{"id":475,"date":"2006-12-13T08:34:14","date_gmt":"2006-12-13T13:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/475"},"modified":"2006-12-13T11:27:43","modified_gmt":"2006-12-13T16:27:43","slug":"not-so-much-a-heart-of-stone-as-a-head-of-stone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/475","title":{"rendered":"Not So Much A Heart Of Stone, As A Head Of Stone…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Compassion.  There’s the genuine variety, and then there’s the self-serving one.  For a healthy serving of the latter, the religious right is always a good source<\/a> :<\/p>\n

\n

Like I said the other day when certain readers groused about the attention this blog gives to homosexuality, it is one of the central issues of our time, and the response to it is cleaving the Christian churches. People who complain about the time conservatives spend on the issue wouldn’t complain if we were taking the Andrew Sullivan gay liberationist line. It’s that we don’t do so that they dislike. If we can’t say something nice and cheerful, we shouldn’t say anything at all.<\/p>\n

But the issue — the issues — won’t go away.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

No shit Sherlock.  That’s because knuckle dragging jackasses like you can’t let go if it.  It matters<\/em> to you, that somewhere, someway, somehow, there are gay people in this world who don’t fear and loath their sexual nature, the way louts like you think they should.<\/p>\n

Rod Dreher, he who knows that homosexuals can pray the gay away<\/a> because he himself was cleansed by God (or was it just getting old) of his lustful feelings toward…no, not men, but Betty Blue<\/a> (no…I’m not kidding…just read his article), wants us to know he feels Compassion<\/em> for all those poor suffering gay Evangelicals The New York Times profiled the other day<\/a>.  Not that he feels any particular need to treat them as if they were as human as he is mind you, with the same basic human needs for love and intimate companionship that gutter crawling louts like him need to stop demonizing.  He has Compassion…Compassion<\/em><\/strong> I tell you.\n<\/p>\n

Whatever your stance on homosexuality and religion, you have to have a heart of stone not to feel for men and women caught in this dilemma. For me, it brought to mind something my friend David Morrison<\/a> told me over a decade ago, about the world he found as he left gay activism and committed himself to living as a chaste Christian faithful to Scripture and tradition.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As it happens, David Morrison was once a friend of mine too.  But that was back in his gay activist days, when we were both volunteers on Jon Larimore’s Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS system (David was mostly a theoretical volunteer, since I ended up doing 90 percent of the work he’d also volunteered for).  In those days he wore his pride like, as he once said, "an anthem".  But over the years we all watched him fall, first into a profoundly reactionary brand of conservatism, and then (surprise, surprise) into an even more reactionary brand of religion.  I remember vividly the day he posted to the general forum, that as far as God was concerned none of us were any better then Hitler.  He had a boyfriend back then, or so he always claimed.  I’ve often wondered how the boyfriend took David’s bellyflop into the gutter.  When he later wrote a column for the New York Post, titled "What Crime Of Hate And Anger?" (issue of November 5, 1998) in which he averred that Matthew Shepard had it coming, because he had a history of risky sexual flirting with strangers, I couldn’t have been less surprised:<\/p>\n

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Newsweek called what happened in Cody last summer a miscalculation on Shepard’s part and it may turn out that he similarly miscalculated in Laramie.  But whether he did or did not miscalculate, Americans should think long and hard about the making the feeling of repugnance at an unwanted sexual advance subject to additional penalties under the law. \n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Angry, yes.  But not surprised.  You can read the article in full here on Eutopia.<\/a>  (There is also a response in that issue of Eutopia to my letter to the Post<\/a>.  Note the theocrat’s reliable retort that "certitude of experience" must answer to "certitude of truth".) <\/p>\n

That was the David we’d all come to know and loath on GLIB.  If he’d said the Pink Triangles<\/a> were a sensible reaction to the repugnance of unwanted sexual advances I couldn’t have been less surprised.\n<\/p>\n

But Dreher thinks David is a fine young man, because David is the only kind of homosexual a moral runt like Dreher can tolerate: a self castrating one.<\/p>\n

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Looking back, after eight years of seeking to live chastely as a Christian, I believe my time at Trinity represented a turning point in my early Christian life. While I had accepted intellectually the claims of the historic Christian creeds and experienced a deep emotional conviction of Christ’s reality and love, Christianity’s doctrines and disciplines remained merely concepts. It was the witness of the Christians at Trinity Church that put flesh onto the bones of biblical phrases like "love thy neighbor" and "seventy times seven times."<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You can love your neighbor, so long as you don’t love yourself…right David?\n<\/p>\n

\n

Sadly, most men and women living with same-sex attraction have had experiences more akin to Gail’s than mine….<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Actually David, what a lot of us have had is experience being in love, and being loved, and sharing with the one you love all the wonderful, awesome, life affirming joy of sexual intimacy.  And we resent it, when a gutter crawling slimeball like you, who just had to put another cigarette out on a dead gay kid’s body for the sake of your own cheapshit self hatreds, decides to lecture us on how sinful that perfectly human joy is.<\/p>\n

Of course, Mr Thank You Jesus For Saving Me From The Clutches Of Betty Blue sees it differently…<\/p>\n

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In my view, that Episcopal church’s response to David, and to homosexuality, was authentically and beautifully Christian. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

An authentic and beautifully Christian approach to homosexuality.  Sorta like the one the Catholic Bishops took last month here in Baltimore:<\/p>\n

\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

How…beautiful…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Compassion.  There’s the genuine variety, and then there’s the self-serving one.  For a healthy serving of the latter, the religious right is always a good source : Like I said the other day when certain readers groused about the attention this blog gives to homosexuality, it is one of the central issues of our time, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13,20],"class_list":["post-475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-religion","tag-the-american-gutter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}