Until I reached my late teens, the issue of gay rights had always seemed trivial to me.
I wondered, why expend so much political capital on paltry recognitions like the right to a civil union or marriage when doing so could compromise the fight for the environment, economic justice and a host of other issues by empowering the “Christian right” and enabling them to wage their perpetual war on America’s most vulnerable citizens?
The concept of politics as coalition building and division of labor never entered my head. It did not occur to me that, if neither side became too dogmatic, that more conservative advocates for the poor could support the gay rights movement at certain junctures and that gay rights campaigners would also succor the former in their endeavors to protect the working class and the Earth.
Upon further reflection, I realized that the right to marry, with its host of tax benefits and other economic rights, did not constitute a nice privilege, but a fundamental recognition of equality. I came to see that I had been using the same rationale white moderates had utilized to avoid standing with the black freedom movement in the 20th century: it doesn’t really matter what part of the bus they have to sit in. It’s a small insult, really, in the grand scheme of things.
Of course, people need those basic recognitions of their humanity most of all, and to have that recognition denied poisons a person’s soul.
Make no mistake, violence every bit as disgusting as that perpetrated by the white supremacist movement upon the marchers in Selma and Birmingham is being visited upon gays the world over. In Russia, Putin has rammed through his “gay propaganda” legislation. Homophobic militias there have taken to deceiving gay Russians into meeting with them in real life via the Internet, and then beating them mercilessly when they take the bait.
In Uganda, thugs and psychotic seminarians, supported by fundamentalist radicals from the U.S., are perpetrating an anti-gay pogrom. In the U.S., James Dobson and other clerical hatemongers of the church’s far-right wing still propagate the notion of the Judeo-Christian God as a cosmic prison warden, holding gays, Democrats and non-Christians in eternal detention.
And then of course there is the psychological torture that homophobia inflicts on gay men and women every day. Gay kids and teens wake up in certain “Christian” households every day, and flagellate themselves for what they have been told are “unnatural” feelings. Sometimes, they cannot take the strain and spiral into major depression, sometimes ending with the quick, final clap of a self-inflicted gunshot.
It is time for Americans to remember our basic values. There is an Islamic proverb that says, “Beware the cries of the oppressed, for there is no screen between them and God.” Americans must remember this injunction if we are to purge our national soul of the blot of hatred.
