There is an eerie parallelism in two excellent and heart-rending articles I've read recently. One is by a gay Orthodox rabbi and the other is about a nascent gay movement being born within Islam. (Really, the parallelism isn't all that eerie, on further thought.)
I do, I really, really, do believe that the issues of gay rights including marriage will turn out to be the human rights issue of this decade, as civil rights were a generation ago and as religious discrimination was a generation before that (and a generation before that, and a generation after, and right this minute in some places. Actually, on further thought again (some day I'll try thinking before writing), given that religious issues have been around for a couple of millenia and that race issues were at a rolling boil during both the 1860s and the 1960s, it may be stupid to talk about "the issue of the decade". What I menat earlier by that phrase is that I believe gay rights will be the sort of step-function issue where once we've gotten past this part of it, we will be incredulous to think what an issue it once was.
There are people out there who believe that all homosexuals are sick, twisted, perverse, evil and disgusting, just as there are people who believe that one race or another is animal or that all adherents of other religions are plotting to take over the world. It is possible to convert that sort of person, because it's been done, but I am neither saintly nor persuasive enough to do it so I don't bother to try. (This may be a moral failing on my part. After all, I compete in races I know I'll lose just for the glory of trying.)
With the race issue, in the past, there were also people of good intentions who just happened to be wrong in the judgement of history. There were good Christians who did not believe in hurting anyone, but who honestly belived the Bible forbade miscegenation.
There was Abraham Lincoln, who wanted the slaves freed but who told Frederick Douglass their two races could never meet as intimates. Douglass said, "Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man. He was preeminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country." Yet this was in a speech praising Lincoln and all he had done to free the slaves, referring to him as "friend and liberator"! Clearly, Douglass knew a man may be wrong in part and still be great.
There was Thomas Jefferson, who tried to outlaw slavery in the Declaration of Independence and who stood with those trying to do so in the Federalist days, who continued to own slaves because he did not believe that people bred as slaves could survive as free men and women. He once wrote to express a qualified opinion, stating that he might at any time be disproven by data, that given equal oppportunities, American Indians could equal whites but that Africans never would.
The vast majority of Americans celebrate Lincoln's and Jefferson's ideals while realizing they were tragically wrong on some points. In more recent examples, some of the most ardent Southern segrationists including Alabama's Governor George Wallace lived to admit they had been wrong. I hope and believe that in time the same will happen with today's issues.
For people of good will struggling with the gay issues now, there are a few things to consider. If it's a religious issue for you, bear in mind that most of you are reading a translation, and there is no such thing as a perfect translation between languages. The original passage in Leviticus usually taken to prohibit homosexuality is nothing if not obscure -- and besides, like Queen Victoria it only mentions men. I understand, too, that for many hetero people there's a squick factor, but the same was true in the segregated South on the subject of interracial dating -- and in most cases we only get past that even for "approved" kinds of couples by not thinking about the issue. If your first grade teacher was much like mine, pointing out that she likely did have sex with her husband will get the point across.
Then again, perhaps your first grade teacher had a partner of her own sex and was afraid to mention it in the community.
Posted by dichroic at May 26, 2004 01:29 PM