A thoughtful op-ed piece in the Salt Lake Tribune makes a beautiful case for looking at LGBT relationships in terms of love instead of focusing on sex acts as is the obsession of our anti-gay enemies who only seek to dehumanize us and degrade us at every opportunity. Interestingly, the author is a straight man with a clinical psychology background. His op-ed column does a wonderful job at making the case that gay relationships are valid and based on love - and that love knows no gender restrictions. Ironically, the piece begins by citing a work written by a survivor of the Nazi death camps. Just like the Nazi regime, the Christianists and Mormons seek to dehumanize LGBT citizens with the same type of sinister motives. Here are some highlights:*
Victor Frankl was a German psychiatrist who survived the holocaust and wrote powerfully about the spiritual lessons he learned while in the Nazi death camps between 1942 and 1945. Man's Search for Meaning , first published in 1959, is one of the classic psychiatric texts of our time. . . . My experience is that in our lives we also find meaning in the antithesis of the horrors of the death camps, in those precious moments when we experience spiritual love.
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. . . I recalled the letter to the editor I had written a few days earlier trying to address the sources of our sexual orientation. I asserted that sexual orientation is not a behavioral issue but it is rooted in our wonderful human encounter with love. Love, that mysterious indefinable process by which we become attracted to other humans and engage in relationships of emotional and physical intimacy, intimacy which at its best has a deep and profound spiritual quality.
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My letter drew the predictable responses online by some unable or uninterested in understanding my argument. The memory of those responses brought me back to another moment I experienced 15 years ago while working as a mental health counselor at an agency in Atlanta, Ga.
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During an emotionally intense counseling session with a young man, we were exploring aspects of our lives and our mutual experiences of romantic love. At one point he looked at me and said: "George, can you understand that the love that I feel for my partner is not different than what you feel for your wife?" In that therapeutic moment, a moment of genuine human intimacy and meaning, the student became the teacher. Reflecting later, I came to understand that in that moment I was confronting the last vestiges of my own homophobia, and this man who sat across from me in this quiet room facing his own death had invited me into Victor Frankl's "community of our humanity."
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The next time state lawmakers consider legislation extending legal protections for gay and transgender couples, can they think beyond the narrow private sexual behavioral issues that dominate the debate to the more important issues of human relationships and love?
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