When I first saw the news on the morning of June 12, 2016, it registered first as yet another sad example of gun violence in our society.  The tragic events at Virginia Tech where 32 were killed, Sandy Hook Elementary where 27 were killed, shootings in Fort Hood, Texas and Binghamton, New York that each claimed 13 lives are examples from the last decade that illustrate the swift and permanent impact of gun violence in our modern world. People did these things.  Individuals whose motives are as shrouded in mystery as they are diverse.  We are left to speculate from the wreckage they leave behind.

Oh my god…

As the morning of June 12th went on, I felt unsettled but also unable to focus on what had happened in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.  I knew the basics as reported by the news media.  Nearly 100 people had been killed or injured at a popular gathering spot for the gay community by a man who had taken the time to phone the media and declare his allegiance to Islamic extremists before opening fire on unsuspecting and defenseless people.  The initial reports suggested that it was perhaps the shooter’s religious faith that motivated his actions.

Although I have abandoned any belief in a god at this point in my life, I was raised as a Christian and I must admit to being largely ignorant of the beliefs and religious tenets of the Islamic faith. In the days following the shooting, I tried to better understand what would motivate a young Muslim man to do something like this.  I listened to Muslims and Muslim clerics on YouTube, I read more about the Islamic beliefs regarding homosexuality, and I tried to understand how those beliefs could translate into violence.  With more than 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, I would expect far more acts like these if these beliefs were central to the Islamic faith.  Apparently, much like my experience with Christianity, much is open to interpretation.  The acts of one individual do not necessarily represent the beliefs of other Muslims.

I said in the beginning this piece that I am not just a “straight, white man” and I think it is unfair to stop any description of the Orlando shooter at “a young, Muslim man.”  His religious beliefs may have played a significant role in this tragedy.  But devout Muslims and Muslim leaders around the world were swift and emphatic in their condemnation of the shooting.  While this young man may be associated with Islam, Islam did not in any institutional sense publicly praise or endorse his acts.  In fact, I read with astonishment reports of Christian leaders praising the shooting. To me it seems that this was one man acting on his personal beliefs, not on behalf of any ideology.

Carefully chosen targets

The fact that this tragedy occurred in a nightclub popular with the gay community hit me particularly hard.  I have been fortunate to call many gay and lesbian people “friend” over the years. Many of the people I dearly love have a same-sex orientation and it is through those relationships that I have come to understand the many challenges that gay and lesbian people face on a day to day basis in our society.  I have watched for the last 40 years, sometimes in anger and sometimes in joy, as our society has adapted and become more accepting of those with same-sex orientation. And so the fact that such violence was done to individuals who have more than their share of adversity was particularly upsetting for me.

I am grateful that we live in a culture that allows people of similar interests to gather freely.  Whether it is a gay nightclub or retail store for those who enjoy hunting and fishing, our society is supposed to provide for peaceful and safe places for people to gather.  The fact that this one gunman could enter that nightclub armed as he was is deeply troubling.  Not only could one of my gay or lesbian loved ones have been in that club, I could have been in there with them.  I have been invited to go out with gay friends before and they have always been accepting of me as a “straight.” This was not just an assault on the gay community, it was an assault on gathering places of all kinds.  In a very real sense, it made me feel that none of us are as safe as we might think.

The Orlando shooter may have targeted a gay nightclub for his own reasons but this is not just a “gay issue” for me.  I don’t feel separate from the gay people in my life.  My life is intertwined with theirs.  Where they go, I go.  Their interests are my interests on many levels.  How can I not feel a sense of being targeted when those I love are targeted by hate?  I think we have come too far as a society to try to separate ourselves now.  This was not just an attack on the gay community; it was an attack on us all.

Gunpoint

Guns make me profoundly uncomfortable.  I have never owned one and on the very few occasions where I have had the opportunity to fire one recreationally, the immense power of these weapons terrified me.  Once the trigger is pulled, there is no taking it back.  We are at a point in our culture where the availability of guns is just a reality.  They are simply there.  Whenever I am out in public, I have to be aware that there may be one or more guns being carried by any of the people around me and that, at any time for their own reasons, one of those people could choose to use that gun.  But would more strict gun control laws have prevented the Orlando shooting?  I don’t think so.  It’s more complicated than that.

