Tuesday, December 2, 2008

THE CASE FOR ACCEPTANCE: An Open Letter to Humanity, Part IX

a work of fiction by Robin Reardon

FOREWORD

The only thing wrong with being gay is how some people treat you when they find out.

This blog entry is the ninth in a series of ten monthly installments that present the rationale behind Thinking Straight. The series is written from the point of view of a gay man—which I am not—so I'm labeling it as a fictional open letter to humanity, addressed to anyone who will read it and consider its points. My hope is that it will further understanding and acceptance.

The installments will be presented in logical order (Part I and the full list of installments was posted in April), and I encourage readers to start at the beginning and proceed through. The series will be highlighted each month on DREAMWalkergroup.com in the DREAMScene newsletter.

IX. THE BIGGEST CARD

THE GOD CARD, continued: Tactics (See the chapter on I-Beam Strategy)

Do not murder. Honor your father and mother. Do not bear false witness. Do not plant different plants together. Do not eat shellfish or pork. Do not marry a divorced woman (male audience was usually presumed in the Bible; women were too inferior to trouble with). Do not lie with another man. Do not waste seed.

Do this, don’t do that. Mostly “don’t,” actually.

Tactics, all.

And what do we know about Tactics? Right; they must be firmly rooted in Situation in order to support Objective. When shift happens, Tactics need to be reassessed based on the new Situation to determine whether or not they support or jeopardize Objective.

In our changed situation—that is, today, as opposed to two thousand years ago—does it still make sense to allow men to rape their female slaves, based on the accepted “facts” (at the time the OT was written) that slavery was a necessity of society and women were almost not quite human and they contributed nothing to the new life so it didn’t matter which oven men planted their seed in?

In our changed situation, should everyone still be desperately trying to have large families? Are we still (as when the Torah was written) desperate to enlarge and purify our Jewish race, so that God will strike dead men like Onan when he shoots his seed onto the ground rather than into the oven represented by his brother’s widow? (Look it up: Genesis 38, verses 1-11.)

In our changed situation, do we still believe that the woman contributes nothing to her child, because all the essentials for a new human life are contained in male ejaculate? Can we still sell our daughters into slavery? Would Lot, today, offer his two virgin daughters, as a substitute for his two male visitors, to the rapacious crowd gathered outside his home? (Look it up: Genesis 19, 3-8.)

Would you stone to death anyone who worked on the Sabbath? Would you expect God to kill your son because he masturbated? Would you kill your own son if he cursed you?

Those who refuse to see that the Bible’s tactical teachings are time-bound and situation-based are literalists. And the thing about literalists is that they can’t engage in conversation. All they can do is make proclamations. They won’t open their minds, and they won’t let go of their blind certainty.

If you start at the beginning of the Christian Bible and work your way through, what you will see—if you’re paying attention—is that the Bible contradicts itself over and over, in terms of tactics. The things that are all right to do and that are not all right to do change over time. Because even if you believe that each one of those books is the divinely inspired, immutable word of God himself, it’s still true that each one was written for a specific group of people in a specific time and place in a specific political environment and with social infrastructure specific to their time and place. In other words, in a specific Situation. And as shift happened, the Bible’s own tactics changed accordingly. Remember: the Bible is not a book; it is a chronological collection of books.

If a sweet young heterosexual couple moved in next door today and invited us to their wedding next month, would we curse them and stone either of them to death for living in sin?

No?

So what’s the problem—today—with gay people? Why won’t religion let go of the tactic, long outdated and no longer rational, of condemning me?

Three things. One has to do with shift happening. The fact is that no one alive when any book of the Bible was written had any concept of homosexuality (see Part VIII for more detail on this), so it was never referred to as it exists today; there’s just no comparison, and so the Bible does not—cannot—address the homosexuality of today. The second is that pesky lizard brain screaming inside the head of most heterosexuals when they encounter a sexual orientation that seems unnatural to them. The third is something we haven’t talked about yet. It’s an aspect of male developmental psychology.

Why focus on the male? We’re talking about religion, here. Even in the religions that allow women to be ordained, the vast majority of clergy are men; also, the primary condemnatory religions were formed at a time when women were considered barely human. Christianity had a lively debate going for a while in the Middle Ages about whether women even had souls. And many religions don’t ordain women at all. Think Catholicism. Think Islam. Think Fundamental Anything.

Children who are developing normally spend the first two years of their lives figuring out that they’re human. They figure out a lot of other things, too, but in terms of their own personal identity, if they think they’re a snake, they’re insane. They’re human, and they’d better get that, or they won’t be able to build a viable life for themselves.

