Stand up and be counted

The problem with certain types of people is that you never know who or where they are. They might be teaching, or working in day-care centers, or standing behind the counter in the library, and there is no way to tell them apart from everybody else. They may be polluting our children’s minds in subtle and unseen fashion, and trying to foment an anti-Christian and anti-American attitude in trusting neighbors. They may wear the same clothes and speak the same language but hold to a belief system so diametrically detrimental to ours that we can only sense it, and hardly understand it.

I refer of course to anti-gay bigots. Sometimes they can be spotted by their pinched faces, their pursed lips, their prudish and prune-like reactions. But more often than not they look just like you and me – just like normal people.

To me those people are not dangerous so much for what they think -- the First Amendment applies to bigots as well -- but for the way they hide it. Polite in public, they spread gossip privately and vote for the candidate who promises to take up back to the Stone Age, or stoning age as the case may be. Many of them want gays to be somehow publicly identified so that they can be “helped” by some of the charlatans who say it can be cured, like a wart, unlike the afflictions of those whose conditions are permanent, like herpes and bigotry.

Those who claim that homosexuality is chosen behavior and not innate personality must, if they are honest, concede that so is holding a negative judgment about a specific group. God may have told them to believe gays are sinners, but those of us whom He didn’t tell tend to think those doing the judging have chosen to do so.

They can of course trace their judgment to Leviticus, which was written about the same time as that part of the Bible (which may also be Leviticus) saying not to eat pork. The pork restriction began to lose its popularity as it became obvious that its origins lay in hygiene. Pork needed to be cooked longer and harder than beef, and it was safer to ban it outright until such time as the meat thermometer was invented, or at least until people learned to burn the hell out of it and mask the taste of ash with pineapple. So if gay behavior was also banned because of hygienic issues, can we not concede that a box of anti-bacterial baby wipes in the bedside table pretty well overcomes the Levitican objections?

Probably not. Everybody chooses which part of the Bible to believe, and the Old Testament is easier for some. Regardless, anti-gay bigotry is a choice people make, and to those of us who believe that bigotry is dangerous and soul-smashing, the anti-gays are certainly more of a peril with their negativity and mean-spiritedness and their attempts at proselytizing, than gays are by what they do in private.

It’s worth noting that I have over the years been invited to join various churches and religious groups, most of which have a stance on gays. These churches and groups have attempted to recruit me by mail, by phone, and in person both on the street and at my door (get the Jehovah’s Witnesses to deliver the mail, Jay Leno once suggested). But never in my entire life – and I think I’m a pretty good-looking guy – have I been approached by a member of an organized gay group suggesting that I give it a try. The fundamentalists seem certain that this gay recruitment campaign is going on, while those of us with more open minds have not been informed first-hand of the effort. Is there some reason the gay enrollment effort is centered primarily on the recruitment of right-wing Christians? Can they not find more fertile fields to plow?

But I’m getting off the point here, which is only partly the danger of anti-gay bigots’ existence and more the fact that we never know who they are. I was reminded of this recently when I saw several people on campus wearing t-shirts that said, “Gay? That’s fine with me.” (I would have preferred “It’s nothing to me,” but I wasn’t printing the shirts.) Those who tolerate their gay neighbors and friends were wearing their hearts on their sleeves, metaphorically, although it was actually more on their chests. And it got me thinking about the conclusion of “Cabaret,” old chum, which ends with the Master of Ceremonies wearing a pink triangle to ID him as a gay man, hence an undesirable to the Nazis.

More and more gays are finding the courage to put honesty above fear and be open about their differences. Soon everyone will know who the gays are.

But the anti-gays will remain hidden behind their pursed lips, much as their spiritual ancestors hid behind white hoods during an earlier societally accepted plague of bigotry. That hardly seems fair, that those creating a problem should hide while those of us who think there is no problem are exposed.

Therefore I modestly propose that we root out the anti-gays in our midst, in their homes, their clubs and their churches, and issue them dark gray wristbands that they will be required to wear in public until such time as gay civil unions are legal in every state of the union. I suggest gray because the color suits the mood of people who hate and judge another group because of how they choose to find joy and happiness. I would then have the guidance I need to express what I feel toward the bigots. I could turn my back on them in checkout lines, turn up my nose at them, and stare at their gray badges of shame until they began to feel uncomfortable and shunned. It will be a sort of Medic Alert for ignorance.

Naturally this is contrary to the First Amendment, but it’s worth noting that the gray ribbons will only be issued to those who think the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and various other celebrations of human freedom are secondary to their religious beliefs. Let those who snicker at jokes about Adam and Steve consider what it would be like if the world were run by Adolf and Eve with the tables turned on the judgmental and the bigoted. When these people, or their grandchildren, reach a point where they can watch two men hold hands without overtly cringing, we can hang the gray wristbands on the back of the closet door with the white hoods, where they belong.

Last Revised: 05.07.05    Publisher: Joseph Gus Fitzgerald