My good friend, Don Charles, on his excellent blog, "Christ the Gay Martyr," quoted a letter from a woman with a gay son, and it's worth repeating here. This sensitive, intelligent woman speaks the truth to ignorant and/or hateful homophobes who make Gay kids' lives unbearable, and even drives many of them to attempt or actually carry out suicide. Religious bigots pervert understanding of the Bible to condemn Gay people, and falsely parade their bigotry and hate as being "righteous." Professing Christians who in any way condemn LGBT people are witting or unwitting tools of the devil, and it's high time that that fact was broadcast in any and every venue possible.
Here is that mother's letter:
Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a Gay son, and I’ve taken enough from you good people. I’m tired of your foolish rhetoric about the “homosexual agenda”, and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant! You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.
My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the First Grade. He was physically and verbally abused from First Grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be Gay. He never professed to be Gay or had any association with anything Gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called “f*g” incessantly . . .
In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn’t bear to continue living any longer, that he didn’t want to be Gay, and that he couldn’t face a life without dignity.
You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair! I don’t know why my son is Gay, but I do know that God didn’t put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think, and it’s about time you started doing that!
At the core of all your misguided beliefs is the belief that this could never happen to you, that there is some kind of subculture out there that people have chosen to join . . . if it can happen to my family, it can happen to yours, and you won’t get to choose. Whether it is genetic or whether something occurs during a critical time of fetal development, I don’t know. I can only tell you with an absolute certainty that it is inborn!
If you want to tout your own morality, you’d best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it. (Here's a question) for those of you who reduce sexual orientation to a simple choice, a character issue, a bad habit or something that can be changed by a 10-step program . . . are you saying that your own sexual orientation is nothing more than something you have chosen, that you could change it at will? If that’s not the case, then why would you suggest that someone else can?
You invoke the memory of the brave people who have fought on the battlefield for this great country, saying that they didn’t give their lives so that the “homosexual agenda” could tear down the principles they died defending. My 83-year-old father fought in some of the most horrific battles of World War II, was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart. He shakes his head in sadness at the life his grandson has had to live. He says he fought alongside homosexuals (sic) in those battles, that they did their part and bothered no one. One of his best friends in the service was Gay, and he never knew it until the end, and when he did find out, it mattered not at all . . .
You religious folk just can’t bear the thought that as my son emerges from the Hell that was his childhood, he might like to find a lifelong companion and have a measure of happiness. It offends your sensibilities that he should request the right to visit that companion in the hospital, to make medical decisions for him, or to benefit from tax laws governing inheritance. "How dare he?" you say. These outrageous requests would threaten the very existence of your family, would undermine the sanctity of marriage. You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people who find your attitudes repugnant! God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows my son has committed no sin!
