With the rainbow flags waving in the breeze, there couldn’t be a better time for a voice of reason as mine to speak on such an important issue. For freshman and transfer students, let me bring you up to speed. When the flags came up last year during Gay Pride Week, I wrote a letter that opposed their display, which I perceived as excessive freedom of speech. An information booth or desk outside the Union is totally cool-I just thought the flags were too much because other groups would never be allowed the same privilege. I believe in equality.
However, some of my fans called me a right-wing Christian fanatic and other ugly things. So if they’re going to make it a religious issue, I’ll reluctantly play along. And since members of the gay and lesbian community pride themselves on promoting an open dialogue, I’m sure they’ll welcome this article. Hopefully, they’ll respond more appropriately then their tirade of last year that followed my letter. In this column, I hope to give some guidance and explanation to both the gay and lesbian community and the Christian right.
Jesus of Nazareth and his followers taught tolerance and love, but they also taught obedience-and homosexuality, along with adultery, sorcery, lying, lust and other actions, is a sin. The gay and lesbian community are not the only target of the Christian right today. I admit that they are the most persecuted of these behavioral groups, but it pales in comparison to other groups’ suffering. Members of the gay and lesbian community use the term “diversity” as a nice buzzword because it is difficult to oppose and it places them in the same camp of other persecuted minority groups.
The problem is that instead of seeing “sexual diversity,” some of us see “sexual perversity.” In reality, there is no sexual diversity in the United States because some sexual acts are so perverse they are illegal. Where are their freedoms? Why are they not socially acceptable? It’s all about perceptions, and some of us perceive homosexuality as being perverse. If the gay and lesbian community doesn’t defend all sexual activities or try to make them legal, then they’re hypocrites. And if someone doesn’t draw the line, who’s to say that in a few decades from now, illegal practices will become acceptable through grass roots protest? Should homosexuality be illegal? No, but being opposed to “sexual diversity” is not the same as opposition to “racial diversity,” and you know it.
The First Amendment guarantees me the right to label any practice morally wrong. However, the Fourth Amendment states that people have the right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects,” and “shall not be violated” without due process of law. Therefore, any “Christian” that conducts his or her own form of vigilante justice against the gay and lesbian community should be thrown in jail for hate crimes. On the other hand, the gay and lesbian community should never use the deaths of Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena to silence any form of opposition-and it does. Where’s the open dialogue in that? It’s no different from the Zionists using the Holocaust to expunge Palestine of its native inhabitants since 1948.
So why does the gay and lesbian community meet so much resistance? First of all, Christian groups today resist practices they view as immoral-and homosexuality is a practice, along with drug use, pornography and gambling. Secondly, anyone who tries to make his or her private behavior into a public lifestyle is asking for trouble. Let’s hope that the Christian right and the gay and lesbian community keep their debate in a legal framework-let democracy work.
As far as this article and last year’s letter is concerned, I’m not sorry for what I’ve said. I am sorry if you are offended, but I tried to explain in the simplest way I know how. Maybe I don’t understand your point of view. Then again, maybe you don’t understand my point of view. Maybe we should all try to understand each other.