. It was for the benefit of the family that marriage was extended to homosexuals.

Religions have the capacity for being noble and ennobling but they are also the expression of some of the darkest impulses in us — to go after the “other.” For Christians, if the other isn’t the Muslim, it’s the homosexual. That is the most discouraging part.

Speaking of hypocrisy, churches have plenty of sexual skeletons in their closet.

Right. The Mormon Church has this incredible notoriety in America for polygamy and has been persecuted because of it. The very church that became notorious because of polygamy is now insisting that marriage is one man and one woman. That is, at least, an irony of history. But as a number of Mormon women friends of mine say, the same church that espouses the centrality of family in their lives is also the church that urges them to reject their gay children.

Then there is the Roman Catholic Church, my own church, which has just come off this extraordinary season of sexual scandal and misbehavior in the rectory against children. The church is barely out of the court and it’s trying to assume the role of governor of sexual behavior, having just proved to America its inability to govern its own sexual behavior.

Look at the evangelicals. In their insistence that people be born again, they know Americans are broken. In their circus-tent suburban churches, you find 10,000 people on a Sunday morning. You find people who have been divorced, people who have had drug experiences, people who have been in jail. These churches touch upon a dream that people can put our lives back together again.

Now these churches are going after homosexuals as a way of insisting on their own propriety. They are insisting that they have a role to play in the general society as moral guardians, when what we have seen in the recent past is just the opposite. I mean, it’s one thing for the churches to insist on their right to define the sacrament of marriage for their own members. But it’s quite another for them to insist that they have a right to define the relationships of people outside their communities. That’s really what’s most troubling about Proposition 8. It was a deliberate civic intrusion by the churches.

I wonder if these churches sense they’re losing some of the influence they’ve had for the past eight years.

To my knowledge, the churches have not accepted responsibility for the Bush catastrophe. Having claimed, in some cases, that Bush was divinely inspired and his election was the will of God, they have failed to explain why the last eight years have been so catastrophic for America.

Now I think evangelicals are falling back on issues that have been reliable for them in the past. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, who said that children of immigrants should be educated, was essentially frightened away from that position by Mitt Romney. The tentativeness of the evangelicals on immigration only allowed them to be more vociferous on the gay issue. That’s traditionally easy for them — to go after the sinner. But it doesn’t convince me of their ascendancy; it merely convinces me that they are retreating. They don’t know how to extend their agenda beyond gay marriage and abortion.

There’s going to be an ongoing legal battle over Proposition 8. How do you think  gay activists should proceed?

I think gay activists should be very careful with this issue. We should not present ourselves as enemies of religion. I am not prepared to leave the Roman Catholic Church over this issue. The Catholic Church is my church. I was a little concerned about the recent protests outside the Los Angeles Mormon temple. I’ve seen this sort of demonstration escalate into a sort of deliberate exercise of blasphemy.

For example, in the most severe years of the AIDS epidemic, activists from ACT UP went into St. Patrick’s Cathedral, took the communion wafer and threw it on the ground. That is exactly the wrong thing to do. One should be respectful of the religious impulse in the world. If we decide to make ourselves anti-religious, we will only lose.

But religious communities must be challenged too. I was in Jerusalem a couple of years ago for Gay Pride. All the leaders of religious communities — Muslim, Jew and Christian — were brought together by their mutual animosity toward gay activism to protest the parade. There was the grand patriarch of the Eastern churches, the high rabbi of Jerusalem, the Roman Catholic archbishop, the mullahs, and they were all united in one cause. The police outnumbered the parade participants. One marcher was attacked and stabbed by an Orthodox Jew.

We have to be very clear about male violence within the monotheistic religions. This is a failure within churches and we can’t be casual about it. But we can’t be casual about the importance of religion either. We need to be both respectful of religion and critical of religion. Otherwise I suspect we won’t get very far at all.

What do you think about gay rights as universal rights? Many argue that it’s a cultural issue and that specific communities, such as Latinos and blacks, have their own understanding of homosexuality and shouldn’t be messed with.

 In my own my family, and my parents were not well educated, it would have been impossible for them to have dealt with the words “gay” or “homosexual” in my relationship with them. But there was no way for them to reject me either. I was a member of the family and I couldn’t sin my way out of it.

