Messages of Hate to Toronto Pride

It is often easy to forget that the anti-LGBT animus that LGBT Americans face in our daily lives is not something unique to America even though our nation is still "the most religious" of any of the world's developed nations.  Truth be told, the same toxic poison that creates homophobia and anti-LGBT hate in America is the root cause of such hatred and ill-will worldwide: RELIGION.  The Toronto Star looks at some of the utterly vile and hate-filled things being said to Toronto Pride which fields its pride event in the coming weeks.  To illustrate the point, in a video posted by the Toronto Star members of Pride Toronto read some of the letters and e-mails that the organization has received.  Here are story highlights:

Homophobia and hate is still rampant in our society — just ask Pride Toronto.

Every day, the organization receives hate mail — usually from anonymous people who don’t believe in Pride’s mission to make the city safer and more accepting for LGBTQI people.

“If you were my child and you turned out gay I’d burn you alive,” said one particularly vile message.

In a video, employees from the Star read these tweets, letters and emails to members of Pride Toronto in order to show the damage that hatred has on our community.

“It’s a little surreal, it almost seemed fake to hear the words out loud,” said Michelle Cherny, a member of Pride’s board of directors. “The hate is out there.”

Rachel Lauren Clark, another member of the board, says the worst part of hearing the hate mail read out loud wasn’t the message’s content, but the fact it is so commonplace. “When you’re a person who hears that stuff everyday, you become numb to it,” she said.

Clark says people who want to spew this kind of hatred typically hide behind the veil of anonymity, rather than confront anyone face to face and actually learn something.  “It’s a bit cowardly to do what they do,” she said.

Clark says the message that shocked her the most was from someone who said that as a transgender person, no one could love her.

“Actually my parents love me very much . . . I have a really great job, I volunteer with my community and I have a really great life,” she says. “It’s pathetic, they don’t know me at all and they just spew these things forward.”

Andrea Delgado, who works in media relations for Pride and participated in the video, says the volume of hate mail proves that Pride still needs to exist.

“It’s so sad that we’re working so hard to try and put ourselves out there and make a difference, but at the end of the day there will still be those people who don’t want to listen,” Delgado said.

Pride may not change a hateful person’s mind, Clark says, but it can help change the tide for future generations.  “We need to have Pride so that those voices can be heard, we are far from liberation, we are far from being equal,” she said.

To me the most numbing things is this statement: “If you were my child and you turned out gay I’d burn you alive.,”  As the parent of three children, I cannot comprehend such a statement.  How does one get so warped and hate-filled?  In a word, religion.  Be it fundamentalist Christianity or fundamentalist Islam, the hatred is the same and all of the putrid mindset traces back to the Old Testament.  When is the larger public going to say "No More!" and start shutting down and shunning anti-LGBT religious extremism?

Pride After Orlando

I frequently note that living one's life "out and proud" is one of the most powerful forms of activism that we in the LGBT community can do.  Making people realize that we are not the ugly stereotypes that the "godly folk" like to disseminate can and does change hearts and minds - at least among decent, thinking people.  One way of doing this is to go to Pride events which in some ways are true acts of rebellion and well as opportunities to celebrate solidarity.  I'm sure that many in the straight community do not understand because they are part of the all too often oppressive majority.  The husband and I will attend Pride Fest today, both to celebrate with friends, but also to be visible and send a message that we will not be intimidated and we are here and never going to slink back into invisibility.  An op-ed in the New York Times expresses this mindset.  Here are excerpts:

June is pride month around the country, and it will continue to be. This weekend, celebrations will take place in Portland, Ore., and Chicago. The weekend after in New York City and San Francisco. All pride parades happen in defiance of people who want the L.G.B.T. community to be scared and ashamed. Most years those people are just parents who won’t talk to you about your personal life; for a decade it was a plague the government wouldn’t fight because they thought gay men deserved it. This year we thought it would be politicians trying to make going to the bathroom impossible for trans people. Now, after a massacre, it is more than that. But every Pride parade is an act of rebellion. And our preferred form of rebellion is getting drunk, sweaty, loud and naked.

Before the parade last weekend, my friends and I talked about Orlando, we talked about gun violence, we talked about horrible things politicians had posted, then deleted. There were rainbow streamers and inflatable unicorns and the flat knowledge that 49 people had been executed the night before for being gay. We walked the half block down to the parade, and it was alive. Go-go boys on fire trucks, Dykes on Bikes, serried ranks of L.G.B.T. Methodists mixed with dance music and light inebriation into a good time. It got better.

Our reaction wasn’t somber. We didn’t cancel the parade. We had fun. That is what gay people do. Every gay, trans or lesbian adult I know had to fight hard against family and social training to be an out, proud person. Our answer to loss and indignity, it seems, is to give a party, have a parade, and celebrate bits of happiness.

