GEORGE TEMPLETON COMMENTARY
By George Templeton
Gazette Columnist
Gay
“Prejudice is more than an incident in many lives; it is often lock stitched into the very fabric of personality. In such cases it cannot be extracted by tweezers. To change it, the whole pattern of life would have to be altered.” Gordon Allport understood that it is easy to change the minds of men but difficult to change their hearts.
Beliefs alone are not enough to justify the complex matter of homosexuality as inherently known evil. When stereotypes generate negative feelings, they lead to discrimination. It has been argued that facts don’t matter; only Biblical truth, but liberty and justice require a patriotic faith in the future.
History
We have not hesitated to injure homosexuals by fraud, laws, and hateful intolerance. They have been the victims of prejudice, witch hunts, lies, and manufactured crime. We have discriminated against Gays.
Stereotypes
Gays are not sick, promiscuous sex-crazed maniacs, and child molesters. Those come from the ranks of coaches, clergymen, law enforcement, and the people we would least expect.
Gays are our neighbors and colleagues at work, and they are part of American families. Often they are ashamed and in hiding, but that has been spun as a dishonest, dangerous deception. Beyond redemption whether they “come out of the closet” or not, their quandary sometimes leads to suicide.
Repeated assertions produce changes in our brains, so we prejudge and categorize. Because this has occurred in myriad ways over hundreds of years, it becomes unconsciously reinforced, changing how we are able to think about it. Our thoughts create our reality.
Family
In the minority, Gay families, single parents, and orphan children have always existed.
Gay
“Prejudice is more than an incident in many lives; it is often lock stitched into the very fabric of personality. In such cases it cannot be extracted by tweezers. To change it, the whole pattern of life would have to be altered.” Gordon Allport understood that it is easy to change the minds of men but difficult to change their hearts.
Beliefs alone are not enough to justify the complex matter of homosexuality as inherently known evil. When stereotypes generate negative feelings, they lead to discrimination. It has been argued that facts don’t matter; only Biblical truth, but liberty and justice require a patriotic faith in the future.
History
We have not hesitated to injure homosexuals by fraud, laws, and hateful intolerance. They have been the victims of prejudice, witch hunts, lies, and manufactured crime. We have discriminated against Gays.
Stereotypes
Gays are not sick, promiscuous sex-crazed maniacs, and child molesters. Those come from the ranks of coaches, clergymen, law enforcement, and the people we would least expect.
Gays are our neighbors and colleagues at work, and they are part of American families. Often they are ashamed and in hiding, but that has been spun as a dishonest, dangerous deception. Beyond redemption whether they “come out of the closet” or not, their quandary sometimes leads to suicide.
Repeated assertions produce changes in our brains, so we prejudge and categorize. Because this has occurred in myriad ways over hundreds of years, it becomes unconsciously reinforced, changing how we are able to think about it. Our thoughts create our reality.
Family
In the minority, Gay families, single parents, and orphan children have always existed.
In history, there have been many examples of domestic partnerships tracing back to the Zhou Dynasty in China and to the Roman Empire. Acceptance has varied. Today, same sex-marriage is recognized in many countries and in some American states.
What makes good parenting is far more complex than sex.
Anti-gay stereotypes are a tool to reinforce traditional gender roles in society, but those have transformed. Families no longer divide into breadwinner and homemaker. Competition, survival, globalization, mobility, communication, and technology make it so. Now we educate women, let them vote, drive, and speak up in church. They educate our children, serve in the military, manage corporations, and contribute to our society according to capabilities transcending gender roles.
Families have problems that are better understood by looking inside them instead of blaming a non-existent homosexual threat. When mom has to work the day shift, and dad the night, because they can’t afford child care, the family is strained. When employers require working overtime, don’t pay enough for families to survive, and refuse time off for family responsibilities, health, and citizenship, work-life balance suffers.