Technology moves forward with our human evolution.  Guns are just another technology.  In my view, it is not the technology that is the problem so much as it is the application of that technology that we should be concerning ourselves with.  Gun rights activists often make the argument that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” and I agree with that sentiment.  Unfortunately, guns do make it remarkably easy and efficient to kill people.  Much like other technologies, guns seem to get better at their job as time goes on.  But I don’t see the value in blaming the tool instead of how it it used.  Why are people shooting people?  It’s a big question but it is much closer to the center of the problem, I think, than just taking the guns away.

I wish it were simple

Over the past couple of weeks, I have seen a lot of discussion about the Orlando shooting.  There has been endless finger-pointing – “It is the Muslims.”  “It is the Gays.”  “It is the Gun advocates.”  “The FBI messed up.”  “The police should have done something.”  “Where were his parents.” and more.  It isn’t just one of those things and yet it is all of those things.  It’s hard to process for me.

I am an atheist.  As such, I don’t believe in a life for me beyond this one.  This life is what I have and I have to make the best of it that I can.  I treasure the people that share this life with me; the black, brown, gay, straight, nerds, rednecks – all of them.  It terrifies me that any one of them could be taken from me in an instant because someone chooses to treat them as a label instead of a human being with a life and loved ones.

Perhaps most terrifying of all is that it could be me.  After all, I am among the “godless ones” that some find abhorrent.  Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter, had his reasons for killing and maiming the people he did.  Who is to say that someone else might not find a reason to do the same to me.  Or you.  It is just so mind-bogglingly big and complicated that it’s hard to come to terms with.  But I don’t think that excuses any of us from making the effort.  If we don’t think about these things and try to find solutions, it never gets better.  And I think it has to get better.  For all of our sakes.  I don’t think we can afford to let it be “someone else’s problem” any longer.

The speculation on whether this statement – and others made by the pope since then – signalled a sea change in how the Catholic Church treats homosexuality and LGBTQ persons has been endless and loud. Francis himself claims that as “a son of the Church” he cannot and does not wish to change its doctrine, but he has also made it clear that he wishes the Church both to take a more merciful attitude to those who have been marginalized in the past and to shift its energies away from policing doctrinal orthodoxy and in the direction of reaching out with love – to all humans, not just heterosexual, obedient Catholics.

But it is difficult for the Church, as it is for other churches and other religions, not to judge when much of its doctrine is based on judgment. An insistence on moral absolutism implies that the one insisting possesses the wisdom, the knowledge, and the authority necessary to determine what is right and what is wrong, who is right and who is wrong on every moral issue. Perhaps Francis is seeking to soften this insistence and the often harsh judgments resulting from it; to this Holy Father, it appears, moral absolutism must be tempered with mercy and love.

Meanwhile, in spite of Francis’s apparent encouragement of a more reasonable and more pastoral approach, the Catholic Church in the United States continues to marshal its moral and financial resources, at the front lines of the culture wars, in fierce opposition to the legal enfranchisement of gay rights in that country (while their Canadian Excellencies lost the battle many years ago). However, losses in recent skirmishes – the Supreme Court overturning DOMA and effectively burying California’s Proposition 8; the legalization of same-sex marriage in an increasing number of states through popular vote or legislation; courts in other states declaring illegal constitutional amendments affirming marriage as only between one man and one woman – may be signalling that a more conciliatory approach is not too far down the road. The pope’s often stated requirement that the names of more pastoral clergypersons be put forward for possible appointment to the office of bishop may speed this process.

Perhaps because the Holy Father is a Jesuit himself, the Jesuits in the U.S. have made the first formal public gesture of any substance in bringing the two sides of this issue, as it is being played out in the Church, closer together. Moral philosopher and Georgetown University professor John P. Langan, S.J. has written a thoughtful and very carefully worded piece, entitled “See the Person,” in the Jesuit journal America. In his article Father Langan attempts first to “read [Francis’s] words and actions and offer suggestions about how to construe them so that they form a coherent picture.” Langan believes that the pope, while unwilling (and perhaps unable) to change or reverse doctrine, is attempting to modify the Church’s stance on homosexuality to one that is “more discerning, more compassionate.” The author implies that the pope’s public rethinking of the issue stems both from who he is and from the fact that the “traditional view [of the Church on homosexuality] is now widely regarded as vulnerable, embarrassing and unpersuasive.”

