Historically and linguistically, being left-handed has long been associated with the mark of the devil. In Latin, the word "sinister" means "left." In French, it is "gauche" – a far worse sin in France than being sinister, no doubt.

There is the left-handed compliment, which is no compliment at all; the bad guy was made to sit at the left hand of God; and there has been a higher than average number of left-handed, insane villains like Jack the Ripper and the Boston Strangler.

-Beth Quinn – Good News From The Left-Handed Liberation Front

Sin.  Sinister.  Left-Handed.  We don’t have to imagine a religion that regards left handedness as a mark of the devil, because it existed.  Perhaps in some corners of the human world, it still exists.  And some of us of my generation don’t have to imagine what reparative therapy for left-handedness would look like, because we have seen it with our own eyes.

The myths and superstitions surrounding left handedness were almost completely dead, at least in the United States, when I entered grade school back in 1959.  But they hadn’t died out completely.  I’m old enough to remember watching two teachers tie a classmate’s left arm to his side after he was caught writing something with his left hand. 

They did it at the kid’s parent’s request, and they were not brutal about it.  It wasn’t like they were binding him tightly or anything.  The thinking was that if you just train a kid to use their right hand early enough, it would take and they wouldn’t be left handed anymore.  It was a bit like putting something bitter on the thumb of a small child that won’t stop sucking their thumb.  They just lightly tied a small strap around the kid’s waste and left arm, to prevent him from reflexively using his left hand to write with.  The kid did not resist, he just sat there crying, humiliated, because he knew he’d done something wrong.

Except…he hadn’t.  Put aside for a moment that their model of how handedness works was all wrong.  That it was something like a bad habit which, if caught early enough, you could correct.  Even if handedness was a completely chosen thing, there is nothing wrong or evil or harmful about using your left hand over your right.  Unless that is, you believe that it’s a sin.  Left-handed.  Sinister.  Sin.  Or you believed the few remaining mental health professionals of the day who said  that left-handedness leads to a host of mental and psychological problems.  Didn’t you know that a higher then average number of serial killers are left handed? 

It isn’t hard to picture how an ex-leftie ministry might work to suck the pride and joy and love of life out of a young guy, a kid maybe who keeps having these…urges…to use their left hand.  Every time he gets that urge he believes he is being unfaithful to God.  He believes this, because his church is telling him this.  The Devil baptizes his followers with his left hand…  His peers either ridicule him, or bath him in suffocating patronization.  He has this…condition.  He can’t help himself.  There is something tragically wrong with him.  His parents are profoundly ashamed that their son uses his left hand.  The kid is deeply ashamed of himself.  And every time he feels the urge to use his left hand, the shame deepens.

But there is one final hope.  Reparative therapy.  Thousands have found freedom from left-handedness.  Question left-handedness.  There are stories of hope and redemption.  This one has been living as a right handed man for over a decade, and is now a successful painter who, he says, never feels the urge to use his left hand to pick up a brush.  That one has been in a successful relationship with another ex-leftie and they are raising a healthy, godly family of right handed children.  This one has been freed from left-handedness through the power of faith.  That one abandoned the left-handed lifestyle, and all its self destructiveness, the drugs, the booze, the litany of health problems, and has been living a clean and sober life ever since.

So he checks himself in for a round of ex-leftie therapy.  Perhaps he misses the fine print on the form that says he will never be completely cured of this left-handed urges.  Perhaps it is not in the fine print.  Perhaps, full of all the stories of hope and cure and…redemption…he decides not to notice. 

So he spends months…then years…and thousands of dollars in the ex-leftie world.  He abandons school, career, the life he had, the life he could have had, on his quest to rid himself of his urge to use his left hand.  But he can’t.  He’s left handed.  After a long struggle he eventually becomes adept at using his right hand to do simple chores.  He can write…sort of.  An accomplishment he’s proud of.  Now he can write with a fountain pen and not smear the ink.  He can use scissors with his right hand.  He can pitch a ball with his right hand…sort of.   But the urges never go away, and maddeningly after years of adapting to a right handed life, he…falls…again and again. 

