On the impossibility of being gay and Catholic

Oh, the life of a gay Catholic! Rosary beads, choir practices, parsing the latest cogitations of slippery Pope "Who Am I to Judge?" Francis (does he love us? hate us? who can tell?), showing up for pot luck dinners and May Crownings while trying very hard not to think about what The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches about us -- that "homosexual acts are always intrinsically disordered." That the Catholic Church cannot even "bless" our unions much less marry us. That the love and affection we might feel for a romantic partner is always morally reprehensible and sinful. 

And oh, that phrase: intrinsically disordered! 

Leave it to a theologian to devise such a nice way of saying that homosexuals are disgusting perverts, that we can be tolerated, but no more, and that our supposed "sexuality" is an abomination in the sight of God.

As homosexuals, we occupy a special place in the realms of moral failure. After all, it's not just any sinner that can earn the title of "intrinsically disordered." The Catholic Church doesn't describe alcoholics that way. Or meth heads. Or murderers. Or the multitude of fornicators and adulterers and masturbators. It reserves that special term for us homosexuals. 

I do my best not to think on such gloomy things, or at least not think too hard about them, but recently I was bitch-slapped by the archbishop of San Francisco who announced that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was no longer welcome to receive holy communion in his diocese because of her stance on the issue of abortion. I was left breathless and heartily agitated by this "sacraments as weapons" approach to pastoral care.  I was also reminded that as a so-called "gay Catholic," I too could easily be singled out by the church hierarchy for a good what for, and that while I could blithely ignore church teaching on homosexuality, archbishops like the one in San Francisco were certainly not ignoring me. 

I used to tell myself that my church-going was a rather radical act, that I knew I was not a sinner and had done nothing wrong, and that if other people wanted to be all judgey and stuff, well, that was their problem and not mine. I told myself that one of the reasons we fought for gay rights was so that we could go and do all the things that "normal" people do -- like going to church, if that was our thing. I told myself there was a certain sort of valor in being true to the Church even though the Church was not true to me. I told myself that I had spiritual needs, just like "normal" people, and that I should not be cast  into the outer darkness as though my soul were nothing more than collateral damage in the Church's eternal war on sinners and losers.

And I believed those things.

But then, on a recent Sunday morning, I woke up and read that news article about the archbishop in San Francisco denying communion to Nancy Pelosi -- and I got mad. Goodness gracious, I got mad! I got so mad I should probably go to confession because there was smoke coming out of my ears and an astonishing array of curse words and colorful bits of vulgarity exploded out of me. I was not simply mad; I was furious. 

But, over and above that, I was hurt. Dismayed. It was like that archbishop had rudely ripped off the Band-aid I had put on my feelings about being both gay and Catholic and had suddenly exposed the ugliness I had tried so hard to hide. 

Some folks told me I shouldn't let any archbishop or anyone else's bad behavior affect my faith. And I readily agreed with them. One's faith should not depend on the good behavior of someone else. Problem was, my faith -- my conscience -- was telling me that to support an organization that teaches such ugly, hurtful things about people like me was not right. That I, as an older gay man who had suffered horribly because of those teachings, ought to know better. That it was wrong of me to support an organization that was teaching entirely new generations of Catholics that gay people like me were less than, second rate, and not as deserving of the same sort of respect accorded to "normal" people. 

I don't like drama, though. I don't like going around with my tail feathers in a huff. And I certainly don't like making mountains out of mole hills. I like to keep my feelings in hand and to listen to my doubts, but not be pushed around by them. But try as I might to dust myself off and move on -- to "shake it off," to quote Taylor Swift -- I could not. A feeling of uneasiness had settled into my bones. Something was not right.

One of my first reactions to that story about the archbishop was to wonder aloud how I could support a Church that does not support me -- and that was the crux of the problem. It took me a few weeks of anguished hand-wringing, but I finally figured out what was bothering me, which was the fact that the church, because of its teachings on homosexuality, literally could not support me. Folks could be tolerant, but being tolerated is not the same as being respected. One only tolerates something when one feels superior to it and decides to have compassion and patience and put up with it. I don't want to be tolerated. If I'm going to sit down to dinner, I want the same thing that everyone else is eating, not  crumbs thrown from the table.

Here's the problem: The Church teaches that the sexuality of a young gay man or woman is "intrinsically disordered" and sinful, and that if such a young person meets and falls in love with another young person of similar persuasion, their budding relationship cannot be supported, their feelings are disordered and dreadfully sinful, and they will go to hell if they "give in" to such disordered passions. 

Try to remember when you were young and fell in love for the first time. What was the reaction of those around you? If you were a boy falling in love with a girl, were you shamed for it? Were you told you would go to hell if you gave in to such feelings? Were you told it was "unnatural" to feel such attractions, that you should pray to God to heal you, that the Devil himself might be tempting you and trying to lure you away from God and the straight and narrow? 

Remember what it was like to be a teenager? To be so painfully self-aware and self-conscious? To be so overwhelmed by so many new feelings? 

The job of a teenager is to push mom and dad away and figure out how to stand on one's own two feet. This is a natural process. To become independent. To figure out who you are, and how you are going to make your way in the world, and who your friends are going to be, and how you're going to survive. Suddenly, the approval of your peers becomes much more important than the approval of mom and dad. This is natural. This is how it works. This is how young people separate from their parents and make their way in the world and eventually create families of their own. 

What the Church does to its LGBT kids at this crucial juncture in their lives is to introduce the most dreadful sort of slut-shaming and fear-mongering about their sexuality. The consequences can be devastating. Just ask the parents of all the many young people who committed suicide because they felt so ashamed of themselves because they were gay.  Hell, ask me, because I tried to commit suicide many times in my younger years because I was so completely ashamed of myself and had prayed so hard and so often to be "cured" -- prayers that were never answered.  

The question, for me, is this: How can I continue to be Catholic? How can I, in good conscience, support an organization doing such horrendous damage to young LGBT folks? 

My faith tells me I cannot. 

