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GayToday's Pride Month Essay:
Open Letter to the Homophobic Right |
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By BuckcuB
Dear Conservative Opponents of equal rights:
So it is with your war against equal rights for gay men and lesbians. The war is over. You've already lost. Every day brings fresh news of the new ascendancy of gay equal rights. Yet your newsletters and Web sites cling to a few tiny setbacks for equal rights as if they were truly major victories for your side. BuckcuB sees that many on your side continue to gloat about the now-hoary decision by the Supreme Court to permit the Boy Scouts to exclude gays. Big deal. Take a look at the membership in Scouting now, compared to its heyday in the 1950's and 1960's. The Boy Scouts of America are not exactly a powerful and influential organization -- especially as the vast majority of those involved are children too young to vote.
State after state after state has repealed its sodomy laws. Vermont even went so far as to enact a law permitting what is, in fact, "gay marriage" -- regardless of the placation of terming it officially "partnership registration." Television and films, books and magazines -- all of America's popular culture -- is loaded with positive, affirming gay and lesbian characters, plot lines, stories and commentary. The film-censoring Hayes Office is long gone. The Catholic "League of Decency," the once- infamous "Index Librorum Prohibitorum" which proscribed certain books, are only fading memories. The Vice-President of the United States has a daughter who is openly lesbian, a fact well-known to all of you. Your beloved idol, Ronald Reagan, has a son who is openly gay-friendly. "President" Bush has been forced by circumstances and political reality to appoint openly- gay officials to his administration, in spite of his stated refusal to do so during his campaign. Big established mainstream religious denominations are softening or changing their tune on homosexuality -- or splintering apart in church-weakening schisms over the debate. Police departments across the nation now receive sensitivity training on how to appropriately respect the rights of gays and lesbians the officers may encounter in the performance of their duty. Like King Canute of legend, right-wingers, you are standing in front of the incoming tide, impotently ordering the sea to turn back. You cannot turn back the tide. It has already swept over you, as evidenced by the frantic press-releases and protestations you send out condemning gays and lesbians -- the pointless struggles and desperate flailing of a drowning man. Like the retreating Nazis, your counteroffensives have been crushed one after another. Anita Bryant was driven from public life and a lucrative career for her homophobia. Reverend Jerry Falwell became the laughingstock object of virtually-universal public scorn after declaring that the Teletubbies' "Tinky Winky," -- a character in a show aimed at pre-schoolers! -- was gay. Dr. Laura Schlessinger is only the latest casualty in your weakening counteroffensives. We pulverized her hateful views and her hateful television show, in less than a year. She's a nobody, now -- a mere footnote in the waning days of the culture war you have irrefutably lost.
"Redemption" and "repentance" are words frequently on your lips, right-wingers. Well, here is a warning, a wake-up call, and an invitation: now is the moment to redeem yourselves and repent of your baseless hate. Now -- before you continue to commit yourselves any further to a war you have hopelessly lost. Before you end up in the same circumstances as Adolf Hitler, left with no option but to put a gun to his head in a cold dank bunker surrounded by his enemies, and blow his brains out. You have only to repent your hate, reject your prejudice, admit your mistake -- and you could move on to become a once-again powerful force for good. Gays and lesbians have spiritual lives, too, you know. Some of us--even a lot of us--might be willing, eager to be able to re-embrace that spirituality in formal contexts like your churches. An affirming, accepting pastorate. A public recognition and celebration that we, too, are God's children. A complete halt to your paralyzed, vain attempts to turn back the tide of equal rights with hateful speech and vicious inflammatory rhetoric. It is not only our equal rights before the Constitution of the United States which many of us seek. It is confirmation and acknowledgement of our equal rights before the Throne of God. In your theology, right-wingers, God is omnipotent and omniscient. It follows, consequently, that God does not make mistakes. Therefore, the only logical conclusion both theologically and secularly is simple--God made gays and lesbians as they are, intentionally. Who are you to question God's intent, simply because your mortal minds cannot begin to comprehend God's grand plan? Your "ex-gay ministries" are miserable failures, exposed again and again as tent-revival hype with no basis in reality and no true change in the orientation of those who participate. Anyone can have relations with a member of the opposite gender. BuckcuB has had a couple of sexual relationships with women, but that doesn't change the fact that he is a gay man and will always be a gay man. Friction is not affection. Orgasm is not love. Now, NOW, is the crucial moment for you, folks. The slow incoming tide of equal rights which began more than forty years ago, has become a line of crashing breakers wiping out all your castles-in-the-sand. You must commit to a position irrevocably, and you must do it very very soon. Why not turn all your ardor to the purpose of accepting and even celebrating the obvious? -- you were wrong. And having made that public confession and expressed sincere repentance, re-direct your talents and networks and initiatives toward rectifying the hurt you've caused. How many of you are unaware that you have a gay son or daughter who cries alone in the dark, bereaved of your love because they know you hate and loathe the manner of loving they were born with, terrified that you will discover their secret? Is that what you want for your loved ones? To fear you, to feel bereft of your love, because of who and what they are? That certainly isn't what you preach. Is it, though, what you practice instead? The time has come, right-wingers. You have lost the war, and you know it. Like some in the American South, the animosity and resentment will linger on in isolated pockets as it did after the North defeated the South in our civil war. But like the leaders of the South, you must accept your defeat -- and come to terms with it, and with us. To do otherwise is merely to prolong the agony of defeat, and to torture your adherents with false promises and impossible dreams. You lost. We won. It might have gone the other way, but it didn't. We have no wish to make examples of you, to punish you as the foolish Nazis were punished at the Nuremberg Trials. All we require is the admission of guilt, and BuckcuB is confident that you will be almost- universally absolved. Turn that absolution into a new acceptance and a new celebration of grace. It can only strengthen what you claim is the central doctrine of your movement -- "peace on Earth, good-will toward men!" |
Leading the Cultural War: Mr. Bush along with his political supporters are spearheading a new era of gay bashing 
Ongoing Homophobia: Despite new right-wing threats, gays cannot forget homophobia still being generated from sources like the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Boy Scouts of America 
© 1997-2002 BEI