Father Langan suggests that “four important elements should mark a new stance toward homosexuals and homosexuality.” These are humility (both sides must acknowledge what they don’t know); “respect for the dignity of homosexual persons”; acknowledgement of “the problems of perception and trust that complicate our efforts to understand and collaborate with one another”; and patience on all sides.

The conclusion to the article is that there must indeed be a change in the way that the Church treats LGBTQ persons; the “principal change would not be in the teaching of the church on the moral acceptability of homosexual activity, but in affirming and practicing pastoral ministry for persons engaged in irregular or questionable unions.”

It is refreshing and encouraging to witness the courage of a member of the clergy of the Catholic Church in suggesting in a public forum that the stance of his Church on the issue of homosexuality is in need of change. Moreover, Father Langan has clearly laboured painstakingly to present a balanced view of the problem, to mitigate the intransigence, the anger, and the hostility that has characterized this argument and to raise it to the level of a dialogue marked by respect and open-mindedness. Many will see his article as a significant step toward a meeting of Catholic hearts and minds on a delicate topic.

I am afraid that I am not one of the many. First, if Father Langan and others hope that his essay will become the basis for a broader discussion of bringing the Church and Catholic LGBTQ persons closer together, they must first understand that the exclusive use of the word “homosexual” to refer to gay people is going to be an obstacle to fruitful dialogue; anyone who has even marginally followed the gay rights movement over the past 45 years is aware that the term “homosexual” reflects the view that being gay is a disorder and that it will be taken by the vast majority of gay people as both ignorant and insulting.

Father Langan’s article also demonstrates a lack of understanding of the LGBTQ community when he uses terms such as “gay and lesbian agendas,” “alternative lifestyles” and “personal choice” in reference to sexual orientation, and “irregular and questionable unions” in reference to gay relationships. It is common knowledge in contemporary life that being gay is not an alternative lifestyle, unless marginalization constitutes an alternative lifestyle; in fact, as Langan himself acknowledges, more and more LGBTQ people are choosing so-called traditional lifestyles by marrying their partners, raising children, and buying homes in suburbia. And it is even more ludicrous to refer to being gay as a personal choice. Who would consciously choose to be closeted or ridiculed or bullied or rejected by their families and their church?

The most fundamental flaw in Father Langan’s approach lies in what he so valiantly attempts to accomplish: to validate the arguments of each side. While it is admirable on the surface, the problem with this approach is that validating the argument of the traditionalist side automatically invalidates that of the LGBTQ side. What if we were to say to left-handers: “We know that we have treated you badly in the past and that it might be wrong for us to force you to use your right hand, so we are going to offer you more compassion and greater pastoral care. Nevertheless, we still think that you are disordered and we are pretty sure that we should not approve of using the left hand.” The tone and language of Father Langan’s article will lead just about every gay person who reads it to believe this is exactly what he is saying about him or her.

A teaching, a tradition, a doctrine, even a stance is a construct, albeit often a complex one. None of these is a human being created in the image of God. An LGBTQ person is just such a human being, and science has shown that he or she is in no way disordered, unless marginalization, rejection, or demonization has disordered that person. An LGBTQ person is equal in every way – in intelligence, in creativity, in holiness, in the ability to love and in the need to be loved – to a straight person. Any theology, any religious teaching that places this community in the category of “other” is not only flawed; it is immoral.

If Pope Francis is telling the Church through his words and through the example of his behaviour that the first duty of the faithful is to set aside judgment in favour of the practice of unconditional love, there is hope that the Catholic LGBTQ community will find a home in the Church. While Father Langan’s essay reflects deep thought and careful consideration of a sensitive issue, it does not reflect an understanding and appreciation of gay people as whole human beings, which is a necessary starting point, in my view, of accepting us as full members of the Church.

Image Credit

“Visita Papa Brasil” by Semilla Luz. Creative Commons Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Zach Wahls is an incredibly well spoken 19-year-old University of Iowa student who was raised by two mothers, both lesbians. Zach recently spoke about his family during a public forum on House Joint Resolution 6 in the Iowa House of Representatives. This sixth generation Iowan came to the House of Representatives to oppose House Joint Resolution 6 which would end civil unions in Iowa.

Zach told the House that he’s an Eagle Scout, owner of his own small business, and he’s an engineering student at the University of Iowa.