As a lifelong Catholic, this was not the answer I wanted. In fact, this answer breaks my heart. I love going to Mass. I love being in the choir. I love my statues and devotions -- they give me a sense of continuity with the past. I love going to Holy Communion. I love my Catholic friends. I love my local parish. I love all the good things they do for people. I love the nuns who run the parish. I love being part of it. 

But ... 

I have come to a place where I cannot ignore the contradictions anymore. I cannot turn a blind eye to the harm being caused by an institution that has trampled on gay people for thousands of years and will keep right on doing so. 

When respect is not being served, one needs to get up from the table -- and leave. 

I have not been to Mass since that Sunday morning when I read that article. I don't know if I will ever go to Mass again. I don't know if I can. 

What I do know is that the damage done by the Church to LGBT folks for so many centuries is not trivial -- and should not be trivialized. What I do know is that God loves and respects all His children, not just the heterosexual ones, and wants all of them to love and be loved. 

If you ask me, what's "intrinsically disordered" is the ugly, hurtful things that the Church teaches about gay people. It's an archbishop using Holy Communion as a weapon. It's a whole slew of bishops and cardinals covering up sexual crimes against children. It's a Church that once believed it had the moral right -- and duty -- to torture and kill those considered heretics or "witches." But it's not two people who want to love each other in a way that's natural, comforting, and healing. 

When the Allied forces liberated the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, they freed not just the Jews but others, a large group of whom were homosexuals. While the Jews and other nationalities were returned to their homes, the homosexuals were sent back to various prisons since being gay was considered a crime.  

Gay people have a long history of being "criminals," and the Catholic Church has been a major player in that history. Now safely into the 21st century, the Church has toned down its rhetoric to the ridiculous "intrinsically disordered" line, but it's the same message. 

And it still hurts. 

And it leaves people like me with a painful choice to make. 

We're Queer. We're Spiritual. Get Used To It.

I'm one of those queers who goes to church.

I get looks. Of course I do. And I get questions, the main question being, Why?

My response is always, Why not? Why shouldn't I go to church? Am I not allowed? Don't I also have a soul, or is spirituality the exclusive realm of the heterosexual?

Some of my queer friends are so over church. Proudly, militantly atheist, they look down their noses at little church mice like me. From their superior, lofty perches, they can't fathom why any queer person would set foot inside a church. Bless their hearts.

It took me a rather long time to realize that just because a lot of God's fans hate me, God himself doesn't necessarily hate me. And just because the priest or pastor says bad things about my kind from the pulpit, it doesn't necessarily mean God is speaking through them.

In fact, it could be that God is saying something through me as I sit there in the pews -- something rather more powerful than another long-winded, torturous traipse through Leviticus. Perhaps God is bigger than we want to believe. Perhaps there is more to both heaven and earth than what we understand. Perhaps God made me just the way I am -- and likes me that way and would not have me any other way. Perhaps it's not my calling to hide my light under a basket, but to let it shine.

Don't let me be the one to spill the beans, but a lot of queer folks do church. Growing up Catholic, I can safely say that most every priest and religious brother I knew was gay although not one would admit it.

I became a religious brother myself, and the reason why I'm no longer a religious brother is because my superiors asked me one day if I was gay, and I was honest. The  next day I was asked to leave. The others lied and got to stay.

If telling a lie (and therefore sinning) was the price of being a religious brother, well, obviously it was not the life meant for me. And what does that say about the many priests and religious types who tell that lie every day because they're afraid of being kicked out? Some of those folks are very prominent people in Catholic circles. How do they live with themselves? Who are they fooling?

The condemnation of homosexuality goes way back. Fair enough -- but that doesn't make it legitimate. That doesn't mean our understanding can't evolve and grow into something more compassionate and honest.

We are often told morality cannot and does not change, but that's not quite true. Today, owning a slave would be abhorrently offensive. But not so long ago, owning another human being was the status quo. In fact, on this front, the Catholic Church didn't get around to condemning slavery until the 1800s. Are we to believe that slavery was morally acceptable for all those centuries before that, or did the Church finally realize that slavery was moral reprehensible and evil?

Divorce used to be absolutely forbidden. And in fairness, one must point out that while Jesus said nothing about homosexuality, and very little about human sexuality, he did go out of his way to say things about divorce -- and modern churches and the people in their pews seem to have no trouble whatsoever completely ignoring what he said on that score.

If our understanding of marriage can change (and it probably needed to), perhaps our understanding of homosexuality can also change.

It's not that morality "changes." We mature. We learn new information. We gain new insights. We get better.

So ... I go to church. Make of it what you will, but don't ask me to explain myself because I don't have to, no more than anyone else who goes to church. I go because I want to. 

I have my own "religious beliefs" when it comes to sexuality and relationships; they are vastly different than those of my fundamentalist neighbor, but that's the beauty of having freedom of religion. I'm allowed to come to my own conclusions. I am not required to follow his. I can decide for myself -- and I do.

I have the feeling that the "kingdom of heaven" is filled with tax collectors and whores and other disreputable sorts and misfits. The "least of these." And perhaps, indeed, the last shall be first.

Time will tell.

What's Up with Mississippi?

In the realms of chutzpah, it was a bona fide keeper. Mississippi Speaker of the House Philip Gunn said he was disappointed that a judge had ruled against House Bill 1523, which would have allowed discrimination against LGBT folks under the guise of religious liberty. Federal judge Carlton Reeves put a stay on the bill, which was to take effect on July 1, 2016.

Gunn said, "We felt like it was a good bill, protecting religious beliefs and the rights of LGBT community."

He did not explain how giving religious people a free pass to discriminate against the gay community would "protect the rights of LGBT community." He also did not explain his aversion to the use of a definite article.

Perhaps he was trying to one-up his boss, Governor Phil Bryant, who received the Samuel Adams Religious Freedom Award from the Family Research Council (categorized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center), for signing the bill in the first place. During the award ceremony, held in Washington, D.C., Bryant said, "They don't know that Christians have been persecuted throughout the ages. They don't know that if it takes crucifixion, we will stand in line before abandoning our faith and our belief in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. So if we are going to stand, now is the time and this is the place."

