Occasional Notes: Confronting Extremism
Jason Kuznicki on Jul 22nd 2005 04:58 pm |
Priceless: Lenka of Farkleberries makes the following incredible discovery:
…a website where a self-proclaimed prophet/Robert Bork fan club member from Bayside, New York quotes the (mainly anti-gay) revelations Jesus and Mary (and the Saints, oh my!) personally gave her between 1968 to 1995. For emphasis, these “new teachings of Jesus and Mary” are interspersed with Robert Bork quotes and photos.
Meanwhile, two teenagers in Iran have been executed for homosexuality. The details are sparse and contested, but troubling all the same. They were held in prison for fourteen months, lashed 228 times and then hanged. (Update: Incredibly, GayPatriot looks at these executions and sees… a chance to silence critics of the Bush administration. Pro-war or anti-, can we all agree that this is some particularly tasteless opportunism?)
Responses: Back at home, Eve Tushnet makes a challenging reply to my photo essay on the ex-gay movement. She writes,
This Positive Liberty post… on “how not to make me ex-gay” captures pretty much everything I like least about this… what? “movement”?First off, the “ex-gay” writer’s description of gay life: “Unlike homosexuals, heterosexuals sacrifice themselves and their personal desires for the sake of their partners. They commit to each other and care for each other even when times are difficult. Being ‘gay’ is only about sex, and that’s no way to have a life.”
Jesus wept, people, read some daggone Evelyn Waugh why don’t you! Read some Augustine. What on earth would make you think that sin never contains any seed of goodness, any element of love? St. Augustine thought precisely the opposite of that–that every sin was a virtue misdirected…
I believe what the Catholic Church teaches not solely… because the alternatives are ugly. Quite often the alternatives are attractive, insofar as they partake in a partial share of the goodness, love, and grace that God offers. I believe what the Catholic Church teaches because, when I’m at my best, I love Jesus Christ, I love God, and I can faintly discern the beauty, hope, and peace He wants for me.
Now I can live with this, and I am willing to look past the condescension that seems so evident in these words. Chronologically speaking, condescension is the mother of tolerance.
(Now maybe my gay Christian friends will not be willing to look past that condescension–”What do you mean we don’t fully share in the love of Jesus Christ?” they may ask–but that is for them, not for me, to ask.)
I can also live with this because I am tolerant and open-minded, and I recognize that “society” itself would be meaningless if it did not encompass wide differences of opinion.
But two questions remain: First, how should civil society treat someone with only an incomplete share of God’s love? I think I know the answer to this question, but it would be nice to hear it from some Christians as well.
And second, what will you, as a Christian, do to draw the line between your measured, thoughtful disapprovals–and those of religious extremists?
From where we sit–and I ask Eve Tushnet to pardon me–it often looks as though there were a seamless continuum of intensity between her position and those of the Iranian executioners.
This absolutely does not mean that the two see eye to eye, nor does it mean that the more decent among the anti-gay are serving as a front, knowing or otherwise, for the killers. It does not mean, as Maggie Gallagher falsely claims, that gays and lesbians always hold anyone who opposes “the gay agenda” summarily guilty of bigotry–as if all prejudice were one and the same.
What it does mean, though, is that if anyone has some soul-searching to do, surely it is not those of us who seek equal treatment for gay and straight relationships, and for gay and straight people.
Say all you like about the greater virtue that God accords to heterosexual couples, and by extension to heterosexual people (And what did they do to earn this virtue?). Crow as much as you please about your virtue, but be very–very–careful never to find yourself saying that you possess a greater humanity.
Is the line too fine to draw? I don’t think so. Consider Orthodox Jews, who hold themselves to be God’s chosen people, and yet who generally find that they can live in the world of the gentiles without feeling the need to force others into their way of life.
Yes, I know that Christianity is an evangelical religion, and that it does call for the believer to remake the world. But when the world says “no, thank you,”–well, what then? Evangelical religions make peculiar demands on their followers, not just to reach out to others, but to do it in ways that would be decent even by the standards of natural reason. Too often, it seems that last bit gets ignored, as with the several letters that I drew on to make that composite.
Changes: Some big developments are afoot this weekend at Positive Liberty. It will become, shall we say, larger. In the meantime it may just look weird or disappear entirely. Details to follow, but I promise you won’t be disappointed.
