First They Came for the Gays

What it is it about homosexuality that scares people so much? It scares people so much that it makes bullying people to the point of suicide acceptable. It scares people so much that they can take absolute leave of their senses. It scares people so much that they can deny humanity to gay people and still think that they’re the good guys.

I’ve been reading some comments from politicians in the United States of America that have just astonished me with their shear brutality. Carl Paladino, is a Republican running for the governorship of New York City. Now I know politicians can be dumb. I know they run for the lowest common denominator in order to win votes as standard practice but this idiot (and there is no politer word to be used) says that gay people should not be allowed to teach in schools. This is apparently acceptable.

Swap the word gay in that sentence for black, Hispanic, Catholic or Jewish and see what would happen. If I were to say that based on the Catholic churches record on paedophilia Catholics shouldn’t be allowed to teach what would that make me? Paladino apparently made his comments at a meeting of Orthodox Jews. Now I don’t want to play fast and loose with the Holocaust but wasn’t it the Nazi’s that said that Jews were unfit to teach. Didn’t anyone in that room not immediately think after Paladino had spoken: “That’s wrong. That’s offensive.”

Perhaps they did.

The thing about homophobia though is that it is sanctioned by God and those who believe in God like to use that as an excuse for preaching bile and hatred about other human beings. I suppose that’s one thing you can use your religion for.

The Old Testament God mentions homosexuality a couple of times. Jesus, oddly, never got around to the big lecture of gayness despite its apparent importance. Jesus is quite scathing about divorce though but you never hear too much about that from the right do you. Its gays, gays and more gays.

These people I call Old Testament Christians, who conveniently skip through Jesus’ ministry and focus on the dark, nasty, spiteful and bitter God of the Old Testament. They’ve taken the Bible and made it into an excuse to hate people to the point of murder. They’ve squeezed the ‘love’ out of God in the name of personal prejudice.

So it seems the only acceptable prejudice left is homophobia. Even most racists have been forced to cover their dislike of the unlike with softer language but homophobia is out there, open and acceptable.

Pastor Neimoller’s poem springs to mind here. People often misunderstand – in my opinion – the poem. I did for a long time. I thought it was about the Holocaust but it isn’t. Not really. It is about the mindset that allows Holocausts to happen. It is about looking the other way as civil rights are removed from the not-we until it is our turn and we’ve got nothing left to hold on to.

It seems now that a stand has to be made. I know people braver and closer to the situation than I are already doing so but let us not let the second decade of the 21st century be the decade when ‘first they came for the gays.’