As Judge Reeves noted in his dissent, the bill was clearly a reaction to last year's marriage equality ruling that made gay marriage legal throughout the United States. Bryant and his friends in the Mississippi legislature thought they had come up with an end run around the ruling with a so-called "religious liberty" bill. After all, who doesn't want to protect "religious liberty"? 

Proponents argued that unless the bill was signed, pastors in the state of Mississippi would be forced to marry gay couples whether they wanted to or not. They provided no evidence for this claim, and were apparently unaware that not one pastor or priest or anyone else wearing a funny hat in this country has ever been forced to marry a gay couple against their will. 

Not to be outdone, the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer posted this on his Facebook page:

He also said the "homosexual agenda is the greatest threat to religious liberty in our nation's history."

Fischer's overheated and over the top rhetoric is one of the reasons why the American Family Association was also categorized as a hate group  by the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

The only sensible statement from a public official in Mississippi on this matter came from Attorney General Jim Hood, who said, "The fact is that the churchgoing public was duped into believing that HB1523 protected religious freedoms. Our state leaders attempted to mislead pastors into believing that if this bill were not passed, they would have to preside over gay wedding ceremonies. No court case has ever said a pastor did not have discretion to refuse to marry any couple for any reason. I hate to see politicians continue to prey on people who pray, go to church, follow the law and help their fellow man."

The challenges faced by Mississippi are many and well known. How its opposition to gay marriage and gay rights in general will help the state with these challenges is a complete mystery. HB1523 has actually hurt the state. Many main street groups and chambers of commerce asked the governor not to sign the bill, as did major corporations like Nissan, Toyota, Levis, Tyson Foods and many others. The governor ignored all these folks and signed the bill anyway. 

Now that a stay has been issued against it, there is talk of an appeal. 

Why, Mississippi? What's up with that?

An Unholy Hatred

I was about twelve years old when I looked up the word "homosexuality" in the dictionary and was given a 1970s definition: Homosexuality, I learned that sad day, was a "sexual perversion" akin to "pedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia, which see."

I looked up those big words--and was horrified. After the feelings of horror and disgust washed off, I was left feeling deeply ashamed.

No child wants to be a pervert, not even a twelve year old boy in love with Barry Manilow.

What I learned that day was reinforced by the overly religious, right-wing environment I grew up in. When the adults sat around at their John Birch Society meetings and talked about "pinko commie bastards" I eventually realized they were talking about me, a revelation that only added to my shame. Just because I had weird, inexplicable crushes on other boys didn't mean I wanted to be a communist (God forbid!), or that I hated my country, or that I was the scum of the earth.

Or did it?

My response to this shame was to become extremely religious, to prove, by a life of prayer and piety, that I was a good person. I can't count the number of rosaries I said, the candles I lit, the prayers I offered, the endless hours I spent begging God to "forgive" me, to "heal" me, to "take this cross away."

It didn't work, and it didn't last.

I look back on a life lived in shame, and, ironically, I feel ashamed I spent so many years feeling ashamed when there was nothing wrong with me, when I had done nothing wrong, and had nothing to feel ashamed about.

My life is bound up with shame. The shame of being something I didn't want or ask to be. The shame of being different in a world that is merciless toward those who don't measure up. The shame of being slender, soft spoken, a sissy, effeminate, faggy, girly, limp wristed, a "lady boy," a pervert, what my church calls "intrinsically disordered."

Shame is a very damaging emotion and a deadly dynamic.

Shame leads to silence; silence leads to isolation; isolation leads to depression and, for too many LGBT folks, thoughts of suicide--or worse.

I look back on this life of shame and I wonder: what purpose did it serve?

I am well aware that my life of shame was not an accident. The shaming I experienced was put into place by other people for a reason. What was that reason? What was the point of shaming children like me? Why do we continue to do it? Whose needs are being met by this shaming? Where's the pay off? Who benefits?

The answer is obvious: by and large, it is the churches and religious folk who benefit. And it is the churches and religious people who, by and large, perpetuate this shaming of LGBT individuals.

There are two immediate benefits that come to mind:

1) It serves the needs of heterosexism, which is the attitude that heterosexuality is "normal" and that everyone should be heterosexual. Since heterosexuality is the most common form of sexuality, it is thought to be "normal," or what God intends and wants of us, and any other form of sexuality is a perversion to be discouraged if not eradicated.

2) It is a useful form of social control. The churches, indeed all religions, use shame as a form of social control, the "just ordering of society." While this "just ordering" is supposed to be Biblically based, it is not always so, and shame is used by the dominant group in society as a way to impose its values, whether those values are based on the Bible or not.

There is a great deal that could be said about these two benefits, and a great many arguments could be made for or against them, but that is not my intention. I'm trying to get at the narrative, the structure behind the shaming I experienced (and continue to experience) as an LGBT individual. I'm trying to answer questions like this: Why do people like Pat Robertson and Bryan Fischer continue, on a sometimes daily basis, to shame gay people? Why does the Catholic Church refer to its LGBT sons and daughters as "intrinsically disordered?" Why do so many evangelicals threaten that the wrath of God will fall upon us now that gay marriage has been legalized? What is the point of this? What is the purpose? Whose needs are being met by this constant "culture war"?

Yet there are other questions that are equally important. What has been the effect of this shaming on LGBT people? Has it helped them? Has it brought them closer to God? Has it helped them to live dignified, meaningful lives? Has it contributed to our understanding of the human person? Are we better off because of this relentless culture war? Are families made better and stronger by shaming their gay and lesbian sons and daughters?

Or has all of this fuss and bother, which has caused enormous hurt to so many people, been nothing more than an exercise in bigotry, the bigotry behind the idea that we should all be heterosexual, that it's not okay to be different, that God wants us all to wear our pants the same way?

Or has it been a sort of mass hysteria, a sort of heterosexual panic, that there could exist, among us, people who are profoundly different in their sexuality?