Choices
Is homosexuality a choice, an admission, or a contagious disease? Should homosexuals seek a cure? If it is just the way things are, we must accept them. I Corinthians 7:17 says that everyone must lead the life the Lord has assigned to them.
Scientific
Today we know that the earth is not flat and at the center of the universe, but we hardly understand homosexuality more than in the time of Moses.
Human beings come in unpredictable varieties and are complex, combining body with mind and consciousness. Homosexuality is more than the sum of its parts. There are clues, stated as statistical correlations without comprehensive explanation, unable to predict, and failing to distinguish between cause and effect. The problem is that the experimental variables cannot easily be adjusted, kept pure and free of interactions, or even accurately quantified. Anything can be proved by statistics!
Studies have related homosexuality with brain structure, left-handedness, and genetic, hormonal, social, cultural, psychological, and political variables. Darwinian evolution can be called on to explain it. Homosexuality combines male and female attributes in ways that benefit society. If it was a fatal flaw, it would have become extinct long ago.
Homosexuality seems to be something that one awakens to rather than choosing. That people remain Gay even in the face of social persecution testifies that homosexuality is not an easy choice.
Morality
If you could identify that a child would be born a homosexual, would you abort it? Personhood and the right to life are in conflict with homosexual acceptance. Would you then deny your homosexual child the right to marriage? If homosexuality is wrong, is gay marriage wrong?
Homophobia is a “descriptive morality”. It is something that seems intrinsic that cannot be measured or accurately quantified. It took form in the Nazi view of Jews and led to the holocaust. It was in Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 admission that he could not define pornography, but knew it when he saw it.
“Prescriptive morality” involves behaviors that can be observed at a time and place. The only valid debate concerning Gay morality must use objective measures. Assertions about homosexuality have little meaning when they cannot be directly compared with heterosexuality. Morality and law needs a reason. People need to get along.
It is deplorable to discriminate against homosexuals, holding them accountable for something over which they have no control.
Natural Law
Sexually oriented displays are publically accepted in movies, television, advertisements, and magazines. Though sexually stimulating, they are not considered lewd, lustful, obscene, or indecent. In our day to day lives we repeatedly encounter, in many forms and ways, displays intending to arouse sexual thoughts and desires. They are embraced by ethical businessmen and largely accepted by society. Yet homosexual public displays have been oppressed, policed and violently punished as threatening the public and contributing to the collapse of society.
Same-sex marriage is not a crime against nature. Authoritarian interpretations of nature lead to the ecclesiastical assertion that “truth has rights which error may not enjoy” and that those rights must be undemocratically forced on all people. Nature makes married people live longer, be healthier and happier and more secure. Nature requires that we live only long enough to reproduce and raise enough children. True natural law holds that people’s activities need no supervision when they are guided by what reality calls for.
Is marriage only the duty of bearing children and restraining one’s appetite? St. Augustine argued that anything more was sinful. In I Corinthians 7, Paul advised against marriage except for those aflame with undeniable passion. What about barren heterosexual couples? Homosexuals naturally don’t bear children, but through birth-control neither do heterosexuals.
Are only certain types of sex for the common good? Do others damage society as well as the participants? Today, social diseases and infection can be prevented by technology and medicine. The dread consequences of unwanted pregnancy are avoidable.
Are heterosexual activities wrong when their intent is pleasure? We can survive without love, not without eating, but love is more incendiary and emotionally profound than any meal. Does the denial of homosexual love shape our culture as much as interpreting it?
Freedom
Conservatives are for more freedom, but not when it allows Gay marriage. Persecution claims that their religious freedom is violated when Gays marry. The slippery slope incites emotion by incorrectly claiming that ministers and doctors will be sued by an evil government if they don’t perform same-sex marriage, inseminate a lesbian couple, or allow bestiality. Conspiracy argues that there is a federal plot to silence conservatives and destroy Christianity.
