Despite having heard a lot of bluster from the religious right over the years, they still sometimes have the ability to say something so totally brand new, and patently offensive, that it just knocks the wind right out of me. Take this gem quoted in the Colorado Springs Gazette over the weekend in a story about the recent rash of gay teen suicides:
Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for policy studies at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., said the rash September suicides by gays might be linked to the students believing they were born gay. “That creates hopelessness,” he said. “It is more loving and compassionate to say you don’t have to be gay for the rest of your lives.”
What would be far more loving and compassionate is for Sprigg and his compatriots to actually engage in a true act of compassion. “Compassion” literally means “to suffer with” or “suffer together.” We can only have compassion for someone when we understand, on a deeply personal level, what, exactly, is the other person’s struggle.
Sprigg and others who like to say they have compassion for gays and lesbians have no clue what they’re talking about. Instead of “suffering with” gays and lesbians, they spend their entire existence inflicting suffering on a whole community with their anti-gay political and religious agenda, quack science, and spurious evidence that “you don’t have to be gay for the rest of your lives.”
Yes, Mr. Sprigg, we who are gay or lesbian do, indeed, have to be gay for the rest of our lives. The only true choice we have is whether to believe the abominable lie that we can “change” and spend our lives in full on repression of who we really are, or we can choose to believe that God has loved us enough to create us this way and bless us when we live into the truth of our lives.
What makes the thought of be “being gay for the rest of your lives” such a horrible, shameful, terrible thought to even bear consideration is because Sprigg and people like him dedicate their entire careers to making the lives of gays and lesbians so incredibly miserable. They produce ridiculous studies full of lies that no reputable psychologist or social scientist would touch with a ten foot pole and when their scientific lies are exposed they play the religion card and say, “well, God didn’t create you gay.”
What creates the “hopelessness” of being born gay is not so much that you’ll spend the rest of your life being gay, but that you realize you will spend the rest of your life being subjected to the hateful and cruel lies of institutional bullying from the church and from organizations like FRC and Focus on the Family that have made it their ultimate mission to make the lives of gays and lesbians completely unbearable.
Imagine for a moment if you had a whole institution like the church or the government telling you from jump street that you are a mistake, intolerable, not worth the same rights or responsibilities as anyone else on the planet, and to top it off you are, according to their god, worthy of death – unless you change.
Yes, with that sort of ingrained bullying built into church and society, it would seem hopeless to think that you would have to live your entire life being the subject of condemning sermons, the butt of numerous jokes, and the target of laws banning you from doing many things others enjoy without a second thought – like marrying the person you love.
What breeds the hopelessness, Mr. Sprigg isn’t the actual being gay or lesbian itself – it’s how society has decided to treat those who find themselves to be gay or lesbian. How you change that hopelessness is not by changing the person, but by changing how society treats them. You give gays and lesbians hope when you tell them that God did, indeed, create them this way and that society is in the wrong for breeding hopelessness in them by their slavish devotion to ridiculous traditions and what they think some words mean in an ancient book that never dealt with the modern idea of sexual orientation.
It is you, and your kind, Mr. Sprigg, who make the lives of gays and lesbians hopeless. What you practice is not compassion, but pity – and that’s one thing gays and lesbians can do without. Those in religious circles who have taken the time to actually “suffer with” gays and lesbians have ended up not changing the gay or lesbian person – but their institutional policies of bullying gays and lesbians into submission. In actually “suffering with” gays and lesbians institutions like the United Church of Christ, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and other denominations, have come to realize that the spirit of the law in their Holy book is one of love and acceptance of everyone instead of the bullying, compassionless, soul-killing, letter of the law.
Mr. Sprigg, when Jesus looked out on the crowds that followed him, that book you love more than your fellow human beings, tells us that he had compassion on them. What did he do then? Did he tell them to change? Did he bully them into submission to his agenda? Did he bend them to his will? Did he lobby for the passage of laws against those people? No, Mr. Sprigg – he healed them of their blindness – and he fed them.