Or have LGBT people been nothing more than scapegoats, the "village idiot," the one group of people in a community that it's safe to pick on and feel superior to as a way to boost one's self-esteem? This is a very traditional role, mind you. You will see it on every play ground at every school. There is always that one child who is picked on, excluded, ridiculed, who simply cannot measure up. By picking on that one child, we feel superior. We also feel part of the "in group." It heightens our sense that we're okay, we're acceptable, we're "good enough." So ... is that the purpose gay people serve? To give society a convenient punching bag?





The shaming I've experienced has hurt me in deep, profound ways that I will never be able to explain to those who have not experienced it.

I spent many years feeling as though my soul had been murdered, that I was a dead person inside a living body, that I was not a good person and could never be a good person because there was something about me that was fundamentally wrong--if not bad, if not evil, if not perverted.

Shame led me into about a dozen serious attempts at suicide, a couple of which really ought to have been fatal.

Shame has left me unable to believe that an entity like "God" could actually love me, or care one way or the other about what happens to people like me.

Shame has made relationships difficult. It's hard to love someone else when you can't love yourself.

Shame has affected me in so many ways for so many years that I will never truly be free of it. It will always lie like a shadow on the past and the future, coloring my choices, poisoning my mind against itself.





I am working my way out of shame.

When I turned fifty a couple of years ago, I decided it was time to come out of the closet-completely and for good. It was a tentative, hesitant step, but much good has come from it.

I continue to process my own shame by trying to understand it, by talking about it, by challenging it, and taking the risk of doing new things and developing new attitudes. It's a lot of work, but it's worthwhile.

What I have come to learn from my experience with shame is that it is a structure. A man-made structure. Someone put it there because it serves their needs. It didn't just happen. It's no accident. Like racism, and all the other -isms, it's serves a purpose. Someone, somewhere, benefits.

I am left with many questions, but the most overriding question for me is this: If you're the one benefiting from the shaming of LGBT people, shouldn't you take responsibility for the harm you've caused, harm that is sometimes so extreme that victims take their own lives? Are you not responsible for your behavior? If your church participates in the shaming of gay people, are you not complicit in the harm this causes? Can you, in good conscience, look the other way and pretend this unholy hatred has nothing to do with you?

Someday churches will have to come to terms with the harm they've caused.

Someday churches will have to recognize their gay and lesbians sons and daughters do not deserve the contempt heaped upon them, that while our mating habits may be slightly different, we are good people, decent people, kind people.

Someday churches will have to understand that you cannot harm others without harming yourself. You cannot demean others without demeaning yourself. You cannot murder the souls of innocent people without murdering your own.

If there is such a thing as Judgment Day, I suspect a lot of believers are in for a hell of a surprise.

"As you have done unto the least of these, you have done unto me" - Jesus either meant these words, or he did not. And if gay people are not the "least of these," then who is?

Sleeping with the enemy

Lately, I've been thinking about leaving the church I've belonged to since I was a teenager, the church where I became a religious brother (until I was asked to leave when I admitted to being gay), the church whose rituals, whose smells and bells, have been the one constant over the course of an often difficult life.

It's not that I want to. It just feels too much like sleeping with the enemy. Each time I drop a donation in the collection plate, I feel like I'm supporting an organization that treats me abusively, that does not value me the way it does its straight members.

Just today, I stumbled across a story from late 2014 about Cardinal Raymond Burke, who advised parents not to invite gay couples to family gatherings when children are around.

Burke said:

‘If homosexual relationships are intrinsically disordered, which indeed they are … then what would it mean to grandchildren to have present at a family gathering a family member who is living [in] a disordered relationship with another person?

‘If it were another kind of relationship – something that was profoundly disordered and harmful – we wouldn’t expose our children to that relationship, to the direct experience of it.

‘And neither should we do it in the context of a family member who not only suffers from same-sex attraction, but who has chosen to live out that attraction, to act upon it, committing acts which are always and everywhere wrong, evil.’

Burke has put his finger on the pulse of my problem: Many members of my church feel that "practicing homosexuals" are committing acts that are "always and everywhere wrong, evil." 

Yet he has nothing to say about young couples "living together in sin" (once upon a time this was known as fornication and is mentioned in the Bible rather frequently), or couples who have been divorced and remarried. He does not warn parents to keep their children away from masturbators and pursuers of pornogtraphy. No, his scorn, his contempt, is reserved only for homosexuals. 

He is careful to distinguish between "practicing homosexuals" and those not involved in sexual relationships, but few make this distinction. The effect of his words is to tar all gay folks with the same brush. So when Mom and Dad sit down to plan Christmas dinner, they are advised by the cardinal to make sure to exclude a son or daughter who might be homosexual because ... well, that is the question, isn't it?

Recently there was a story about a Catholic priest who was fired from his ministry at a college in New Jersey for supporting the No H8 Campaign. Is that the message my church wants to send, that a priest who stands shoulder to shoulder with the "least of these" will lose his job? 

These are not isolated events. Such stories appear every day.

While there are indeed many Catholics in the church who support its LGBT sons and daughters, sadly, there are many in the hierarchy who do not. 

Consequently, like many LGBT Catholics, I find myself thinking it's time to leave, that, for my own spiritual well being, I really ought to leave. 

I attend Sunday mass at a small church in a rural town. Never once have I been made to feel uncomfortable. No one has ever said a word about my sexuality. I am treated decently and compassionately.  

And yet, there is something wrong. 

Some folks go to church to have their "batteries" recharged; I come away feeling that mine have been drained. I do not feel lifted up, or spiritually refreshed. Rather, I am left with the curious feeling that the "good news" of the Gospel was meant for others - parents with their kids, older couples, grandfathers and grandmothers, not people like me. Not people who are "intrinsically disordered" as I am. Not people of questionable morals. 

Some folks enjoy the social aspect, the meet and greet; I avoid these occasions because I've learned the hard way that there is something about me that is deeply troubling, perhaps even distasteful to some people. So I keep to myself and always feel like I've crashed a party that I wasn't invited to. 