Republican Steve Yarbrough’s strike everything bill, SB1178 provides a new path for people to sidestep laws they don’t like by appealing to religious freedom. Individual religious beliefs need not follow the dogma of any particular religious denomination. Under the guise of “more freedom” it would legally empower discrimination against Gays, teach Intelligent Design in public schools, and confound the Affordable Care Act.
Holy
The Bible spans thousands of years, describes the creation of nature, culture, and a covenant with God’s chosen people. Prudish about nudity, it deals with motives and subjective truth, but is not a treatise about sex, psychology, taxation, benefits, inheritance, overpopulation, human lifespan extended to 120 years, or diversity in race and creed. That is why marriage policy must be pragmatic and utilitarian instead of metaphysical and dogmatic.
Matthew 5:31-32 states that divorce, and even remarriage of a divorced woman is a sin. In modern society, marriage is a complex legal institution, considering the raising of children and the distribution of responsibilities and assets in the event of divorce. It is a religious institution only in our hearts, and by permission of the law.
The Bible has ambiguities that place great power in the hands of interpreters. It contains mythology, literature, poetic art, history, and politics, but no understanding of modern society. What one reads into it often tells more about the reader than what is printed.
When the Bible speaks of marriage between a man and a woman it is about the natural majority. It is for fertility in a time when large families were a source of labor and care for elderly parents, not against Gay marriage.
Religious conservatives argue that God expects marriage between a man and a woman and that if we allow Gay marriage we will destroy the natural difference created by God and cause devastating damage to children. Character, not sexuality, is what determines human behaviors.
A paternal forgiveness of homosexual sin reveals pride and prejudice. Matthew 15:24-28 describes Canaanites as dogs, an attitude found today in sermons and the Palestine controversy. Can we identify enough with gays to allow altruistic behaviors? A website speaks of the hate that gays have for Christianity, but misses a self-interested judgment, casting homosexuals, who are also God’s creation, as threatening by their very existence.
Arguments that God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was a specific retribution for homosexuality ignore the incest by Lot in Genesis 30-36. They ignore that the Old Testament accepted slavery and polygamy. Leviticus 20:13 says the punishment for homosexuality is death. The Bible also gives strict rules for burnt offerings, hygiene, and diet that are ignored today but were severely punished as described in Leviticus 26:27-40. In Numbers 15:32-36 we read that working on the Sabbath was punished by stoning to death.
Galatians 5:10-21 broadly describes the sins of the flesh. The 4th century monk Evagrius laid a broad interpretation for the “Seven Deadly Sins” that was embraced by Catholics. Dante’s early 14th century poem, The Inferno, described a journey through Hell and numerous sins corresponding to the punishments he observed. He met Popes in Hell, but no homosexuals.
The Ku Klux Klan used a symbolic cross in a circle with a blood drop in the center to represent how Jesus shed his blood for the white Aryan race, but Jesus even accepted prostitutes. Conscience can be manipulated to justify bigotry instead of recognizing that obligations to others should take precedence over the individual. Humility recognizes that conscience is potentially erroneous and not the absolute truth.
Jesus never spoke about homosexuality or Gay marriage. Instead, the gospels repeatedly show that his love did not exclude those who had been marginalized by his society. He advocated a whole humanity without barriers.
Restroom Fear
Here he comes to save the day, Republican John Kavanagh flexed muscles to win the culture war nullifying progressive city of Phoenix ordinance G-5780 that prevented discrimination by sexual orientation, and gender expression in employment and public accommodations. A strike everything emergency bill, its first revision was SB1432 and would have made it a misdemeanor if one did not use the bathroom corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate. Thankfully, this was replaced by another emergency strike out bill, SB1045, removing state criminal prosecution while allowing discrimination by businessmen who could deny a bathroom if you do not seem to belong. The bill refers to male, female, or appallingly “something in between”. It enables the prosecution of masculine females for “gender violation”.
People who could be humiliated and attacked because of their appearance are nothing new. They are not peeping Toms. They are the ones who need protection. Historically, they have gone where they seemed to belong and behaved themselves.