At about the age of two, the child is starting to take in the next identity differentiator: gender. And it’s apparent that this is important, because the child badly needs to figure out his relationship with his parents in order to figure the world out; it’s step one. So the child must understand that one parent is a girl and one is a boy, and it’s critical to figure out which one to identify with. If the child makes a mistake at this identity level, it’s not a question of sanity, as it was with the snake. At least, not yet. But it will be impossible for the child to build a viable life in the future. If a male child identifies with the female side of life, at some point he’s got to come to terms with this discrepancy. Either he finds a way to fit into life as he is, even though that will be incredibly difficult, or he makes whatever adjustments he can, so that he will be able to build a life; also incredibly difficult. [Important note to anyone who doesn’t already know this: a gay man does not necessarily identify as female. Get used to it.]

The next identity layer most children figure out is race. Is it important? You bet. But it’s no more important than the next layer: sexual orientation.

Some gay kids know from a very early age that they’re “different.” A lot of gay kids don’t figure this out until after puberty. But let’s talk only about the straight boys for this discussion, because there are more of them than gay boys, and because there will be more of them in clergy everywhere.

The two-year-old boy begins to identify with the male. With Daddy, if he has one, or with some other icon of masculinity if he must. Up to now, most children of both sexes have bonded with the female, because for most kids the mother or a female mother substitute has essentially been their everyday world. But the little boy has to start severing that bond, at least in terms of identification, or he can’t build a viable life. He has to start pushing away from the female identity. Hard. Very hard. Why so hard? Because for years to come, it would be possible to have his hair grown into ringlets and send him into the world in pink ruffles and call him Grace instead of George and have no one question it. George would have to pull down his bloomers and lift his skirt to prove he wasn’t Grace after all. So at some point after two, he’s going to start treating girls as though they have cooties. He won’t be as willing to hold Mom’s hand. His toybox will have tanks and trucks and guns, not dollies and tea sets. He’ll swagger like a B-Western film star and deepen his voice whenever he thinks there’s a question about who he is. He’s desperate to prove his masculinity.

The human brain doesn’t fully develop until around the age of twenty. So the little boy isn’t conscious of what he’s doing, and certainly he has no idea why. But a mantra sets up inside his head. It goes like this: I must prove I’m a man.

He’s not aware of the mantra, so even once he’s obviously male he doesn’t do anything to stop the chant. So it’s still going in his head, mostly quiet, but it gets louder and louder if something happens to threaten his masculinity, something that makes him insecure, that makes him doubt the success of this particular objective (proving he’s a man). And the closer that threat gets, the louder the chant gets, until he figures out what action to take that will make it go away, what action will take away the fear that he’s failed at this critical level of his own identity.

So now we’ll call on our homophobic bigot again. Remember that the “I must prove I’m a man” mantra is still there, more white noise than anything else most of the time. He’s actually terrified of me. Li’l ol’ me. Don’t believe me? Watch this.

There he is, leaning against his pickup truck doing his utmost to look manly and unassailable. Maybe his arms are crossed over his broad chest (he’s forgotten about the bulge beneath them where he keeps the innumerable beers he’s downed). And he’s glaring at me, the gay, the unnatural, the abnormal, the pedophile. There’s no need to think; he feels instinctively that everything about me is wrong. In one ear, his lizard brain is already screaming, “Eeeewww! Eeeewww! Eeeewww!” (Now, a lot of women would hear their lizard brains at this point, too; consider the idiot in Massachusetts. But the man also has another demon possessing him.)

I look at him, cock my head and throw him a flirtatious look, and then I move slowly toward him, my movements sultry. I don’t touch him, but I get close enough to hear him breathe. In the other ear, his mantra “I must prove I’m a man” gets louder.

“Hey, there,” I say, my voice silky and quiet. “Doing anything special tonight?” He doesn’t answer; he doesn’t know what to say, partly because his lizard brain is still screaming, and partly because his mantra is even louder now. I go on. “No?” A slight lift of my chin here. “I could change that.”

At this point, he’s totally deafened in one ear by his lizard brain and in the other by the mantra screaming, “I MUST PROVE I’M A MAN! I MUST PROVE…” He might just get the tire iron out of his car and bash me with it.