I am very much aware that the folks in the pews around me are there to further their own spiritual lives. But what about my spiritual life? Am I not entitled to one? Are the "same-sex attractions" I experience the only thing about me worth noting? Do I not have a soul too? Do I not deserve the spiritual encouragement and uplifting that is offered so freely to parents, to children, to the elderly? 

I often wonder what it would be like to have a church family that welcomed me, that was not afraid of me, not afraid to acknowledge me from the pulpit, not afraid to discuss the issues that have such a deep impact on my life. Seems to me it would be an amazing experience -- to go to church and be surrounded by supportive people, to worship together, to contribute my talents and gifts just like anyone else and not always be singled out as someone of questionable morals. 

How is it that I am now 51 years old, and have never experienced this? 

When St. Peter was given charge of the church, he was told -- three times -- by Jesus to "Feed my sheep." Why is it that I am always left with the feeling that I have not been fed, that the church has nothing to offer me except condemnation and perhaps pity, that it sees nothing about me except a "disordered" sexuality? 

An abusive relationship is one in which your needs are not being met, where you're not free to state your needs, where you're not free to speak for fear of the consequences, where you live in fear of what might happen, what might be done to you if you don't measure up, or keep quiet, or toe the party line. In an abusive relationship, one does not feel properly valued and acknowledged. There is no mutual exchange of respect, love and encouragement. One person always lives in fear of the other, lives in the fear of love being withdrawn, or the fear of being punished, the fear of saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing, and bringing down the wrath of the abuser on one's head.  

How can genuine spiritual work be done in such an atmosphere? 

How can the "love of God" be authentically experienced when it comes from the hands of people who are simultaneously abusing you?

A private spirituality is fine and dandy, but a genuine spirituality must be communal, must involve the give and take of others, of a community. Within the framework of community, one discovers who one really is. 

The church's LGBT sons and daughters are handicapped in this regard because they are not free to be themselves. To admit to being what they are is to admit to some moral, irresolvable failing. A cloud will always hang over their heads. How can they live authentic lives and experience an authentic spirituality when they are not allowed to be authentic? 

Hence, my dilemma.

I don't want to leave the church, but there are times when I think my spiritual sanity and well being depend on it. 

The church has been a wonderful place for so many groups of people. It could be a wonderful, uplifting place for gay people too -- but it does not want to be. 

How can I continue to support a church that does not support me, that does not feed me, that has no answers for people like me, that condemns me for a reality that I did not choose, that I find just as bewildering as it does?

Where is all this "good news" that the Gospel was supposed to bring -- and when will the church get around to sharing it with its LGBT sons and daughters? Or must we stand on the sidelines and forever remain second class citizens who need to be content with whatever crumbs from the table that might get thrown?

It's time to end the American Family Association's one-sided conversation on gay rights

As an openly gay man living in the reddest of the Red States, I can be forgiven for spending an unhealthy amount of time thinking about Bryan Fischer and the American Family Association. Headquartered not far from where I work in Tupelo, an omnipresent voice all over the radio, with a daily tsunami of Facebook posts and tweets, Bryan Fischer and the AFA, like magnolia trees and dry counties and Duck Dynasty, are inescapable facts of life in the state of Mississippi.

Bryan Fischer, host of FOCAL POINT

When I moved here three years ago, I could not fathom how it was legal for Bryan Fischer to go on public airwaves and say, on an almost daily basis, the most disparaging and woefully ignorant things about gay people. Comparing them to Nazis, suggesting they were responsible for the Holocaust, calling them a danger to public health, a threat to religious liberty, a threat to the economic well being of the United States, routinely classifying them with pedophiles, deeming homosexuality a “sexual sickness” and just as dangerous as addiction to hard drugs, talking about how we can either have religious liberty or homosexuality, but not both – day after day, the tide of myth,misinformation and just plain foolishness was hard to stomach.

But harder to stomach was the apathy of Mississippians who shrug and sigh and seem to believe there is nothing to be done even though Bryan Fischer and the AFA have earned themselves a hate group designation from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Protected by the right to free speech and freedom of religion, wrapping their myth and misinformation in religious garb and calling American Family Radio programs like Bryan Fischer’s FOCAL POINT a “ministry,” they are a monolithic entity safely removed from the consequences of their actions.

I have watched in disbelief as most local media outlets, when they report on gay rights (rather rare, to be sure), go microphone in hand to the AFA for a comment—as if there were no other religious or spiritual leaders in north Mississippi they could talk to.  I find it incredibly offensive that anyone would care what a hate group would have to say about a complex issue like gay marriage. Even more offensive is the media’s failure to seek out other voices on such issues, as if the AFA alone had some sort of monopoly on the gay rights conversation. But then the AFA has been having a one-sided conversation on gay rights since it was founded back in 1977.

When I inquire as to why no one will speak out against the AFA, I am frequently told that one does not mess with them. It’s as if they were some sort of mafia organization, as if one might wake up one day with concrete boots while being tossed into a swamp for having the audacity to have one’s own point of view.

When I started a Facebook page (Stuff the American Family Association Says) designed to document the hate speech coming out of the AFA, I was warned to be careful.

Why, I wanted to know.

Just be careful, I was told.  

Really? Am I supposed to be afraid of an organization that calls itself Christian? Are they going to break the law, or do something unchristian to me?

How very odd.

Yet I’ve noticed how silent politicians and elected officials are with regard to the AFA. I’ve also noticed that local media outlets don’t mention the fact that the AFA was designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, as if ignoring that fact of life might make it go away. Or are they afraid of offending and losing advertisers?

My Facebook page has not exactly been a rousing success. As of this writing, only about one hundred and fifty souls have been brave enough to click “like” on my page. Some people have sent private messages stating they cannot “like” my page for fear that people on their friends’ lists will find out. Are we back in grade school? Are we not allowed to have our own opinions?