Once my partner became part of my life, he became part of their life too. They didn’t want it said, they didn’t want it named or defined, but they assumed it and accepted it. At family events, when my partner wasn’t there, my mother would get on the phone and call him and insist he come over.

These communities have very intricate ways of dealing with these things and they are not necessarily the highly politicized tactics that you see in traditional middle-class society in America.

I have not been to a Mexican family without some suspicion of homosexuality in children or grandchildren. But people deal with it within the larger context of family. That’s why I suspect the revolution will come not from the male church but from how women treat their children, and whether or not women are willing to reject their children. I don’t think they are. I saw too many times during the AIDS epidemic that when death came and the disease took its toll, if one parent was there, it was almost always the mother and not the father. That bond is so powerful.

I also think about the role of gays as caregivers to the elderly parent while siblings are too busy with their children. At the Most Holy Redeemer Church in San Francisco, which is the gay Roman Catholic parish, a number of old Irish women essentially adopted the gay parishioners, and were adopted by them, because their children had moved to the suburbs, or Pennsylvania, or Orlando, and were no longer in a position to care for them. That’s a bond that no one really talks about.

My partner has taken care of many elderly people over the years. They know who he is and they know who I am. But it’s unspoken. I don’t know how they voted on Tuesday, but I do think that it is their responsibility now to speak out.

Are you saying individual relationships will ultimately be more powerful than organized religion?

Well, I’m working right now in the Middle East on monotheistic religions because I’m very worried about the direction of religion. Ever since Sept. 11, when I heard that prayer being spoken at the moment the planes hit the World Trade Centers, I realized how much darkness there is in religion compared to how much light there is. I am very much concerned with whether or not these religions can be feminized.

The desert religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — are male religions. Their perception is that God is a male god and Allah is a male god. If the male is allowed to hold onto the power of God, then I think we are in terrible shape. I think what’s coming out of Colorado Springs right now, with people like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, is either the last or continuing gasp of a male hierarchy in religion. That’s what’s at stake. And women have a determining role to play. Are they going to go along with this, or are they going to challenge the order?

Well, yes, but then we have the rise of someone like Sarah Palin, who is just one example of how complicated things get in this issue.

Yes, you have Sarah Palin. But you also have women deciding to leave marriages. When a woman decides to leave the kitchen and seek a career outside the family, when a woman decides not to take on the name of her husband, when a woman wants to be more than simply the mother of children, when she wants to have some place in the world that is not defined by her family or her husband, that seems to suggest something comparable to what gays experience when they come out of the closet. Notice that both those metaphors of getting out of the kitchen and getting out of the closet are domestic images.

But are you saying Palin represents this?

I’m not that kind of optimist!

It does seem she wants to have a career separate from the family, but in many ways she embodies the old conservative order. 

Clearly, what you say is true. I don’t see women challenging the male order of things in every case. Wives tolerate all kinds of behavior of fathers toward their children. But I do think it’s important that some woman are starting to challenge that. The divorce rate suggests that women are not happy with the relationship they have with men. And whatever that unhappiness is, I would like people to know that, as a gay man, I’m not responsible for what’s wrong with heterosexual marriage. On the other hand, whatever is wrong with the heterosexual marriage does have some implication for the world I live in. Women are redefining sexuality in a way that’s going to make it easier for me to be a gay man.

The formal role of women is also undergoing change in some churches, right?

That’s right. The Episcopal Church in America is now under the leadership of a woman. Feminism is going to change a great deal. The most radical people in the Roman Catholic Church are women. They’re challenging everything from the priesthood to the male God to what it means to be married. I don’t expect to see gay marriage enter these conservative institutions in my lifetime. But I do see change.

I belong to a Catholic parish in San Francisco, where my partner and I are acknowledged by the other people in the parish as a couple. We take communion together, the priests know who we are, they’re supportive of who we are, and what we are, and they see us in various roles — giving eulogies to dead friends but also helping to baptize little babies. We’re very much a part of that community. That’s why I’m not prepared to lose it because some archbishop in Colorado or cardinal in Los Angeles is behind Proposition 8. It is not my church that they’re talking about, it’s not even my experience of love.

Unfortunately, as hilarious as it is to see O’Reilly’s contorted Reefer Madness vision of San Francisco, it’s also offensive. Fox used blacks and Latinos, transgenders and gays, and poor people to represent the progressive Obama nightmare that his “radical left” government is supposedly going to unleash. And the good “traditional” America? Yup, white mothers with strollers.

