October 24, 2007 11:20 AM

Reading Liberally Page Turner: With a Name Like "Albus"...

(cross-posted from Living Liberally)
The revelation last week that Albus Dumbledore, the powerful and wise wizard of the Harry Potter series, was gay caught the attention of the entertainment news. It earned the wrath of the the religious right and Bill O'Reilly (who called it part of author J.K. Rowling's "gay agenda." And most importantly, it received applause from the audience of children and families to whom Rowling was speaking.

This is the reaction that matters -- because Harry Potter readers are soon going to be running the world and their beliefs will triumph while O'Reilly joins anti-wizard Jerry Falwell in the hereafter. Messages of hate from the religious wrong are having less and less impact in this next generation -- while messages of love, like that Rowling offer, are gaining traction.

As we've written about before, there are groups that are using the lessons of Harry Potter to promote an agenda of social justice and awareness, chief among them the HP Alliance. Its founder, Andrew Slack, was recently featued in an LA Times article on the "Seven Clues That Dumbledore Was Gay."

Among the tongue-in-cheek tells -- his sense of style, his "flaming" phoenix pet and that his name's anagram is "Male bods rule, bud" -- are reasons more core to the HP Alliance's mission: Dumbledore's openness and sensitivity. As Slack argues:

Rowling said that she viewed the whole series as a prolonged treatise on tolerance....Like the LGBT community that has time and again used its own oppression to fight for the equality of others, Dumbledore was a champion for the rights of werewolves, giants, house elves, muggle-borns, centaurs, merpeople -- even alternative marriage.

The Alliance's aim to promote issues from genocide in Darfur to workers' rights in America isn't a stretch -- these lessons are in the novels, even if readers don't realize how political the message is. Should we be surprised that a story-teller does a better job communicating values than many of our politicians?

So the religious right is right to be worried. Their stranglehold on our culture has been broken. Jerry Falwell would never have been able to stand up to Albus Dumbledore in a fight.