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November 14th, 2008

Reaping What You Have Sown…(continued)

 

And the unsurprises just keep on coming.  You know the old story about how so many right wing anti-gay warriors turn out to have gay children?  Phillys Schlafly?  Alan Keyes?  Charles Socarides, late of NARTH?  Recall how the man who spear headed California Proposition 22, which was the first swing at same-sex marriages back in 2000, Pete Knight, turned out to have had a gay son?  

Isn’t it interesting how so many of the most vitirolic gay haters have gay children of their own?  Like…they’re punishing their kids, by waging war on the entire gay community?  Like…all of us have to bleed, because hating their own flesh and blood just isn’t good enough?  Isn’t it so very…unsurprising…that 67 year old Gary Lawrence, Mormon, California State LDS Grassroots Director, and prominent organizer of the Proposition 8 campaign, has a gay son?  Surprise, surprise, surprise.

It’s worth remembering in the wake of Proposition 8, that Mormon abuse of their own gay children has been well known for some time now.  If you thought it was tough growing up gay in a Southern Baptist household, just listen to the stories of gay Mormon kids.  And…(Via Pam’s House Blend), like all the children of the anti-gay culture war, this particular son has his own heartbreaking story to tell

Matthew Lawrence, 28, of Santa Ana, California is just one of approximately 500 people who have contacted Signing for Something ( http://www.signingforsomething… )in the last few days to announce his resignation from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because of the Mormon Church’s handling of and involvement in the gay marriage issue.  Matthew is gay and is the son of Gary Lawrence, 67, who is the “State LDS Grassroots Director” for the state of California.  (See http://yesonprop8.blogspot.com… ).

Matthew Lawrence, in an e-mail interview with this diarist, said that although he is “extremely upset and frustrated” with his family and that he has “cut off communication with them,” that “at the end of the day, I do love them.”  The elder Lawrence was also the Mormon Church’s point man for the Prop 22 campaign in 2000.  Matt says, “I love my family so much, but it’s hard to not take this personally.  We had a brief falling-out over Prop. 22, but that got mended.  But two anti-gay initiatives in eight years, it’s impossible not to feel attacked.”

Matthew was particularly hurt when “my father said that opponents of Prop. 8 are akin to Lucifer’s followers in the pre-existence.”  (Printed in Meridian Magazine online, and reported in the Salt Lake Tribune http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_… and other newspapers). Matthew’s plea to his father and others is “We can all agree to disagree and respect each other’s informed opinions and decisions, but don’t put me and Satan in the same sentence please.” 

“This issue isn’t about gay marriage,” writes Matthew. ” This is about certain religious factions that believe homosexuality is disgusting, immoral and wrong and needs to be stamped out. . . .  It’s a problem to be ‘fixed.'” Matthew writes that his family sent him to multiple counselors during his youth, and even sent him to live with relatives in Utah which he writes was an attempt to “straighten me out” by living with what he describes as “homophobic cousins.”  He said while in Utah it wasn’t unusual for his cousin to call him a “faggot” at school and that his “aunt and uncle did nothing to discourage his behavior.” 

…don’t put me and Satan in the same sentence please.  Is this too much to ask?  Never mind the gay stranger down the street who wears horns every time you set eyes on them.  Never mind that same-sex couple you can casually condemn to eternal hellfire because they’re not part of your own family, but someone else’s, and it’s always easy to toss someone else’s children, someone else’s loved ones, into the fiery lake for all eternity.  Is it too much to ask you to stop demonizing your own children?  Is it too much to ask you to stop putting your righteous knives into their hearts too?  They want your love…they Need your love.  Can you stop putting them side by side with Satan in your eyes?  In your hearts?  At long last, is this too much to ask?