Last year, a small group of hardy souls organized a protest march in front of the AFA headquarters in downtown Tupelo. We were about two dozen, in all. We were largely ignored by the media – as if a protest against the AFA right on their own front door was somehow not news, or not newsworthy.

While the AFA believes itself protected by free speech and freedom of religion, so are the rest of us. We have just as much of a right to engage in this conversation as they do. As a gay man, in fact, I would argue that I have more of a right to speak my mind than they do. This is an issue that affects me directly. This is an issue I have struggled with for decades.

I listen to American Family Radio frequently, but I have never once heard them talk to a gay man about the issue of homosexuality. What are they afraid of?

No doubt they have enjoyed their one-sided conversation on this issue. But isn’t it time to hear the other side? Isn’t it time for gay Mississippians – and there are many of them – to speak up, to speak out, to tell their stories, to tell the truth about what it means to be gay or lesbian or transgender? Might we not be allowed to hear from other spiritual and religious leaders? Is there no room in Mississippi for alternative points of view?

Bryan Fischer hides behind his microphone and religion. I wonder how comfortable he would feel if challenged to a public debate on the issue of homosexuality. Since the man talks about homosexuality almost every single day, surely he would relish the opportunity to demolish an articulate gay rights advocate like John Shore or Dan Savage.

No?

And that’s the point.

Fischer and the AFA are, in my opinion, cowardly bullies who hide behind religion and radio dials and Facebook posts and tweets. They are interested only in a one-sided conversation. They do not seem to realize they are talking about real people, a great many of whom live next door to them, in their own communities, people who attend their churches, who rub elbows with them at the grocery store. They seem oblivious to the harm caused by their hate speech and demonization of others.

I will continue my no doubt woefully inadequate efforts to document their hate speech and provide an alternative point of view and I will do so because it’s important for young members of the LGBT community to realize that Bryan Fischer does not speak for everyone in this state.

I am not afraid of the AFA; neither should you be. We have the right to decide our own religious beliefs. We have the right to free speech and we are entitled to our own opinions. We do not live under a fascist dictatorship where the AFA talks and the rest of us do nothing but listen.

We live in a free country.

Don’t we?

We’re Americans.

Aren’t we?

Our fathers and forefathers did not fight for our freedoms so that organizations like the American Family Association could run roughshod over the rights of fellow citizens. They fought, and many times died, to preserve our right to hold our own religious beliefs and to speak our minds on issues that matter to us.

I do not believe the AFA speaks for everyone in the state of Mississippi. They may be a powerful organization and there may be good reasons to fear their retaliation. And they may well run the table on the gay rights conversation in the magnolia state. But they are not the only ones with a point of view.

It is way past time for Mississippians to shake off the dust of apathy and indifference in the face of this massive and daily assault on the rights and dignity of fellow Mississippians.

Gay people are not child-molesting, goat-buggering, disease-ridden threats to religious life and limb. We are sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, created by the same God and entitled to the same rights and dignities as everyone else in this great country.

It’s high time we acted like it.

What the duck?

So, what's wrong with Duck Commander Phil Robertson going Biblical with his views on homosexuality?

Nothing. 

Not one single, solitary thing. 

His religious views are not substantially different from many Christians all over the world, including the pope in Rome. 

But it wasn't his religious views that caused the Quack Heard Across the Globe.

Here's what he actually said during the GQ interview:

“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”

It takes just eleven words to find the problem. When the topic turns to homosexuality, he immediately throws out the word "bestiality," linking homosexual behavior and bestiality as if they were of a piece, as if the relationship between two gay men or two gay women, between two consenting adults who love and cherish each other, was no different than a redneck having sex with a donkey. 

That's the problem.

Members of the LGBT community are no strangers to this type of talk. We are routinely classified as sexual perverts, and homosexuality, we are told, is not substantially different than sexual perversions like pedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia. 

As a child growing up during the 1970s, I remember very well looking up the word "homosexuality" in the dictionary and finding it classified as a sexual perversion, "akin to pedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia, which see."

I flipped the pages to look up those other words and was horrified to learn that the crush I had on Shaun Cassidy was no different than my wanting to have sex with a little kid, or a cow, or a dead body. Pretty heady stuff for a teenager in the throes of puberty. And not only heady, but shaming. Intensely, relentlessly, mindbogglingly shaming. And embarrassing. And humiliating. And psychologically damaging. 

Does it need to be said that the love two gay men or two gay women feel for each other is substantially different than someone having sex with a corpse? Do we really need to explain how deeply misinformed, ignorant and offensive such thinking is? 

Apparently we do. 

Folks like Phil Robertson, pontificating on Bible verses and taking a stand for Jesus, routinely throw out comparisons to pedophilia and bestiality. Presidential candidate Rick Santorum is famed for talking about gay marriage as something that will lead to the "man on dog" thing. Evangelicals constantly warn that gay marriage will lead to people wanting to marry their pets, or their children, or their brothers or sisters or ... fill in the blank.

Well, you say, so what? What's the big deal?

I'll tell you what the big deal is.

Love.

Surprise, surprise, gay people want to be loved, too. They want to fall in love, experience intimacy and romance, have sex, commit themselves to each other, create families, live normal lives.

By constantly suggesting that gay love is a sexual perversion like bestiality, religious types are striking right at the heart (so to speak) of a person, hitting them right in the place where they feel, where they find meaning and hope and happiness. They are striking at the core of an individual and his or her ability to love, to receive love, to interact with the community, to be a human being. By dismissing as perversion their romantic feelings, their attractions to members of the same sex, they are killing the souls of such people. 

They are suggesting that these feelings of love and affection among gay people are disgusting and unworthy, perverted, sinful, so terrible that such feelings ought to be denied. They are doing this, not because there is any scientific or medical evidence to support it, but because they believe the Bible condemns homosexuality. They are teaching young gay men and women to hate themselves, to hate their feelings, to hate the truth about themselves, to shut themselves off from the love and affection of others like them. The psychological, spiritual and sociological consequences are predictable:  Alienation, suicidal ideation, low self-esteem, self-doubt, self-loathing, loneliness, and ultimately, despair. And as a final kick in the pants, young gay men and women are expected to believe that this is what the God of love wants for them: A life of loneliness and pain and rejection and humiliation and shame. 