In 2009, Iowa became the third state in the United States to say yes to same sex marriage but the clock has been wound backwards. Yesterday a constitutional ban on gay marriage, civil unions and domestic partnerships passed the Iowa House by a vote of 62-37. Democratic Reps. Dan Muhlbauer, Brian Quirk and Kurt Swaim joined 59 Republicans in support of the measure. Thirty-seven Democrats voted no ; one Republican was absent.

Watch Zach Wahls’ speech to the Iowa House of Representatives:

Last week we featured “The Bible Tells Me So. Oh Really? Part 1” This week, Ross Lonergan looks at how the church’s treatment of gay people can contribute to depression, family break-ups and even suicide.

When she was away at college, Anna wrote to her mother and told her that she was gay. Mary Lou reacted to this news by first going to the bathroom and throwing up and “then just going completely underground, not telling anybody and being ashamed and embarrassed.” She wrote her daughter back and told her “some things…that were not very loving.”

This is part of what she wrote: “Undoubtedly the most difficult part of your letter is the gay thing. I will never accept that in you. I feel it’s a terrible waste, besides being spiritually and morally wrong. For a reason I don’t quite fathom I have a harder time dealing with that issue than almost anything in the world. I do and will continue to love you, but I will always hate that.”

Mary Lou thought her daughter’s sexuality was a choice and that “she needed to just get her act together and stop this.”

The letter caused an irreparable break between daughter and mother. Ten months later, before there could be any reconciliation, Mary Lou’s daughter took her own life by hanging herself from the bar in her bedroom closet.

The death of her daughter led Mary Lou to question what she had been taught by her church—that being gay was a choice, for example—and to begin to research the subject of homosexuality for herself.

What she learned was this: “…instead of taking the Bible literally, I have to take it in the context and culture of the day in which it was written.” She has since become an activist for the advancement of gay rights and for the understanding of gay and lesbian people by the church.

Jorge Valencia of the Trevor Project Suicide Hotline says, “It’s estimated that every five hours an LGBT teen takes his life, and for every teen that takes his or her own life, there are twenty more who try. One of the top five reasons why teenagers call us is for religious reasons. They’re feeling there isn’t a place for them and God.”

And Reverend Jimmy Creech of Faith in America says, “The church, because of its teachings that homosexuality is sinful, is wrong, is a perversion, has created the climate in which gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered children growing up feel very much in conflict with the world in which they live. It really shapes their thinking so that they hate themselves, so that they internalize this judgment and condemnation.”

In The Bible Tells Me So, a number of clergy members, including biblical scholars like Reverend Peter J. Gomes of Harvard Divinity School, stress the wisdom and importance of reading the Bible in the context of the period and culture in which it was written. They point out, for example, that the famous prohibition against homosexuality in Leviticus—“If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall be put to death. Their blood is upon them”—does not exist in isolation from other abominations: eating shrimp, planning two different seeds in the same hole, co-mingling crops, eating a rabbit, and so on.

Moreover, biblical scholarship has determined that in the Hebrew Bible the word abomination “is always used to address a ritual wrong. It never is used to refer to something innately immoral. Eating pork was not innately immoral for a Jew, but it was an abomination because it was a violation of a ritual requirement.”

It is not a stretch to say that selective reading of the Bible, as a constitution, led to the tragic death of Mary Lou Wallner’s daughter and has led to the deaths of many other young people. It has also resulted in closeted lives of fear, self-loathing, and confusion for countless numbers of LGBT teenagers who do not take their own lives. In this age of information, where the truth of both scripture and homosexuality are readily available, the choice of pastors and laypersons to not only remain ignorant but to preach in ignorance is, in the sense of the word as they so like to use it, an abomination.

In A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren suggests an alternative metaphor for the Bible; his suggestion is that we think of the Bible as a library, which is “a collection of documents.” His rationale for the use of this metaphor is that “in a good library you want to present all sides of an issue. A good library preserves key arguments; a good constitution eliminates all arguments.”

A library is a sacred place of ideas. For every argument you find there, you will find a counter-argument, made with the same intelligence, with the same love for truth as the first. This interplay of ideas promotes growth—spiritual, intellectual, and emotional. If we can see the Bible as a library rather than as a constitution, Christian churches and Christian families might begin to have respectful and loving conversations that include the LGBT members of those churches and those families and that allow them to be who they are.