 

 

5 Responses to “Reaping What You Have Sown…(continued)”

  1. Bob C Says:

    Somehow as I read this, these words floated into my head (Must have been from God):
    Which came first? The chicken or the Gay?
    If these bigots believe some of the NARTH BS and other propaganda, then THEY THEMSELVES "Made their children Gay, by being unfit parents…yadda yadda…"
    Is their Gay Child a torment sent by God to punish THEM?
    Well…an idea that ALSO floated through my head (Must have been from God), is that MAYBE God sent them a Gay child in order to let them bigots deal first hand and personal with a real live Gay person, and perhaps that would ease their fears and HUMANIZE Gay people in their eyes.
    Instead, I guess it became a "test" for the bigot parents: God wanted them to sacrifice their son, just as God sent Abraham to the mountain to sacrifice his son Isaac. Except that for whatever reason, the bigot parents "faith" is telling them to go through with it, regardless of God’s intentions.
    The real test here is that the parents are chosing between their own bigotry and hatred, and their own child, and so many of them are chosing to stick by their hatred and sacrifice their own child.
    It keeps the scum like Smid in business.
    22 million bucks would have gone a long way towards saving the "American Family(tm)" from hell, by protecting them from forclosures, homelessness, medical bill capsising their budgets, etc.
    I feel really badly for those children.

  2. Glen Says:

    Love the sign. I would also love to have a t-shirt like that.
    Much has been made (and hyped) of black Christians’ social conservatism. To a degree true. (I remember seeing Rev. Calvin Butts on our local PBS station; socially conservative, yes, but light years away from Alan Keyes.)
    I suggest the the arguments were incorrectly mounted. "Love" will not be compelling to the, um, uncoverted: they simply don’t care (and I don’t care that they don’t care). Rather, the sequence should have been (and should be in the future): Loving v. Virginia; Plessy v. Ferguson.
    I actually saw it suggested that gays were not being told they had no right to marry. A gay man could marry a woman; a lesbian could marry a man. Ipso facto, no discrimination was involved. (No trace of irony could be detected.) As for Plessy, if it’s separate, it’s not going to be equal. I trust that everyone in the post-Brown era can understand that.

  3. Bob C Says:

    tee hee hee…"Calvin butts" hee hee heee….how could anyone take a guy with THAT name seriously?
    I wonder if the rev John Smid is even allowed to THINK about him?

  4. Bruce Says:

    I actually saw it suggested that gays were not being told they had no right to marry. A gay man could marry a woman; a lesbian could marry a man. Ipso facto, no discrimination was involved.

    That’s an old sophistry in this struggle.  I was hearing that in the mid-1990s on the Usenet forum alt.politics.homosexuality.  You could as well argue then, that race segregation laws weren’t discriminatory either, since they applied to both races.  Black people had to stay on their side of the bus, but then white people also had to stay on theirs.  Black kids had to go to their schools, and white kids theirs too, so everyone had to go to a school for their race.  Equality.  But being wrong isn’t improved by being consistently wrong, and discrimination isn’t discrimination any less for being consistent.  Even if separate really is equal, it is still separate and that’s discrimination.  Invidious discrimination isn’t just that you are being treated differently…it’s that your freedom is limited solely on the basis of some innate and benign characteristic.  But understand that this really was something that segregationists argued back in the 1950s and 60s.  Separate but equal was not immoral they argued, because it was equal.

    Leaving aside the fact that in America separate but equal was never really equal, in the case of heterosexual only marriage discrimination is not equal because it does specifically favor one group over another: heterosexuals.  To say that heterosexuals are being treated equally to homosexuals in the marriage laws, because both gay and straight have to marry someone of the opposite sex, is like saying Christians and Atheists were both treated equally in the Soviet Union, because even atheists weren’t allowed to believe in God.  Heterosexuals mate to the opposite sex and homosexuals mate to their own.  To say that only opposite sex couplings are allowed to marry is to discriminate against same sex couplings, and that discriminates against homosexuals. 

    Usually at this point, they’ll start arguing that not all discrimination is bad.  Fine.  But this discrimination is.  It cannot be justified on any terms other then through myth, lies and superstition.  It is pure animus and nothing more.  I saw a photo yesterday from one of the Proposition 8 protests, of a man holding a counter-protest sign that read "Defending marriage is not hate."  No.  It isn’t.  But defending marriage against same-sex couples because you think homosexuality defiles it is.  Hate isn’t an action, it’s a motive.

  5. Willie Hewes Says:

    Check that photo again, Bruce. It’s Peter LaBarbera (unless there were two men with a sign saying that.) He was in Chicago I believe, with his BFF Matt Barber.
    On topic: it is mindboggling to me that there are so many couples that love their religion more than they love their children. Epic empathy fail.
    It’s just so sad…

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