Right-wing San Francisco-bashing is hardly new or even notable. But O’Reilly has taken it to new extremes of paranoia in this little production. You gotta see this for yourself. 

A few weeks after the wedding, Jay, a movie director based in Los Angeles and San Francisco, told me that his father’s Beatles reference had taken him totally by surprise. “When Dad said, ‘And to quote the great Western philosophers,’ I thought for sure he was going to read from Scripture,” Jay said. But to his great relief, the advice his father doled out came from John Lennon and not John the Baptist. After all the pain Jay had endured, wondering whether his devout Mormon father would even attend his wedding, those Liverpool lyrics were music to his ears.

While same-sex weddings are daily events in California these days, especially since the California Supreme Court legalized gay marriage earlier this year, it’s easy to overlook the fact that it’s still a strained personal issue inside many families. With Proposition 8 on the ballot this Tuesday, which would amend the California Constitution to ban gay marriage (effectively overriding the recent Supreme Court ruling), the strain has taken on a renewed political intensity.

The Yes on 8 campaign has become a national conservative cause, with churches from around the country, led by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, pumping millions into the Golden State in support of the measure. If it passes, Proposition 8 would throw Jay’s marriage, as well those of the approximately 12,000 other same-sex couples who have married in the state since June, into legal limbo. As of Thursday night, polls showed the measure to be in a statistical dead heat.

But the story of Jay and George Redd shows that blood is often thicker than holy water. And as much as the Mormon church, or any church hierarchy, seeks to dictate how people live their lives, the heart won’t be so easily chained.

Jay’s parents are reverent Mormons from Utah and have long been challenged by his sexual orientation. According to Jay, they never stopped loving him, and have invited his same-sex partners into their home. But they never gave up wanting him to reform, to get back on “the right path” of heterosexuality. “You know what the church says,” they told him. “You know what we believe, you know what God has taught us, you know what the Scripture says, you know the right thing to do.”

For Jay, the right thing to do this year was marry the love of his life, Brian Dietrich. Jay met Brian, a 41-year-old psychotherapist, last year, and they immediately knew they wanted to commit to each other for the long haul. When Jay called his parents to invite them to their wedding, the line between Salt Lake City and San Francisco seemed to fizzle out. “Dear, that’s nice, very nice,” his mother, Marsha, said lukewarmly. “I’m not sure how your father’s going to deal with this,” she added. “I don’t think your dad is going to come.” Jay wasn’t surprised exactly. But it still hurt.

When he spoke with his father directly, Jay’s heart sank. “He didn’t say, ‘We’re happy for you,’” Jay said. “Not, ‘congratulations.’ It wasn’t passive-aggressive. It was just, ‘Well, OK.’”

Jay was ripped up inside. “I respect and understand my father’s position because I grew up in it,” he told me. “I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt for how far he’s come all these years.” But he was also angry and frustrated. His father had celebrated the marriages of his sister and brother, and he longed for the same paternal blessing.

He left an urgent message on his father’s voice mail: “Dad, you always told me you just want me to be happy. This makes me happy to be marrying Brian. I’m asking you to be there to support us in our happiness.”

The days were ticking away to the wedding on Oct. 5; his father still hadn’t returned his call.

“I was anticipating that something like this might occur, just knowing what the times are and how things are moving,” Jay’s father, George E. Redd, told me when I reached him by phone at his home in Salt Lake City. George, a 62-year-old banker, who is active in the Mormon church, was a bishop when Jay was growing up. He kindly answered my question about how he might have felt a year ago if someone had told him he would be celebrating his son’s marriage to another man. “I said, Well, I hope that doesn’t happen, but if it does, I’m not sure how I would feel about it and react to it. Probably not very positively at the time.”

When George got the call from Jay asking them to attend his wedding, he plunged into reflection, talking with his wife, praying, reading biblical and Latter-day Saints scriptures. Love for Jay was never a question, and they had met Brian “and thought he was a wonderful man as well.” But the marriage was a conflict for him because of his Mormon beliefs. He was reticent to express it, but in an interview overflowing with positive words about his son, he admitted, “My ideal situation would be my son marrying a woman. That’s what I believe the family unit is, the marriage of a man and a woman.”