If you have not seen The Bible Tells Me So, I highly recommend it. You can watch it on YouTube in nine parts.

Photo Credits

“No Way, Ken” Bobster855 @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

We found this video “When Did You Choose to Be Straight?” on YouTube and really thought it was worth showing in light of the articles we’ve been running on the “It Gets Better” campaign in support of LGBT youth. These street interviews, conducted by Travis Nuckolls and Chris Baker in Colorado Springs, prove that “asking the right question can be more important than anything you can tell someone.”

href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJtjqLUHYoY&feature=player_embedded

“Nellie Norton was a novel to celebrate the greatness of slavery, and the subtitle was basically something like this: How the Bible is a pro-slavery Bible and God is a pro-slavery God. Now, that turns your stomach to hear that now but we haven’t had any scrutiny about the way we read the Bible. We’re still using it the same way.”

We are indeed still using the Bible the same way. In fact, many claim today that the Bible is an anti-gay Bible and God is an anti-gay God.

For the Bible Tells Me So is a moving documentary that came out a few years ago and made the rounds of the film festivals; I’m not sure whether it ever found its way into general release. The film is about Christian parents with gay children.

The documentary looks at five families, including Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop elected in the Episcopal Church, and his parents, and former U.S. presidential candidate Richard Gephardt and his wife and their lesbian daughter Chrissy. In the film we learn of the struggle of the parents to come to terms, in the context of their own religious upbringing and beliefs, with the sexual orientation of their children and with their own prejudices and their fears for their children’s safety and well-being. The film also examines the fears and misgivings faced by gay and lesbian children in religious families as they hear the condemnations of homosexuality in their churches and as they consider coming out to their parents.

The Bible is a major character in this documentary as it is quoted by pastors and laypeople alike in order to condemn homosexuality and homosexuals. There are numerous clips of preachers railing against homosexuality; the most common word that is used is “abomination.” One preacher, Jimmy Swaggart, says to his congregation: “I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. If one ever looks at me like that, I’m gonna kill him and tell God he died.” He goes on to say—with no awareness of the irony of his statement—that “God calls homosexuality an abomination. It’s an abomination! It’s an abomination!”

A parent of a lesbian daughter and husband of a Christian minister, says, “I’ve learned enough about the Bible now to understand God. I understand how God works, how Jesus works.” A little later, when talking about his two children, he has this to say: “When my kids were growing up, I said, ‘God, please don’t let my son grow up to be a faggot and my daughter a slut’. And he did not…he did not do that. He reversed it (laughs).”

Gene Robinson, who was a model Christian boy in his childhood church, says, “From ten to eleven on Sunday morning everyone was in Sunday school class, [which] was always and only focused on the Bible. So we were absolutely steeped in scripture.” From the seventh grade, Robinson knew that he was different from the other boys his age and he immediately realized that he must keep this difference to himself. “I was always familiar with what the Bible said: Anyone who is thought to be ‘that way’ was an abomination before God.”

All of the stories in For the Bible Tells Me So are compelling. The senior Robinsons, southerners and members their whole lives (they are in their late seventies when the film is shot) of the Church of the Disciples of Christ, deeply and unconditionally love their son. The Gephardts are willing to forego Richard’s quest for the presidency if their daughter feels the campaign—and Gephardt believes her being a lesbian will be an issue in the campaign—is in any way going to be painful for her.

For me, the most powerful story in the film is that of Mary Lou Wallner and her daughter Anna. Mary Lou was raised in a family of fundamentalist believers and attended “a conservative, Bible-believing church” every Sunday of her childhood and her adult life. In her Christian community, “everything in the Bible was taken literally and there were rules about everything.”

The church that Mary Lou was attending taught that homosexuality was a sin—and not just a sin but the sin of all sins. “I didn’t really study the Bible at all about [homosexuality], but I did pull out those passages and read them and certainly used them against Anna, later.”

To be continued….

If you have not seen For the Bible Tells Me So, I highly recommend it. You can watch it on YouTube in nine parts. This is the trailer….

href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpJAucyX7RE&feature=related

Photo Credits

“Pride Bigots Get Police Protection” Gay Liberation Network @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

“Laramie: Probably the best moment of this entire production was during the cast party. Someone had brought these two signs to the party and around midnight most of the cast and crew walked down to the beach with them. We stood in a circle and lit both of the signs on fire…” Arbron @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.