Monstrous ignorance, from start to finish, as so many members of the gay community have painfully learned. 

Read those words again:

“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality ..."
It takes but six little words for Robertson to jump from "homosexual behavior" to "bestiality." As if they were so intrinsically linked, he couldn't mention one without the other. 

This type of talk is so common among evangelicals as to be uninteresting. But that doesn't make it right. That doesn't redeem it from being what it is: Hate speech. 

Hate speech is the use of words to demonize groups of people. Suggesting that two men who love each other is not at all different than a horny farmer raping his goat is demonization. It's a display of shocking ignorance and stupidity which has nothing to do with supposed Biblical teachings on sexuality and everything to do with bigotry and prejudice.

It's wrong.

Many, many churches carry on a conversation about homosexuality without resorting to demonization and hate speech. It is possible to talk about religious beliefs on homosexuality without needlessly offending people. But the moment you stray from your beliefs and start talking about gay people as being no better than pedophiles or people who like to have sex with goats, you are no longer having a conversation on your religious beliefs: You are engaging in highly offensive exercise in ignorance and bigotry. And you can, and should, be made to face the consequences. 

No one argues with Robertson's right to free speech and no one is suggesting that he is not entitled to his own religious beliefs. But when free speech turns into hate speech, and religious belief turns into ignorant demonization of others, there is a problem.

Hate speech leads to hate crimes. Gay people can and do get fired from their jobs. Some have had their children taken away from them. Gay and lesbian teens are kicked out of their homes and left to fend for themselves on the streets.  Hate speech makes it easier for society to discriminate against gay people, take away their rights, violate their persons and property. Hardly what Jesus had in mind when he said we should do unto others what we would have done unto ourselves. This is not loving your neighbor as you love yourself. 

That this hate speech wraps itself in Christianity does not give it the protection of freedom of religion. Your religious beliefs are protected, but your belief that homosexuality is somehow the same as necrophilia is not supported by the Bible (or any authority, including science or common sense). When you talk about homosexuality being the same as bestiality, you are not having a conversation on religious belief. You are being an ignorant bigot, and we have the right to be offended.

The hate speech of Bryan Fischer

Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association has told listeners to his radio program that President Obama is preparing the U.S. military to kill Christians. 

Speaking last Friday, he said, “The military is being conditioned to use weapons on the American Family Association. The soldiers are being conditioned in their brains to think of evangelicals, Tea Partyers, the American Family Association and the Family Research Council as domestic enemies that may have to be neutralized by lethal force. The people you got to watch out for, you may have to turn your tanks on, are American Family Association.”

Fischer warns that the military may "surround the hotel" at next year's Values Voter Summit and ... well, use your imagination.

Fischer was upset that the American Family Association was included on a list of hate groups at a recent army training session. 

So: Is the AFA a hate group? 

It has been listed as such by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which provides an excellent summary of the group's hate-filled past. The reason for its designation as a hate group was not because of the group's religious beliefs, which are similar to most religious groups on the subject of homosexuality, but because of its constant demonization of members of the LGBT community.

Fischer claims the designation is unfair. 

Is it?

Consider the following states made by Fischer:

• Has repeatedly called for an Underground Railroad to "deliver innocent children from same-sex households."
• Has said gay people must be criminalized and treated "like drug addicts."
• Said "We should discriminate against unnatural and aberrant sexual behavior, whether pedophilia, bestiality, or homosexuality."
• Said Boy Scouts would be better off "drowned in the sea" than to allow gay scouts.
• Said "In the wake of what we've seen at Penn State, that alone out to be enough to say that, look: we are not going to put children in same-sex households—we are not going to adopt them into same-sex households. We are not going to give custody, if somebody goes into the homosexual lifestyle after siring children—bringing children into the world with an opposite-sex partner—they are not going to get custody of these children. If they have visits with those kids, they are going to be supervised visits. We cannot trust the sexual integrity and innocence and purity of those kids with those who have same-sex preferences. The risk is far, far too high.
• Claims "The homosexual agenda represents the single greatest modern threat to freedom of religion and conscience.”
• Says "The real haters are homosexuals. The real venom is coming from those that support the homosexual agenda, either homosexual activists, homosexuals, or those that support the homosexual agenda. They are the real haters. There is a heterophobic hatred, there is a Christophobic hatred that is just seething, there's a dark, venomous, demonic hatred that is in the homosexual community."
• Said "The homosexual agenda represents a clear and present danger to virtually every fundamental right given to us by our Creator and enshrined for us in our Constitution."
• Said “[Gays] are Nazis ... Do not be under any illusions about what homosexual activists will do with your freedoms and your religion if they have the opportunity. They’ll do the same thing to you that the Nazis did to their opponents in Nazi Germany.”
• Said "So Hitler himself was an active homosexual. And some people wonder, didn't the Germans, didn't the Nazis, persecute homosexuals? And it is true they did; they persecuted effeminate homosexuals. But Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers, they were his enforcers, they were his thugs. And Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals."
• Said "If We Want to See Fewer Students Commit Suicide, We Want Fewer Homosexual Students"
• Claimed homosexuality is a form of "domestic terrorism."
• Famously said "Homosexuality gave us Adolf Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews."
• Said allowing gay adoption is a form of sexual abuse.
• Constantly refers to gay marriage as "sodomy-based marriage."
• Said Hillary Clinton could be "our first lesbian president."
• Claimed "3/4ths of all lesbians are obese."
• Said "Parents and churches should abandon Boy Scouts like they were running out of a building house."
• Has openly admired Putin's anti-gay stance and said "It's time for us to be more like Russia."

See this article from GLAAD for more.

More choice quotes from Fischer, taken from my Stuff the American Family Association Says page on Facebook:

So ... is the American Family Association a hate group? When activists such as myself push back against this constant tide of myth and misinformation, are we persecuting the AFA and infringing on their right to religious liberty and freedom of belief? 