George and Marsha raised their kids inside the Mormon church in Utah in the 1970s. Jay remembers that there were four temples within about a mile of his house. As a young man, he served as a deacon and belonged to a young Mormon men’s group where he learned that masturbation is an “abomination” that leads to being gay. According to the teachings, “It’s a sin next to murder to be gay, which was really hard to hear,” Jay said. When he came out to his father at age 23, “ironically, in a church parking lot,” Jay felt so guilty that he agreed to go into reparative therapy to overcome his “same-sex attraction disorder.” But he moved on quickly and grew to embrace his life as a gay man. Now the Mormon church acknowledges homosexuality, but says gays and lesbians must remain celibate.

After much contemplation about what to do about his son Jay’s marriage, George realized that “the most important thing is to love and support our son in the decision he’s made.” He and the family would drive from Utah to San Francisco for Jay and Brian’s wedding.

Jay recalls hearing the phone ring at 4 o’clock one morning. When he listened to the message later, it was his father. “I’ve been praying about this. I love you. You’re my son. I want you to be happy, and if this marriage to Brian makes you happy, then I’m happy.”

Jay sobbed.

Later, he asked his mother what she had said to him to influence his decision. “I didn’t say much,” she said. “I only asked him one question — what do you think Jesus would do in this situation?”

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Mormons have poured over $11 million into supporting Proposition 8, or 40 percent of the total raised so far. When I asked George how he felt about the proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, which would put the legal status of his own son’s union in jeopardy, he didn’t want to go there. “This discussion has been based on feelings of love, of concern for the happiness of my son and I’d just leave the politics out of it,” he said gently.

“I’m not surprised at all,” Jay said when I told him what his dad had said about Proposition 8. For all his life, George has “left politics out of it.” But “based on his actions and his words at our ceremony,” Jay believes in his heart that he supports equality for all.

When Jay’s father agreed not only to attend the wedding, but to speak, Jay had “this weird Darth Vader moment,” he told me, laughing. “No, he’s not Darth Vader! But the analogy here is this spark of amazing grace in him.”

Many of us at Jay and Brian’s wedding were indeed deeply moved by George Redd that day. A man of medium stature, with close-cropped fine gray hair and glasses, he spoke eloquently and lovingly to his son and new son-in-law. We only had a small inkling of the journey he’d been on to reach that moment of accepting and blessing his son’s union with Brian, but we knew he was reaching out across a cultural and religious abyss to do so. “Jay, who has blue eyes, red hair and a red beard, told me he met someone who makes him incredibly happy,” he said, looking over at the grooms, who were seated nearby, fingers entwined. “And that man,” he said looking at Brian and smiling, “has blue eyes, red hair and a red beard …” It was hanky time again.

Jay does not feel the same kind of grace from the Church of Latter-day Saints, however. Regarding its aggressive campaigning for Proposition 8, he is sad and angry. “I feel cast out for who I am,” he says bluntly. “Though I no longer identify as a practicing Mormon, it still burns. This is a church that has been persecuted for its flavor of Christianity, for its past marriage practices, for its past religious practices. And here they are turning around and persecuting another group of people. I feel like it’s very shortsighted and it’s not a very Christian way of treating people.”

In the end, Jay’s dad even helped them finance the wedding. Jay was worried about “how far to push the envelope with him.” His ex, David, even told him, “It’s good enough that they’re coming out. Don’t push it too far.” But ask, and you shall receive.

“I feel like they really sacrificed,” Jay said. “My father’s not a big fan of freeways and big cities, but they drove for two days from Utah to come to our ceremony. They really went the extra mile.”

Don’t get me wrong. I am a sucker for a lot of the Obama-wear and will pack my bags with a selection of fabulous T-shirts and other memorabilia. And there’s some great Hillary Clinton swag, too.

My question is this: Where is the boogeyman? The lack of Bush swag on the streets is a metaphor for the relative lack of Bush-bashing in the campaign. This is a president with the worst approval ratings since Atilla the Hun, so why aren’t the Dems taking better advantage of it?

Hillary Clinton’s line from Tuesday night, “It makes sense that George Bush and John McCain will be together next week in the Twin Cities. Because these days they’re awfully hard to tell apart,” was one of the best lines of the convention so far. Where’s the T-shirt? I want to buy it.