Civil Unions
If Webster’s dictionary is the ultimate and final technical authority, then Gay partnerships must be civil unions. These would always be something less than marriage. State by state, gays would be denied equality under the law.
Psychology
To be true to themselves, homosexuals must wrestle with how they can align their self-image with belonging in society. That is the essence of integrity. When homosexuals are forced to live schizophrenic existence, it leads to psychological problems. Psychology argues for gay marriage. No one should be torn apart by trying to maintain a split between what they are and what they feel society demands that they must be.
Civilization’s End
Shame is an agent of suppression that comes from outside of Gays. Can America grow to understand that homosexuality is nothing to be ashamed of?
Gay marriage will not mean the end of heterosexuality, marriage, monogamy, personal responsibility, and civilization. Based on all the commotion, one might think that Gays were planning to amend the Constitution to ban heterosexual marriage! The law permits interracial marriage, showing that the one you love is the important thing. Not being allowed to love is unnatural. Human rights include Gay rights. Human understanding is the right to be whom one is. Gay marriage will replace rejection with acceptance, sorrow with joy, and silence with communication. Marriage equality promotes social stability, economic mobility, business competition, emotional health, and legal fairness. It will help us to strengthen entire communities, and to make them more just, stable, and compassionate. Gays will form families having diverse and creative solutions to the division of labor and the relationship of intimacy within the family. Men can be motherly. Truth and trust will replace the anxiety associated with a homosexual masquerade. A morally progressing nation recognizes human rights, liberty, and justice for all.
Anti-gay stereotypes are a tool to reinforce traditional gender roles in society, but those have transformed. Families no longer divide into breadwinner and homemaker. Competition, survival, globalization, mobility, communication, and technology make it so. Now we educate women, let them vote, drive, and speak up in church. They educate our children, serve in the military, manage corporations, and contribute to our society according to capabilities transcending gender roles.
Families have problems that are better understood by looking inside them instead of blaming a non-existent homosexual threat. When mom has to work the day shift, and dad the night, because they can’t afford child care, the family is strained. When employers require working overtime, don’t pay enough for families to survive, and refuse time off for family responsibilities, health, and citizenship, work-life balance suffers.
Choices
Is homosexuality a choice, an admission, or a contagious disease? Should homosexuals seek a cure? If it is just the way things are, we must accept them. I Corinthians 7:17 says that everyone must lead the life the Lord has assigned to them.
Scientific
Today we know that the earth is not flat and at the center of the universe, but we hardly understand homosexuality more than in the time of Moses.
Human beings come in unpredictable varieties and are complex, combining body with mind and consciousness. Homosexuality is more than the sum of its parts. There are clues, stated as statistical correlations without comprehensive explanation, unable to predict, and failing to distinguish between cause and effect. The problem is that the experimental variables cannot easily be adjusted, kept pure and free of interactions, or even accurately quantified. Anything can be proved by statistics!
Studies have related homosexuality with brain structure, left-handedness, and genetic, hormonal, social, cultural, psychological, and political variables. Darwinian evolution can be called on to explain it. Homosexuality combines male and female attributes in ways that benefit society. If it was a fatal flaw, it would have become extinct long ago.
Homosexuality seems to be something that one awakens to rather than choosing. That people remain Gay even in the face of social persecution testifies that homosexuality is not an easy choice.
Morality
If you could identify that a child would be born a homosexual, would you abort it? Personhood and the right to life are in conflict with homosexual acceptance. Would you then deny your homosexual child the right to marriage? If homosexuality is wrong, is gay marriage wrong?
Homophobia is a “descriptive morality”. It is something that seems intrinsic that cannot be measured or accurately quantified. It took form in the Nazi view of Jews and led to the holocaust. It was in Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 admission that he could not define pornography, but knew it when he saw it.
