2:54 p.m. - February 14, 2005
Everybody please, just shut up
Come, let the schism between the cultural and spiritual Christians hasten quickly, so that I may stop being embarrassed by charges of hypocrisy leveled by those whom generally disparage any form of Christan belief but find the verses about love handy when another child from a prominent right-winger comes out and becomes a media spectacle. So Alan Keyes' daughter is a lesbian, so what? Unhappy / outraged / disgusted parents terminate tuition payments for said daughter - so what, this happens all the time and if the community were really as outraged as it is, they'd take their pocketbooks to the nearest high school and start writing postdated checks.
What galls me is the glee with which gay people as a whole seem to react to these revelations, as if there's some biblical mandate that Christian households cannot foster homosexuals and those that do are aha! not Christian at all. Or maybe it's a tautological in-your-face see, it happens to you, too!, an expression of relief that there's another stone to throw at the cracked window that is contemporary Christendom.
What these people don't know, simply do not understand, is that these reactions fuel the very retrenchment, both cultural and religious, that they decry. And I suppose it's human nature to exult in one's misfortune, perceived as such or not, but it's also human nature to grit your teeth in the face of taunts from those who caused that misfortune. This cycle of win / lose, up / down has been miscast since the beginning with each side claiming the high ground and playing a game of all-or-nothing.
I wonder about the people like me, gays and lesbians who also take their Christian faith seriously: Where is our place in the larger pantheon? Culturally and spiritually I identify myself with conservative Christianity, a simple choice when presented with the watered-down-of-everything mentality of those churches and denominations who say love is all one needs, so why worry about the rest. Fundamentally I am opposed to such easing of faith, simply don't understand it, don't understand this assumption and entitlement delusion of a happy, unstressful, unjudgmental, if-you-believe-you're-a-good-person faith. Who are they kidding? Faith is a yoke, a burden, and God knows any kind of profession in the unknown is met with skepticism and prejudice in this world, and damn it, you have to work hard at faith to live with it. There's nothing easy about it in the world and just because we've come to expect our meals delivered as we idle exhaust and have lost the ideals of intellectual pursuit, there is no QED in that faith, its burdens, its frustrations, its challenges has to be any easier today than when Aquinas slammed his head against the desk in frustration.
I long for the day our numbers shrink and we become negligible, cultural oddities in this land of sameness and group think. That's when the cultural Christians will fade away, like distilling salt from water, and the craziness that marks this religiopoliticoagitprop will leave only the elemental faith behind, a sine qua non that it was in the first place.
It is the reversing of fortune's wheel, this moving into a post-Christian, postmodern environment, similar to the one secular pundits claim holds in Europe (but have they seen what a hold religion, if not faith, has even in Western Europe? Fools and idiots all). And while my ideals chafe and are disgusted by the trends present in society, I find creepy solace that all this was foretold not just for the 1st century Christians but for today's. So what's the big deal - let the gays marry, let the concept of marriage between one and another melt into a fluid dynamic of love, let this great society that should evolve once these awful Christians disappear finally appear, and when I see that I'll trade in my intangible faith for your moral high ground and shut up. Until then I'll shake my head in disappointment when I look at cultural Christians who can't defend their ideals either spiritually or intellectually as well as these gay and lesbian zealots who display as much hate in equal measure as those Christians they decry in the first place. Hypocrites all - hardly a surprise - and terribly overblown.
