Lats night I had a Facebook blow out with a Christian fundamentalist cousin. It started because he had the gall to post a long Bible quote about how homosexuality is a sin on my mother’s Facebook page when she had shared this quote from Bishop Desmond Tutu:
“I can’t for the life of me imagine that God will say, ‘I will punish you because you are black; you should have been white. I will punish you because you are a woman; you should have been a man. I punish you because you are homosexual; you ought to have been heterosexual. I can’t, I can’t for the life of me believe that that is how God sees things.”
Firstly, and most importantly, good on my mom for being a very supportive person, who actively works for LGBT civil rights. That is a huge huge blessing.
My first response to this cousin was to say that this view was his own interpretation and that there are plenty of Christian leaders who do not agree with him, and who find other ways to interpret the Bible that are inclusive of and loving to the LGBT community. I also pointed out that the Bible at times seems to support slavery and historically it has been used to condone slavery. Point being that not everything in the Bible is applied literally, even by the fundamentalist Christians, and it shouldn’t be, since it includes some really inhumane stuff that I don’t think should be part of any society.
Of course, his retort was the whole “love the sinner hate the sin” thing. And this sounds to me like very shallow kind of love, a sad kind of love without a heart. A love that doesn’t actually require you to love anyone, but is supposed to somehow make you look better. Make you look like you’re not a hater. But the only people fooled by that trick are the other haters. When phrases like “love the sinner hate the sin” are spit out at you and meanwhile your civil rights are getting trampled on, it sure doesn’t feel like love. So if that’s the kind of love someone has for the LGBT community, well you know we can live without it. LGBT people deserve to be loved because of who we are, not in spite of it.
And his second retort was to claim that only his view is real or true, and that all those other Christians out there who don’t agree with him are “fake” Christians just trying to be PC. Well if Bishop Tutu is a fake Christian, I’ll be darned. And if trying to love and accept people for real, not in some grudging way, is reducible to being “PC” (the dreaded curse word of the right), then it is just more evidence of the twisted paths we invent in order to avoid having to practice love.
This claim that only his point of view was real and all others could be immediately dismissed, that he holds the only key to the door of truth, that he is the sole possessor of the meaning of God — that is the most dangerous thing in the world. If someone can think this way, they are on the path to dictatorship. If you know all truth and can dismiss all others, what do you need democracy for? What do you need other voices in the society for? Why allow them to speak? And if you do allow them to speak, what motivation have you to listen? What motivation have you to learn from anyone else? This perspective is the one that starts and continues wars. I see it in action, I know what it looks like. There are some key ideas that one must abide by if one is to build a just and pluralistic society, and that includes valuing different voices and having the humility to accept that you may not know everything. Having the humility to be open to learning from other people.
I have to add here, though, that there is reason for me to feel positive. Because I realized through this fallout that I have gained more strength. I am finding the ability to look this stuff in the face and speak back to it. Earlier in the day yesterday, I was listening to a sermon given by Rev Otis Moss III, who is pastor at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. And Rev Moss made some very powerful points. He said that we should not just listen to our story from the perspective of people who hate us or oppress us. We should not passively identify with their version of our story, because in their version we are going to be at the bottom and we are going to always be the losers and the bad people who should be hated. So we need to instead tell our own stories, bring our own perspectives out there. When I thought about that last night, when I was hearing the story my fundamentalist cousin wants to tell about the LGBT community, I thought “I don’t have to assess myself through the story he tells about me. I get to tell my own story.” And I did. And I will. I felt like I could look his story in the face, stand up and say – “No, I have another story to tell and it is about love and acceptance. That’s my story.”
A UU in Israel 