Or does the Southern Poverty Law Center have it right?

Fischer is welcome to his religious beliefs. But where, pray tell, are they? Comparing gay people to Nazis is not a religious belief. Slandering them as dangerous to society, as diseased, unhealthy, as the same as drug addicts and pedophiles ... where is the scriptural authority to back up such statements? What do such statements have to do with religion or religious belief? 

To find out what Fischer is up to, let's recast the same statements, but direct them against Jewish people instead of gay people:

• "The Jewish agenda represents a clear and present danger to virtually every fundamental right given to us by our Creator and enshrined for us in our Constitution."
• Said “[Jews] are Nazis ... Do not be under any illusions about what Jewish activists will do with your freedoms and your religion if they have the opportunity. They’ll do the same thing to you that the Nazis did to their opponents in Nazi Germany.”
• Has repeatedly called for an Underground Railroad to "deliver innocent children from Jewish households."
• Has said Jewish people must be criminalized and treated "like drug addicts."
• Said "We should discriminate against unnatural and aberrant sexual behavior, whether pedophilia, bestiality, or Judaism."
• Said Boy Scouts would be better off "drowned in the sea" than to allow Jewish scouts.

It's not about religion.

It's about hate. 

It's about demonizing an entire group of people over a biological fact of life that cannot be changed. 

There is nothing specifically Christian about any of Fischer's statements. There is, in fact, nothing specifically religious about them. Unless he told you he was a Christian, you would have no way of knowing. 

The American Family Association calls its a Christian ministry. It also calls American Family Radio, its radio programming that goes out on public airwaves all over the South, a "ministry" of the American Family Association. 

A ministry ... in what sense? 

Since when did telling outright lies about a certain group in society become a "ministry" protected by freedom of religion? Since when did "ministry" become something that involves persecution and hatred of people one doesn't like?

If the AFA is allowed to carry out this "ministry" against gay people, will other groups of "sinners" be targeted? Will we see ministries against drunks and murderers, against fathers who incest their daughters, against business people who exploit the poor and refuse to help the widow and the orphan? Will there be a ministry against masturbators? Will boys who masturbate be publicly shamed and excluded from the Boy Scouts? Will fornicators find themselves described as a clear and present danger to American society and the Constitution itself?

***

I live in Tupelo, Mississippi. which is also the headquarters of the American Family Association, and  I have yet to meet a single person in Mississippi who supports the AFA. Most of the people I have talked to over the last two years that I've lived here view the AFA as an embarrassment. They do not leap to defend it. They do not talk about the the many good works done by the AFA, the needy people helped, the hungry stomachs fed, the spiritual needs met. They sigh and shrug their shoulders the same way they do when the subject is slavery, or civil rights, or any of the other bits and pieces of Mississippi's unfortunate past. I have not met a single person who is proud of the AFA. 

If it engenders any feelings at all, they are feelings of fear. When I attended a sparsely-populated protest against the AFA several months ago, carried out in front of the AFA headquarters itself, I learned that many people would not come because they were afraid of retaliation, of losing their jobs or their standing in the community. 

When I started my Facebook page (Stuff the American Family Association Says) highlighting the outrageous and just plain wrong statements made by Fischer and others about the gay community, I was warned by several people to be careful. That I might be sued. That they might retaliate. That I might lose my job. 

My response to that was, and still is, that silence in the face of evil is not an option. The only reason the AFA gets away with their constant demonization of gay people is the fear and silence they engender among good people who know better but are afraid to speak up and speak out. And since when does a supposedly Christian group need to rely on fear and intimidation to get its message out? 

***

Anyone who has ever been in an abusive relationship will recognize the signs: 

• Abusers are selfish and self-involved, thinking only of themselves, their status, their standing, what they want. They do not care who gets hurt because of their actions.
• Abusers almost always view themselves as the victims while demonizing the people they hurt as somehow or other deserving of what they got. 
• Abusers never take responsibility for their actions. When we protested the AFA, the general manager came out to speak to us. When confronted about Bryan Fischer, he was quick to note the AFA is "not responsible" for the content of its own programming, that Fischer's view "don't necessarily reflect" those of the AFA itself. They even run such disclaimers on-air.
• Abusers are always right. They will not tolerate the idea that they might be wrong. They go to great lengths to rationalize and justify their behavior, willfully and willingly blind to its consequences in the lives of others.  
• Abusers create a climate of fear and intimidation to keep victims quiet. 
• Telling the truth is a crime among abusers. Anyone who tells the truth about them will be punished, and often very severely. 

Have a look at these signs of an abusive relationship over at HelpGuide.Org.

Do I, as a gay man:

• feel afraid of the AFA?
• avoid certain topics out of fear?
• feel that I can't do anything right?
• feel that I deserve to be mistreated?
• feel emotionally numb or helpless?
• wonder if I'm crazy?

Yes. To all of them. That's the way the AFA makes me feel.

Does the AFA:

• humiliate or yell at me?
• criticize me or put me down?
• treat me badly so that I'm embarrassed for my family and friends to see it?
• ignore my opinions and accomplishments?
• see me as a sex object rather than as a person?

Yes. Yes to all of it. Yes, exactly.

Do I feel threatened by the AFA?

Yes. 

Does the AFA threaten to take my children away?

Yes.

Does the AFA want to control me and what I do?

Yes.

***

What, exactly, is going on here? 

If the American Family Association is a Christian ministry, why do I feel abused? Why does its programming leave me feeling dirty and embarrassed? Where is the "good news" in the AFA gospel? Why must I constantly defend myself against a torrent of untrue accusations and slander?

If the AFA is a Christian ministry, to whom is it ministering? What is its message? What is it trying to say?

If the AFA is a Christian ministry, how does its behavior compare to its founder, Jesus Christ? Is its behavior Christ-like? 

What, exactly, is the AFA?

Who, exactly, is Bryan Fischer? 

The answers are increasingly obvious.