I have begun a series of short YouTube videos about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer issues. In particular, I’m interested in the conflict around faith and sexuality that causes so much strife and oppression for LGBTQ people and their loved ones. Serious stuff for a queer comic to tackle.
How come in 2012 people are still overwhelmed with the idea of two men or two women together? Is it that people are held hostage to the Bible and the way they insist on interpreting it? Or is there some other big fat pink elephant in the room distracting them from an adult conversation? I am sure there are many reasons, but I must confess, I am partly to blame, or part of me.
Like you, my brother, I talk to lots of conservative people. Whether they mention their religious affiliation or not, their basic ideas about homosexuality are from religious doctrine. You’re right, that there is a level of obsessive interest in maintaining the conversation at a superficial level. For them, they can only speak in the abstract about sexual practices, disease and lack of sexual restraint among gay people.
While usually, we try to keep the conversation at least in the realm of social responsibility and fairness in being self determined and self reliant.
Still very superficial, but the lack of self awareness that bigoted ideals requires is a major part of it too.
Lack of awareness of just how hypocritical a religious person will be.
And lacking in just how much they contradict the very terms they expect themselves and others to live by.
Their ideals are stemming from 66 books or so, written during times of illiteracy and fear of things that were strange and not easily defined.
The issue of gender, the role of gender and artificial standards of enforcing it, are what’s actually in effect here.
No one should still be arguing that females are only bound by a small amount of standards of behavior and dress, and that males are as well.
And those standards ARE artificial, but to hear a conservative religious person tell it, they aren’t. They are natural.
It’s not moral revisionism to remind the conservatives we speak to, not only of the determined human progress since then, but that gay human beings have traveled the distance of time and human history along with everyone else.
The FACT that homosexuality, and it’s universality has remained very stable and unchanging in that history, where religious principles and enforcement has not been.
The moral definitions of sins, are essentially about how one human being treats another. Those are results and actions that never change.
The religious definition of sins, is not essential to the enforcement of morals, and in fact, is not in our country.
However, it’s been revisionist, and also a conflation, that morals and virtue, have something to do with sexual orientation, but not how people treat others WITH their orientation.
And there is a contradiction in the terms of living under the Constitution and Bill of Rights protections meant for all of us, and using those documents to exclude all over again over a strictly RELIGIOUS belief, and not how gay citizens have conducted their lives along with other citizens in the same way.
It’s a blindness, and inexcusable blindness to the very good things that have bound us, like equal rights and protections, in favor of religious doctrine, which in fact, that has not.
It’s reasonable to argue those places and situations where all of us have benefited from equality, and no one has suffered from it.
Especially not the religious.
This indifference to benefiting from not just the laws, but also the LABORS of gay citizens, flies in the face of how immoral it is, to at once vilify those you DO benefit from.
And, we can also point out, to what benefit to society has there EVER been, to holding someone down based strictly on ideals of gender, and not what that person has actually done or accomplished? What morality is there, in assuming that being gay IS the full content of character, any more than one’s gender or color is assumed to be?
Very religious people, in their way, considering how superficially and with little complexity to their argument, have given themselves no reason to be deeper, think in a more complex manner, or confront their low level comfort zone.
It’s permission for someone and SOMETHING (the Bible) to absolve them from independent thought, or responsibility for the harm they cause.
This harm IS a tangible, as are the results of equal treatment under the law. Many who are religious already accept, and rightfully, that there are non believers who coexist with them, under the same laws.
There are gay and not gay, parent and non parent couples. People who use contraception and people who do.
And it harms nothing and no one, to have this coexistence be respected as possible, acceptable and NECESSARY to individual responsibility and independence.
There are Christians and other people of faith, who must understand that, wearing their religion on their chests is no measure of character or virtue.
It’s their deeds that will always matter. And when your deeds harm an entire group of people, who in fact are doing no harm, then you do not hold the moral high ground on a say so.
Not every website can cover every story. I saw an article on GoodAsYou that there is a big Family Conference in Madrid Spain, NOM, FRC, AFTAH (Americans for Truth About Homosexuality)
This ticked me off. It is like they are exporting American hatred around the world, just like they did in Uganda.
Maybe we can all take a little quick action. I went on the internet and found what I think is a big gay organization in Madrid. I called and talked to Juan Carlos. He did not know anything about America’s biggest anti gay HATE GROUPS meeting in his city this week-end so I sent him an e-mail with the information and asked him to protest.
This is the conference
Madrid, Palacio de Congresos, mayo 25 a 27 https://www.worldcongress.org/wcfnl/wcfnl.cur.pdf
And here is Juan Carlo’s e-mail
gayinform@cogam.es
I used Google Translate to send him my message https://translate.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wT
If I could ask all of you to send Juan Carlos an e-mail I bet that more e-mails will help. After all just getting one e-mail from one person may not make much of an impression. We still have time to act. Will you kindly take a moment and ask Juan Carlos via e-mail to Protest and send Videos?
AFTAH (Peter LaBarbera) is in Madrid? Wow.
Straight Grandmother hit it. Spain’s new President has vowed to reverse marriage equality in that country and support similar measures to DOMA here in the uS.
I’m guessing too, that Peter LaB can help stir up the masses to support it, considering the win this President had after saying what he did.
How many years has it been that marriage has been legal there? The President didn’t win on that platform, it was mostly economic issues. They are in trouble very much like Greece. I don’t think the marriage issue will be the priority the President or Peter LaB will think it is. But lies can go a long way.
And considering their economic problems, we all know well the hypocritical complaint that a society has bigger problems and greater priorities than gay people being married.
But in Spain, they are.
Peter LaB’s trip exemplifies that hypocrisy. He has absolutely NO other reason to be there but in seeing an opportunity in the Spanish President’s objection to married gay people.
NOM and AFTAH what a bunch of insufferable carpet baggers.