As regular readers know, I have no use or patience with most of the "professional Christians" of the far right such as James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Pat Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell, et al, and of course the men at Concerned Women for America. If one is to believe the Gospel message, the two great Commandments are to love God and to love thy neighbor as thyself. Yet what does one see? Those who hate gays, blacks, Hispanics, non-Christians - the list is lengthy. What is to me even worse is that they truly seem to have no remorse about the pain and hurt that they inflict, particularly, in terms of dehumanizing others and trying to instill self-hate and those they do not even know. The callousness - and often monetary greed are unbelievable. Personally, I do not understand the mindset - which I guess says something positive about me. In any event, Andrew Sullivan had a post that really resonated with me as someone who spent years in the closet always afflicted by self-hate and meanwhile playing a role that I deemed expected of me. It is very destructive and this dehumanization of others costs live literally daily. Here are some highlights:*
I think there is this to say: the fact of the matter is that a small percentage of humankind is attracted emotionally and sexually to the same gender in exactly the same way that the overwhelming majority is attracted emotionally and sexually to the opposite gender. We do not know exactly why this is; but we do know that it is. It is the truth. It is reality. The notion that it can be somehow expunged from reality is a delusion. This much we now know. The question is simply what we will do about it.
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The sheer reality is that they [LGBT individuals] have hearts and souls; and they have families and belong to families; their loves and lives are well-known to all heterosexuals because being human is already known to all heterosexuals. And yet homosexuals have historically been told - and are still being told in much of the world - that they are not fully human, that their love is somehow sick, and that while they come from families, they can never form their own. At an emotional and spiritual and psychological level, the sheer crippling pain this denial of gay humanity has caused to so many for so long is incalculable. If there is anything un-Christian, the imposition of this cruelty and the perpetuation of this pain is un-Christian - and the damage still continues its path of destruction in families, societies, institutions and human psyches.
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And when we find a young famous person driven to suicide because of this, we should remember all those not so famous, who kill themselves for this reason, alone, all the time, or those who, in far greater numbers, simply die a little every day inside themselves. Because they have built a wall around themselves outside the livable ways of being human. Because, for so long, their own governments and their own families have told them that they do not, and never will, belong. Because they could not find a way to believe that God loves them as they are and that God is not the same as the current leaders of organized, fundamentalist religion.
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Andrew references the recent suicide of Marie Osmond's son, who may or may not have been gay. Truthfully, I do not know. However, whether or not Osmond's son was gay doesn't matter. The cruel hurting and destruction of lives happens so often. Indeed, I lost two friends to suicide as a result of their inability to reconcile their sexual orientation with their religious upbringing. Michael Gerson had a piece recently in the Washington Post about the need to protect love one's from suicide's tentacles. The problem is that too many parents and siblings are blinded by their religiously induced blindness. One can only hope that society at large will soon learn to disregard the message of hate that seems to dominate the professional Christian set.
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