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Thank you very much for the link, and for expanding on the topic of the “bigotry continuum”…I’m looking forward to checking out the “new Positive Liberty”!
Your photo essay was very moving! Thank you.
As a Christian, I find myself thinking along lines that might be more characteristic of the Jews, as you mentioned. The Old Testament mentality seems to be that God gave Israel these laws, and calls the Jews to observe them, but not to force them on the nations around them, who do not follow this god or understand the ethic God provided. Under Roman rule, Christianity was similar — and there was no way for Christians to change the law, anyway. And they acted as a culture within a culture, and and were different from the culture around them. If a Roman cast aside an infant (their solution to unwanted pregnancy) it was not a Christian’s duty to make them raise the infant — but they could take it in as their own.
And then Constantine converted, which my favorite reformer (John Wesley) believed was a disaster. Constantine converted the whole empire to Christianity — but empires didn’t survive without war, or executions, or countless other injustices that empires tend to depend on. The church lost a lot of its uniqueness. We, as the church, haven’t since gotten rid of the idea that the church and the government are going for the same thing, and really, we’re not. When the church and the government get too cozy, it’s generally good for the government and bad for the church — because, essentially, the government does what it wants and gets this holy veneer to boot. And, the church — we’re people, sometimes we’re wrong about God — may succeed in making legal what may be only a cultural anomoly.
Good health insurance is hard enough to find when domestic partner benefits are intact. People sometimes need someone to make decisions on their behalf, and they ought to have the person who knows them best. The Bible says much more about poor people than gay people. Nor does God attempt to force anyone to believe. As a Christian and a citizen, I’m going to vote for things that I perceive to be just — but I’m not going to count on the law to do or be God’s will. God’s will is for the church to figure out, and then to follow the best it can.
As Americans, we have a good inheritance from Christianity. “In Christ there is no slave nor free,” no people who lack humanity, or who receive lesser grace. Even though it took us Christians too long to be ready to receive those words. And there is, unfortunately, a gray area here, too. I’m Methodist, not Amish, after all, and I participate in the system. But we can’t count on non-believers to agree with us, and government generally does whatever it needs to keep itself intact, which is not necessarily just. I’m going to put more faith in the church to do what is just, and push it in that direction — but there are a lot of things that really ought to stay internal arguments. I can’t convince a non-Christian social darwinist that the least and the lost are important — but I can behave as though they are. And while I support the ordination of anyone who is called by God, regardless of their sexuality, I wish we could have a good, non-hostile talk in the church about all the issues homosexuality brings up — the purpose of marriage and sexuality, our mix-up with sexual fulfillment as a God-given right (which I don’t go for, for either straights or gays), celibacy and intimacy and community.
Forgive me; I haven’t the time to edit the crap out of this, just to blather. Hope it’s comprehensible. Thanks again for the photo essay, Jason, and may God bless your marriage.
Gail
Gail,
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Interestingly, the idea that Constantine greatly harmed Christianity used to be a lot more prevalent. As it happens, I wrote my MA thesis on Claude Fleury, a 17th-century French Catholic thinker who argued exactly the same in his histories of the Church. His works are not in print anymore, however, whether in French or in English. Today I think most Christians see him as a hero, which strikes me as doubtful at best.
About the supposed right to sexual fulfillment, I generally agree. But (and we might also agree on this) choosing a partner on the basis of your sexual orientation is not just a matter of sexual wish-fulfillment. I struggle to find an analogy for it, but if you can imagine being married to a person who actively dislikes being intimate with you in any form, and who always will–from what I have heard, that’s quite often what a partnership can end up like if the sexual orientations aren’t compatible.
Constantine insured that Christianity would spread, but he also institutionalized it in ways that have often made the church more about oppression than love, more about exclusion than Good News, more about judgment than hope. Constantine, even after conversion, displayed traits of both cruelty and progressive thinking. The church has teetered between cruelty/hate and love/service ever since.
[...] First, the awful. Rob Anderson, a promising voice in the next generation of gay activism, has this to say about the execution of gay teenagers in Iran, a story that should be familiar to PL regulars: For many gay Americans, the pictures from Iran that spread around the Internet in late July represent a watershed moment, a time when we realized that on top of demanding our rights and equality at home, we must also actively seek to influence the lives of LGBT people abroad. [...]
[...] To his great credit, Jason recognizes the distinctions. In his response to Eve, he writes: [...]