This post is an article I wrote about two years ago, and I feel it's appropriate to reprint:
In his book, "In Our Time," Eric Hoffer who was an excellent
philosopher, was self-educated, blind for the first fifteen years of his
life, and became a migrant worker and then a longshoreman, wrote the
following:
"In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes -
courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty - can be transmuted
into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous
traffic between good and evil within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of
the soul: Where there is com-passion even the most poisonous impulses
remain relatively harmless. Thus the survival of the species may well
depend on the ability to foster a boundless capacity for compassion."
So many in the United States (and elsewhere) lack that
essential emotion, "compassion," that will help ensure the survival of
the species! Indeed, the hostility visited upon LGBT people is a very
strong indicator in our time of that deficiency!
All sorts of rationalizations have been trotted out by the
ignorant and/or hatefully homophobic to try and justify discrimination
against LGBT people, ranging from "maintaining traditional family
values" to linking Gay people with pedophiles to causing all sorts of
societal calamities. The very irrationality of their arguments in favor
of deprivation of civil rights to LGBT people both bespeaks lack of
compassion as it bespeaks gullibility and/or lack of compassion of those
who take their rhetoric seriously.
In his book, "The Passionate State of Mind And Other
Aphorisms," Hoffer states:
"Passions usually have their roots in that which is blemished,
crippled, incomplete and insecure within us. The passionate attitude is
less a response to stimuli from without than an emanation of an inner
dissatisfaction.
"A poignant dissatisfaction, whatever be its cause, is at bottom
a dissatisfaction with ourselves. It is surprising how much hardship
and humiliation a man will endure without bitterness when he has not the
least doubt about his worth or when he is so integrated with others
that he is not aware of a separate self."
And it is to this phenomenon every person who possesses both a
critical intellect and the necessary emotion of "compassion" must turn
to help understand why there are some homophobes who make their
homophobia something like a career. So many spend an inordinate amount
of time condemning God's LGBT children, and one must understand that
their animus ultimately resides, not in the object of their hatred, but
in their own psyches that betrays their blemishes, crippled natures,
incompleteness, and insecurities.
After all, if someone is emotionally and sexually intact, why
would there be a need for their obsessive condemnation of other
consenting adults' emotional/sexual orientations?
How is same-sex marriage, for example, going to adversely
affect anyone's heterosexual marriage? Is there anyone who can give a
reasonable answer to that question?
Clearly, there can be no rational answer to that rhetorical
question! If anything, same-sex marriage will enhance the institution of
marriage!
Indeed, increasing legitimacy will accrue to the institution of
marriage the more people partake of its rights, privileges, and
responsibilities. So, people who are genuinely concerned with the future
of the institution of marriage should be working to minimize divorce
and encourage same-sex couples who wish to make a lifetime commitment to
each other to marry!
Yet, we have many religious (and secular) people who try and
prevent same-sex couples from partaking of the very institution from
which they benefit, thereby encouraging fornication as one of their
prejudices' byproducts, and they even have the temerity to claim the
right to discriminate in the name of God. So, would they have us believe
that God would prefer fornication over marriage among Gay people?
Can they be that clueless that they could reasonably expect
that Gay people can, should, and must lead celibate lives while only
heterosexuals can and should fulfill one of human beings' most primal
urges?
The irrationality of homophobic rhetoric shows a clear
deficiency on the part of homophobes regarding their level of
"compassion," as it does their clear dissatisfaction with their own lot
in life! Why else spend such an inordinate amount of time thinking about
and condemning the emotional/sexual lives of others?
Emotionally and sexually intact people aren't particularly
concerned with the emotional and sexual lives of other adults! They are
likely to have a "live and let live" approach to such matters!
However, when someone has an inordinate fascination with
condemning others, that condemnation betrays an emotional deficiency
that makes compassion very difficult, if not impossible, to have or
sustain.
And if a Christian (or any other decent person) can be
characterized by any one characteristic, that characteristic is
"compassion!"
Christians are to be agents of God's grace in this world; we
are to preach and live out the Gospel of grace, faith, love, peace,
reconciliation, and inclusiveness! And those who condemn others, those
who seek to deprive others of civil rights, those who help create a
climate of fear and hatred of others, have shown by their words and/or
deeds that they are neither Christians nor even decent people!
We are to make no mistake: homophobes are absolutely no
different in their mind-set and in their emotional deficiencies than
were and are White Supremacists! Both groups partake of the need to
discriminate and hate in order for the awareness of their own emotional
deficiencies to be overridden by their condemnation of others!
"Condemnation" acts as an imperfect and temporary band-aid to
help heal the haters' own emotional woundedness, a woundedness that they
don't have the courage to bring themselves to face, confront, and
overcome! So, they take the coward's way out and, rather than deal with
"the beam in their own eye," they feel the need to manufacture a beam in
a minority group whom they perceive it is safe to persecute.
And when that particular minority group is no longer considered
safe to persecute, they will search for another minority group upon
which to vent their anger, an anger borne of their own emotional
deficiencies that they cloak in religious trappings, so that they can
try and stake a claim on "godliness," "virtue" and "morality" when, in
fact, their own rhetoric and actions show them to manifest the greatest
form of ungodliness, lack of virtue, and immorality: the sin of pride in
their oppression of others!
Jesus never condemned Gay people, but He sure spent quite a bit
of time condemning the proud, the haughty, the legalists who condemned
and discriminated against others and put yokes of bondage onto others,
all the while claiming to impose those yokes in the name of God.
If haters didn't have an object to hate, they would be forced
to confront their own emotional blemishes, crippled natures,
incompleteness, insecurities, deficiencies and frailties. And that is
the last thing a moral coward feels he/she can afford to do!
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