The uprising at Stonewall, our most famous civil rights moment, happened at a bar. It wasn’t noble or solemn, it was drunk, surly, and there were sequins involved. Those trans women and drag queens didn’t just stage a polite protest about repealing sodomy laws or cross-dressing prohibitions. They fought back against a police force invading our bar, the one place where the simple right to get a vodka soda and make out with a cute gay girl or boy in peace was something we could take for granted. It may seem frivolous, but when society has denied you dignity, honesty and safety, frivolity is all you’ve got.

And frivolity still comes through. When I logged into Grindr, a gay hookup app, on Sunday night, I was first greeted with a pop-up that let me know where and how I could help victims of the Pulse shootings.

It’s a dark, cruel joke, but ours is a culture that is not unfamiliar with darkness and cruelty. When people kill us, pass laws against us, make cheap jokes about us, they aren’t actually saying all gay people should die. They’re saying all L.G.B.T. people should know our place, live in silence, lie about who we are. Societal homophobia wants us to be ashamed, and finds ways to punish us if we refuse. The greatest gay rebellion is honest expression of our truth.

When word surfaced that the Orlando shooter had frequented gay bars and dating apps, some speculated that he might have been doing research to plan his attack. Gay people understood the other very real possibility, that the attacker might be a man with homosexual desires whom society had filled with so much secret shame that he would do anything to prove his distance from the gay world. It’s a tragic, complex truth that means however revolting I find him, I also have sympathy for the ways shame and the inability to live honestly may have twisted this man into a murderer.

The people who were at Pulse nightclub in Orlando on Saturday made the choice to be out and gay, and they paid a horrible price for it. The people who were out in West Hollywood on Sunday, and who will come out around the country this month, were there for all the L.G.B.T. people before us who suffered and struggled to be out and honest, and we did it with pride.

The Hypocrisy of Evangelicals Supporting Donald Trump

Unlike many on the right, I long ago ceased to view evangelical and similar conservative Christians as nice and decent people.  Instead, I concluded that hypocrisy, hatred of others, and often racism are the pillars of their belief system.  In yet another piece in the Washington Post belatedly lamenting what has become of the GOP in the context of the rise of Donald Trump, Michael Gerson finally seems to be opening his eyes to the hypocrisy of the evangelical crowd that is supporting Trump.  For Gerson, support for Trump is a betrayal of Christian values.  In my view, the phenomenon merely underscores the hypocrisy that has always been main stream among evangelicals.  Here are column highlights:

Of all Donald Trump’s political skills, perhaps the most impressive is his ability to persuade people to support him by suspending their deepest, lifelong beliefs. 

The same can be said of some pro-lifers, who must look past Trump’s previous support for partial-birth abortion and his inability to provide a serious rationale for his pro-life conversion (other than the obvious political imperative).  

Many evangelical Christians are now in a similar position. In considerable numbers (Trump was the presidential choice of 42 percent of them in a recent poll), they are attracted to Trump’s unvarnished populism and his identification with middle-class anxiety and anger. 

The greater problem for evangelicals is found not in the field of biology but of theology. Trump’s defining personal and public characteristic is pride. In making America great again, he offers not a set of political ideals or policies but he himself. He, he says, is better, smarter and tougher than our corrupt and stupid leaders. Pride is his platform.  

It is also, in the traditional Christian view, a vice, and a particularly pernicious one. “The essential vice, the utmost evil is Pride,” wrote C.S. Lewis. “Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison; it was through Pride that the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every other vice; it is the complete anti-God state of mind.” 

Why is pride so dangerous? Because it is never sated, and always breeds conflict. “Pride is essentially competitive,” said Lewis, “while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. 

In our personal experience, we know that pride is often at the root of resentment, rivalry, jealousy, antagonism, greed and a desire for revenge. It is the unifying conviction of evangelicals that people eventually come to the end of their ego and need to look upward; upward from the foot of the cross. 

A narcissistic leader is always at enmity with other people and groups, and cannot be a unifying figure. As Abraham Lincoln displayed, the capacity to heal requires humility and empathy. A narcissistic leader is vindictive, keeps lists of his grievances and enemies and is vulnerable to the abuse of power. A narcissistic leader finds it difficult to feel sympathy for those regarded as failures and losers, for the wounded and disabled, for strangers, refugees and the vulnerable. 

The reality is that pride is a hallmark of evangelicals who are narcissistic in their belief that they are better than others - those deemed to be "sinners" - as the selectively pick and choose Bible passages to condemn and denigrate others while ignoring their own lack of morality and decency.   Donald Trump is in perfect company with these hypocritical and hate-filled people.