DO YOU HATE GAY PEOPLE?

Election Night 2008 (11/4/08) About 7:30 pm
Hopeful, but the outcome still seems uncertain.

Rancho Peñasquitos, a typical suburban bedroom community about 20 miles north of downtown San Diego, became a battleground last night in the desperate fight in California for the rights of two human beings who are in love, and committed to their relationship, to marry one another . Supporters of California Proposition 8 which would ban gay marriage were gathered on some street corners, and opponents of Prop. 8 were gathered on others. There was even some intermixing, but you can be relieved because no real violence broke out, and no gay people were converted into heterosexuals, nor vice versa. It was noisy and police were called. They came, but just watched. Eventually. the rush-hour parade of traffic waned, people got tired, hoarse and cold, and went home.

Proposition 8 has attracted tens of millions of dollars from all over the country. Gay people want the right to marry or have their marriages be sustained legally, and religious groups want to stop gay people from getting married. I must say, it's troubling that the Catholic Church and the Church of LDS (Mormons) are so strongly in favor of a constitutional amendment to deny people their basic rights.

The history of the role of churches in political life in America is a least disturbing. When early pioneers fell in love with American Indian women and took them as wives, churches condemned the unions as godless, as abominations. When, a little further on in American history, African Americans and people from the Caribbean started to get together with White folks, churches again defended the dominant paradigm of racism and bigotry, declaring that marriage was impossible, illegal, violated religious codes, and could not be tolerated. Even well into the 20th century racism was preached from the pulpit, integration was declared a plot of the Devil, and the power and prerogatives of the White power structure were defended, supported and blessed. As a society, as a culture, as human beings we have largely grown past all of this ridiculous racist hatred. There are a few on the fringe who cling to the old paradigm, holding Hitler as their hero, or declaring that the only solution is to distrust those of a different color and separate the races, etc. The evolution of our society has already proven that untrue, but some are not convinced.

One thing that is convincing, is while people may use membership in a church as a definition of whether or not a person is a good and decent person, a citizen worthy to hold office and lead, some churches themselves have fared poorly in being our guide to a just, equal and morally admirable society. Human nature being what it is, churches have been turned into instruments of a political machine, unable to guide or lead our society and instead being proponents of hate, discrimination, inequality and the domination of one group of people by others. I am not talking about medieval times here—don’t support the church’s position on abortion? Well you can’t take communion. Happen to be gay and born into a Mormon family? Sorry, there simply is no place for you within our LDS church or community. Is this the love and acceptance their putative role model would have wanted?

That Elizabeth Dole thought she could win an election for the U.S. Senate by accusing her opponent, Kay Hagen, of associating with “godless Americans” or of being godless herself is even more troubling. (Thankfully, she turned out to be wrong.) Being religious is not a sine qua non of being a good, decent, upstanding person. It can be part of that, but 16% of Americans consider themselves atheists, and I’ve known a few. To suggest that someone who isn’t religious is a bad person, or that lacking a specific religion or set of religious practices and memberships means a person lacks a moral compass is worse than wrong, it is simple bigotry.

Mindless hatred, or worse is a basic human ability—you are not like me so you must be evil. Sounds pretty primitive, no? Something someone in an isolated jungle tribe might believe, “Oh there are some White people. They are not like us; we must kill them, or at least make them slaves or prisoners. Certainly they must never marry anyone of our kind!” Yes, or the people next door who regularly attend a church, synagogue, temple or mosque, and of course your local terrorist ala Tim McVeigh, or the one who is building is bomb right now in some distant corner of the world. All, my friends, believing they are truly doing the work of their god or gods. Religion is not universally, or unilaterally good, or at least it isn’t always pressed into good purposes.

What really gets me though is the notion that strong heterosexual families are somehow harmed by gay folks getting married. Simply put, they aren’t. I’m a heterosexual guy who has been married to a wonderful woman for 35 years. Do I care if the gay couple across town or across the street ties the knot? Is my marriage threatened? Of course, No. I have two daughters, both involved with boyfriends now. But if one of them woke up some morning in the future and decided she was done with men and really wanted to be with a woman, would that crush me. No. The Higher Power, whatever it may be, made all of us, all colors, so many faiths, and yes, even different sexual orientations. Get used to it. Churches tried to kill homosexuality for millennia and never succeeded. None will succeed now, only make lives more difficult, and in a few cases, ruin them and separate people from families who otherwise might have loved and accepted them.

Several years ago, while working as a psychotherapist, I led a group of men who were gay. Once we had gotten to know each other quite well I asked them when each of them knew he was homosexual. Every single one of those men felt their earliest, pre-adolescent sexual stirrings in relation to other males. Crushes on teachers were same sex, embarrassing arousal in school classrooms, in response to other boys. These guys didn’t choose homosexuality; it chose them. (A growing body of research literature supports this.) They still had the choice to fake a heterosexual lifestyle (some had tried that), to live without physical intimacy, (some had tried that), and all ultimately came to feel that they were and should rightfully acknowledge they there were homosexual. Many actively pursued that lifestyle, some promiscuously, some seeking and finding long-term commitment. Does that make them bad people? I hardly see how. Does their sexual orientation mean they should be denied the right to marry? Good Heavens, NO! Again, because heterosexuality is the dominant paradigm, does that mean we should condemn, enslave, harass, imprison, cast out or deny basic human rights to those who aren’t like us?

In the end we have to ask, What are we? Are we containers of hate and exclusion? Do we exclude the man or woman who loves another man or woman the way we would exclude the murderer, the child molester, the rapist, the miscreant, the thief? All of these can still marry, even from behind bars. We deny the right to marry to no other group of people. And in the end to deny gay men and lesbian women the right to marry is to deny their very humanity. Oh, yes, and our own.