“Prescriptive morality” involves behaviors that can be observed at a time and place. The only valid debate concerning Gay morality must use objective measures. Assertions about homosexuality have little meaning when they cannot be directly compared with heterosexuality. Morality and law needs a reason. People need to get along.
It is deplorable to discriminate against homosexuals, holding them accountable for something over which they have no control.
Natural Law
Sexually oriented displays are publically accepted in movies, television, advertisements, and magazines. Though sexually stimulating, they are not considered lewd, lustful, obscene, or indecent. In our day to day lives we repeatedly encounter, in many forms and ways, displays intending to arouse sexual thoughts and desires. They are embraced by ethical businessmen and largely accepted by society. Yet homosexual public displays have been oppressed, policed and violently punished as threatening the public and contributing to the collapse of society.
Same-sex marriage is not a crime against nature. Authoritarian interpretations of nature lead to the ecclesiastical assertion that “truth has rights which error may not enjoy” and that those rights must be undemocratically forced on all people. Nature makes married people live longer, be healthier and happier and more secure. Nature requires that we live only long enough to reproduce and raise enough children. True natural law holds that people’s activities need no supervision when they are guided by what reality calls for.
Is marriage only the duty of bearing children and restraining one’s appetite? St. Augustine argued that anything more was sinful. In I Corinthians 7, Paul advised against marriage except for those aflame with undeniable passion. What about barren heterosexual couples? Homosexuals naturally don’t bear children, but through birth-control neither do heterosexuals.
Are only certain types of sex for the common good? Do others damage society as well as the participants? Today, social diseases and infection can be prevented by technology and medicine. The dread consequences of unwanted pregnancy are avoidable.
Are heterosexual activities wrong when their intent is pleasure? We can survive without love, not without eating, but love is more incendiary and emotionally profound than any meal. Does the denial of homosexual love shape our culture as much as interpreting it?
Freedom
Conservatives are for more freedom, but not when it allows Gay marriage. Persecution claims that their religious freedom is violated when Gays marry. The slippery slope incites emotion by incorrectly claiming that ministers and doctors will be sued by an evil government if they don’t perform same-sex marriage, inseminate a lesbian couple, or allow bestiality. Conspiracy argues that there is a federal plot to silence conservatives and destroy Christianity.
Republican Steve Yarbrough’s strike everything bill, SB1178 provides a new path for people to sidestep laws they don’t like by appealing to religious freedom. Individual religious beliefs need not follow the dogma of any particular religious denomination. Under the guise of “more freedom” it would legally empower discrimination against Gays, teach Intelligent Design in public schools, and confound the Affordable Care Act.
Holy
The Bible spans thousands of years, describes the creation of nature, culture, and a covenant with God’s chosen people. Prudish about nudity, it deals with motives and subjective truth, but is not a treatise about sex, psychology, taxation, benefits, inheritance, overpopulation, human lifespan extended to 120 years, or diversity in race and creed. That is why marriage policy must be pragmatic and utilitarian instead of metaphysical and dogmatic.
Matthew 5:31-32 states that divorce, and even remarriage of a divorced woman is a sin. In modern society, marriage is a complex legal institution, considering the raising of children and the distribution of responsibilities and assets in the event of divorce. It is a religious institution only in our hearts, and by permission of the law.
The Bible has ambiguities that place great power in the hands of interpreters. It contains mythology, literature, poetic art, history, and politics, but no understanding of modern society. What one reads into it often tells more about the reader than what is printed.
When the Bible speaks of marriage between a man and a woman it is about the natural majority. It is for fertility in a time when large families were a source of labor and care for elderly parents, not against Gay marriage.
Religious conservatives argue that God expects marriage between a man and a woman and that if we allow Gay marriage we will destroy the natural difference created by God and cause devastating damage to children. Character, not sexuality, is what determines human behaviors.
A paternal forgiveness of homosexual sin reveals pride and prejudice. Matthew 15:24-28 describes Canaanites as dogs, an attitude found today in sermons and the Palestine controversy. Can we identify enough with gays to allow altruistic behaviors? A website speaks of the hate that gays have for Christianity, but misses a self-interested judgment, casting homosexuals, who are also God’s creation, as threatening by their very existence.