So when all the male clergy for whom homosexuality is unnatural have their lizard brains screaming in one ear and their mantra yelling in the other, they aren’t likely to do a lot of thinking. They don’t have to, because they believe the Bible has already done it for them. Instead of picking up a tire iron, they point to one of those five, maybe six places in the entire Bible that refer to men lying with men (the word homosexual didn’t exist, remember) and beat us to death with them. Never mind that they cherry pick these spots out of all the other sacred laws that are so conveniently ignored today. Never mind that society now has many ways for the elderly to provide for themselves, and not everyone has to pop out as many kids as possible. Never mind that homosexual people can now earn money and save it for retirement ourselves, so we’ll never be the charity cases of two thousand years ago. Never mind that we pay taxes that support the health care for everyone’s children (sometimes even our own). Never mind that we pay taxes that support public schools, even though most of us never have kids of our own. Never mind that instead of being drains on society, as would have been the case two thousand years ago, society is actually better off with us in it.

Gray matter? What’s that? There’s no need to think…

Prove they’re men? Yeah, I want them to prove they’re men. And not lizards.

As for my own tactics, while I’m not going to tell you what my religion is or even if I have one, and while all I’ll say about my belief system is that I use faith to bridge the gap between what I can prove and what I believe, I will tell you that I think Jesus was spot-on in those two all-important commandments from Matthew that I talked about in Part VII. I believe they are the most important tactics we can apply to achieve the objective of loving connection. So I do my best to live up to them. The first one, love God with all of yourself, requires that I know myself. I know this: I’m gay. And if you’ve read up to this point, you know that we’ve proven that homosexuality is a natural, normally occurring phenomenon. So guess what? I love God with that part of me, too. As for the second commandment of those two, love each other, again I do my best. Some of you make it extremely challenging, telling me how much God hates me. And some of you make me scream in frustration when you say you love me but you hate the sin of homosexuality in me. GET THIS: I AM GAY. Love me, love my orientation.

Shred that card. The one that says “Damned.”

Oh, there’s still sin here. There’s still a lot of missing the mark going on. Only it’s not the homosexuals doing the sinning—at least, not by virtue of being gay. What’s the objective? What did Jesus tell us? It’s all about love; all law depends on love. Anything that doesn’t create and support love is sin.

So where’s the sin? It’s with the people who create hatred and destroy connection. It’s with the people who hold up signs that say, “God hates fags.” It’s with anyone, anywhere, who fosters divisiveness and separation and pain and hatred and isolation and exclusion. It’s anyone who damns someone else.

And don’t fall for that old saw, “Love the sinner; hate the sin.” It’s a lie. It’s a lie because if someone insists on hating something that’s a foundational part of who you are, how can they love you? How can you ever feel loved? If they keep insisting, you should print out for them the section of this letter called “There’s no need to think; I feel instinctively this is wrong.”

Love the human; expose the lizard.

Shred the card.

And now a word for non-theists. I heard self-proclaimed atheist Ian McEwan (author of several best-selling novels, such as Saturday and Atonement) interviewed for a PBS program that was part of their Frontline series. The program is called “Faith & Doubt at Ground Zero.” While the program was one of the most thought-provoking things I’ve ever seen, I wasn’t especially impressed with the excerpt they included on McEwan. But he’s such a master with words that I felt sure he’d have had more to say. So I went to the PBS Web site, where I was able to download a complete transcript of his interview. What follows is the gist (paraphrased) of what had a tremendous impact on the atheist McEwan because of September 11th.

Historically, the only people whose last words on earth have become widely known have been people who were famous. And many times the words themselves have become politicized to serve some agenda on the part of the people who heard those words. September 11th changed that. Why? Because of Situation.

A huge number of people, non-famous people, within a very brief span of time, faced their deaths. They knew they were about to die. What did they do? What tactics did they take, based on this situation? They reached for their cell phone, or any phone that worked, and they called someone they loved. And they said, “I love you.” They made a connection, and they expressed love, knowing it would be the last thing they did on earth. These people were Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Pagans, Deists, Sikh, Hindu, Hmong, Shinto, atheists, agnostics—it didn’t matter. They reached for a device that their situation today made available, and they achieved their primary objective: they told someone “I love you.” We know this, because so many of these messages were captured on voicemail, answering machines—again, because today, our situation is such that these devices are available.

But the most important thing was that regardless of situation, regardless of religion or the lack of it, regardless of everything else, these dying people wanted loving connection. Some thought of it as heaven, some as God, some as humanity, some as the cosmos. But they all reached for this universal, immortal connection at the moment of their deaths.

The God card is everyone’s card—or anyone who wants it. It is not something any one of us can hold up to any other of us and yell, “Damned!” It’s not a weapon or an accusation or a judgment. It’s love. Use it.

There will be one more installment with a few of my own rambling thoughts about some of the challenges society throws at gays. Till next time… know yourself; love yourself.