Note: This article was originally published in the Spirit of Jefferson on March 10, 2018.
Matthew Franck’s opinion in the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/17/AR2010121702528.html) is that LGBTQ people are overplaying their hand in calling out hate. This is a position he is locked into because of his Christian faith. His stance against gay marriage, and by extension gay people, is negative and non-negotiable. This is by definition a biased view — one that is not susceptible to change or negotiation. And while bias is not the same as hatred, there is a muddy, slippery slope that leads from bias to hatred.
Christianity in its most conservative interpretations of homosexuality wraps a mantle of righteousness around its belief that would make homosexuals out to be, if not actually evil, then counter to God’s plan. Naturally this puts fire in the belly of those who truly do hate homosexuals. This heated attitude affords these haters the resolve to manifest their hatred in sometimes violent, psychologically damaging, and socially divisive ways. You do not have to look further than Westboro Baptist in Kansas, a temple of Satanic hate operating tax-free as a Christian church.
Mr. Franck, as a reasoning person, almost certainly would disparage the tactics of Westboro as anti-Christian, but how can he deny the causal connection between the supposedly benign beliefs he espouses and their consequences in the behavior of Westboro Christians? They are both couched in the same hard beliefs that lead to the blind, unyielding “logic” driving fundamentalists of any religious persuasion to deny others rights. We see it in fundamentalist Muslim attacks on Iraqi Christians; in the persecution of Jews under the fundamentalist Catholic inquisition; the burning of Muslim mosques in India by fundamentalist Hindus.
The regard of homosexuals by fundamentalists of almost all religions makes homosexuals probably the safest people to hate, but it is no more justified than any other kind of hatred.
The reason we cannot and should not accede to Mr. Franck’s plea to stop calling fundamentalists hateful people, or at least driven to hate, is that they will not budge in their belief. For example, homosexuals needed their own strong rhetoric to face off with the big money supported bigotry of fundamentalist Mormons in California’s Proposition 8 in 2008, as they used their money to manipulate people to seeing danger and social decay in homosexuality. Ultimately, their stance and their money prevailed, and homosexuals were denied not just civil rights, but had their human rights put into question. That’s hatred, even if it exists between the lines.
Homosexuals are who they are and cannot budge from that reality and, except for those homosexuals whom fundamentalists have made self-loathing, they overwhelmingly do not want to be anything other than what they are. Whether it’s a creator’s hand or biology is beside the point. It’s incontrovertible and embedded in human nature. If we cannot embrace that aspect of humanity, so be it. But what we need to do is accept the humanness of it. Without attacking religious belief per se, we need to make it more difficult for fundamentalists to make the slide from belief down into hatred.