Arguments that God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was a specific retribution for homosexuality ignore the incest by Lot in Genesis 30-36. They ignore that the Old Testament accepted slavery and polygamy. Leviticus 20:13 says the punishment for homosexuality is death. The Bible also gives strict rules for burnt offerings, hygiene, and diet that are ignored today but were severely punished as described in Leviticus 26:27-40. In Numbers 15:32-36 we read that working on the Sabbath was punished by stoning to death.
Galatians 5:10-21 broadly describes the sins of the flesh. The 4th century monk Evagrius laid a broad interpretation for the “Seven Deadly Sins” that was embraced by Catholics. Dante’s early 14th century poem, The Inferno, described a journey through Hell and numerous sins corresponding to the punishments he observed. He met Popes in Hell, but no homosexuals.
The Ku Klux Klan used a symbolic cross in a circle with a blood drop in the center to represent how Jesus shed his blood for the white Aryan race, but Jesus even accepted prostitutes. Conscience can be manipulated to justify bigotry instead of recognizing that obligations to others should take precedence over the individual. Humility recognizes that conscience is potentially erroneous and not the absolute truth.
Jesus never spoke about homosexuality or Gay marriage. Instead, the gospels repeatedly show that his love did not exclude those who had been marginalized by his society. He advocated a whole humanity without barriers.
Restroom Fear
Here he comes to save the day, Republican John Kavanagh flexed muscles to win the culture war nullifying progressive city of Phoenix ordinance G-5780 that prevented discrimination by sexual orientation, and gender expression in employment and public accommodations. A strike everything emergency bill, its first revision was SB1432 and would have made it a misdemeanor if one did not use the bathroom corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate. Thankfully, this was replaced by another emergency strike out bill, SB1045, removing state criminal prosecution while allowing discrimination by businessmen who could deny a bathroom if you do not seem to belong. The bill refers to male, female, or appallingly “something in between”. It enables the prosecution of masculine females for “gender violation”.
People who could be humiliated and attacked because of their appearance are nothing new. They are not peeping Toms. They are the ones who need protection. Historically, they have gone where they seemed to belong and behaved themselves.
Civil Unions
If Webster’s dictionary is the ultimate and final technical authority, then Gay partnerships must be civil unions. These would always be something less than marriage. State by state, gays would be denied equality under the law.
Psychology
To be true to themselves, homosexuals must wrestle with how they can align their self-image with belonging in society. That is the essence of integrity. When homosexuals are forced to live schizophrenic existence, it leads to psychological problems. Psychology argues for gay marriage. No one should be torn apart by trying to maintain a split between what they are and what they feel society demands that they must be.
Civilization’s End
Shame is an agent of suppression that comes from outside of Gays. Can America grow to understand that homosexuality is nothing to be ashamed of?
Gay marriage will not mean the end of heterosexuality, marriage, monogamy, personal responsibility, and civilization. Based on all the commotion, one might think that Gays were planning to amend the Constitution to ban heterosexual marriage! The law permits interracial marriage, showing that the one you love is the important thing. Not being allowed to love is unnatural. Human rights include Gay rights. Human understanding is the right to be whom one is. Gay marriage will replace rejection with acceptance, sorrow with joy, and silence with communication. Marriage equality promotes social stability, economic mobility, business competition, emotional health, and legal fairness. It will help us to strengthen entire communities, and to make them more just, stable, and compassionate. Gays will form families having diverse and creative solutions to the division of labor and the relationship of intimacy within the family. Men can be motherly. Truth and trust will replace the anxiety associated with a homosexual masquerade. A morally progressing nation recognizes human rights, liberty, and justice for all.
1 comment:
Amen.
I would have copied and downloaded, but I didn't have enough room on my hard drive.
Post a Comment