Sometimes its unexpected, like when his neighbor’s kid playfully tosses a ball at him and he catches it in his left hand.  Sometimes it happens when he lets his guard down, and he catches himself doodling something with the pen in his left land.  It seems the devil won’t let go of him.  But it’s not the devil.  It’s just his biology.  The model of handedness he’s been fed is all wrong, and no amount of sincerely held religious belief can change that any more then it could change the fact hundreds of years ago, that Galileo and Copernicus were right.  And yet, it moves. 

All his life this left handed man has been fighting his nature.  And…for what?  To please a lot of right handed people who have bought into, for whatever reason, a model of handedness that is not true, and which…surely only coincidentally…elevates them above their left handed neighbors.  His own nature has been used against him since childhood, to implant shame, self loathing, disgust.  To make him accept his lowly status.  He has been denied a wholesome and nurturing spiritual life, being made to feel himself alienated from God Every Time He Gets An Urge To Use His Left Hand.  Which he keeps getting, Because He’s Left Handed.

He is either condemned, or at best, patronizingly offered help for his…condition.  When he is not being told that his sin is the worst sin of all, he’s being patronizingly told that well…we’re all sinners in the eyes of the Lord.  But this sin seems woven into his very being, like a taint on his very soul.  He just can’t stop the urges.  His body fights him every time he picks up a pencil or pen.  It reminds him constantly that, somehow, he is fundamentally wicked, in a way no one else seems to be.  No one else except other devil marked lefties.  

He has been denied wholesome and nurturing relationships with his peers, with his community, with his family, because every time he catches himself using his left hand for something, or even feeling the urge to, he is ashamed, and so he withdraws, feeling ashamed, unclean, unworthy. He has been denied the career he might have had, the friends he might have made, and all the joy and fulfillment they might have brought. 

Who knows…perhaps he was even denied the love of his life, because he was taught from such an early age, that there was something innately unclean about him.  A feeling of shame and despair that was reenforced, again and again within him, every time he had that perfectly natural urge to use his left hand.  Sin.  Sinister.  Left-handed. 

The devil baptizes his own with his left hand…  He sees himself as someone profoundly, horribly tainted.  Unworthy.  He gets on his knees nightly and begs God, tearfully, to take the urges away from him.  But they don’t go away.  He’s Left Handed.  It isn’t something you can pray away. 

He pays therapists thousands of dollars to talk him into being right handed.  Perhaps it was an overly dominant mother.  Perhaps when a boy uses his left hand to write with, he is subconsciously rebelling against his manhood.  Left is associated with the feminine isn’t it?  Whereas right is associated with the masculine.   Perhaps his father was too distant.  Perhaps he isn’t getting enough masculine activity.  But therapy doesn’t work either.  He’s Left Handed.  You can’t psychoanalyze it away.  It wasn’t his mother.  It wasn’t his father.  It’s his biology.  It’s perfectly normal.  Not average.  Not common.  But nonetheless, normal.

But he is never told that.  There are nights when he wonders why God even allowed him to be born.

There is nothing wrong with him.  Nothing.  He’s just left-handed.  It neither harms him, nor his neighbors, that he uses his left hand.   And it doesn’t separate him from God, because if God is the creator then God made him that way.  If anything, it is trying not to be what he so clearly is, that is separating him from God.  It is also separating him from his family, and from his community.  It has separated him from the whole life he could have had.

Reality matters.  Existence exists.  When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird.  You would think that someone of a deeply religious nature, wishing to be faithful and devoted to God almighty would instinctively grasp how the hand of the creator has the final, absolute say over all our human pretensions.  However we might wish reality to be, reality is what it is.  There is a lesson on standing humbly before the Creator in that, which you’d think the religious conservative would find completely agreeable.  You’d think.  But if that were so, then there wouldn’t be a movement to teach creationism to school kids, let alone a movement to teach homosexuals to hate themselves, and to teach their peers, their neighbors, their country, to treat them with contempt.  The problem with standing humbly before the creator, is that its…well…humbling.