I’m fairly certain that the first time I met a gay person who was out wasn’t until my first year in seminary. A group of us had bonded early on in the summer Hebrew class that happens before the actual school year begins and three of us were sitting together when the individual (I don’t actually want to name their because I don’t want to inadvertently tell their story while I am telling mine.) got a rather sheepish look on their face and said to me and the other person in the room, “I need to tell y’all something. I’m gay.” I am both sure that they felt like they were stepping out on a limb in letting us into their world like while at the same time, having heard this, I was trying to play it as cool as I possibly could as my mind tried to wrap around this new variety of person in my world. I also know that I felt some degree of nervousness at that moment trying to figure out if I would have to act any different around this person having told me that they were gay. As I think back to that moment I roll my mind’s eye at my 24 year-old self trying to process something that has so changed in the past twenty years that all my children don’t even know that being gay is something to even find curious. It all seems slightly absurd twenty years after the fact to think of the things that were running through my head but this was truly a totally new experience.
If I am being completely honest, I don’t remember having any special feelings about members of those communities prior to graduate school. I don’t even know that the presence of LGTBQIA+ folks would have registered for me in my small town upbringing and if I knew anyone who identified as such in college I was not aware of it at the time. Moreover, I don’t ever actually remember garnering any sort of theological or philosophical perspective from my home church prior to going off to college. If there was any talk about that sort of thing from the pulpit, the Sunday school, or the youth group it totally went over my head (which isn’t hard to imagine). It really wasn’t until the couple of years in between graduating from college and going on to grad school that issues of inclusion within the denomination even hit my radar.
Albany Area Pride Parade, 2015
It is, perhaps, for this reason that while I have been a vocal advocate for the full inclusion of all those groups into the life of the Presbyterian Church (USA) since I was in seminary, I’ve always been reluctant to condemn Christians who are slow in processing the information required for them to be accepting of difference. Further, while I can tell you ten reasons why the verses people use to condemn same-sex behaviors don’t actually say what they believe them to say, it is difficult not to see that the place contemporary translations have ended up do call into question the propriety of those actions shared between persons of the same sex. (Whether or not we should take our ethical cues from those communities is a whole other question.) By the same token, for folks who grew up in the generations that came before mine, having an even more homogenous experience in terms of awareness of non-cishet persons and relationships, than my own, getting to a place of acceptance and understanding is that much harder.
Rep. Marie Newman in front of her office. Taken from : https://nypost.com/2021/02/25/marjorie-taylor-greene-gets-into-office-spat-over-lgbt-flag/
In many ways, because of the light speed advancements made towards accepting and celebrating otherness over the past quarter of a century, there has formed a real and significant split between those who want to continue to move the country to better embrace a diversity of orientations and identifications and those who are still trying to make peace with the idea that two guys can be in a loving and committed relationship with one another. This places conversations like the debate around who can enter what restroom and the use of a panoply of pronouns to self-identify so far beyond what a lot of folks can even begin to process that it starts to feel like trying to ride a motorcycle when you have just mastered a tricycle. Those sorts of shifts are so many steps beyond where a good number find themselves that it’s not hard to imagine some throwing up their hands and assuming that they will never catch up, so why even try.
Keeping all that in mind, what happened today in both the halls of Congress and even in the chambers of the US Senate was not that. In both the cases of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), the chief end was neither healthy dialog or even simply expressing disagreement over a concept put forth by another person. Rather, in these cases, the idea was to cause ongoing pain (Greene) or to deride and dismiss, out of hand, a person nominated to serve as an assistant health secretary (a maneuver, incidentally, that Rand Paul has just about perfected).
The actions of Rep. Greene came in response to her across the hallway neighbor, Rep. Marie Newman (D-IL) who, on the eve of the House voting on a new Equal Rights Amendment that would include members of the LGBTQIA+ communities from being discriminated against, put a Trans flag in the flag holder next to her office door. This she filmed herself doing and posting on Twitter to show the folks in those communities that she supported them while calling out Greene on her troubling language about that community of persons, of which Newman’s daughter is a member.
Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene. Taken from: https://nypost.com/2021/02/25/marjorie-taylor-greene-gets-into-office-spat-over-lgbt-flag/
Sometime later, Greene, seeing the flag, had a large sign made bearing the message, “There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE ...Trust The Science!” While Greene has made statements about this before, something she, and everyone, has every right to do, this is fundamentally different. In this case, she erected a sign, so that every time Rep. Newman leaves her office she has to read it. She has also taken to calling Rep. Newman’s daughter her “biological son.” While nobody would confuse Marjorie Taylor Greene with a calm and level-headed person (until like two weeks ago she believed that members of the Democratic Party were all pedophiles who practiced cannibalism while worshipping Satan), her behavior in this action was and is designed to inflict pain on someone else. It is calculating and hurtful and with it, Greene has fallen short of a level of civility and decency that I would demand of my seven year-old.
At the same time, Sen. Rand Paul, never one to be outdone, took his shot at snatching the spotlight from Greene with a set of insulting and hurtful questions aimed at Dr. Rachel Levine, the first transgender nominee for a cabinet position in the history of the country, trying to tie gender reassignment surgery, a procedure sometimes undertaken by those in the trans community, with genital mutilation, a practice of destroying the sexual organ of women so that they derive no pleasure from intercourse often practiced in African and Asian cultures, while dismissing Levine’s complex responses to his questions and declaring her unwilling to answer his query.
In both these cases, Greene and Paul failed to follow the precept offered by my grandmother McLeod when I was a small child, the one that demands if you can say nothing nice to someone, don’t say anything at all. Further, they both don’t realize that you can be dead set against something and still be a decent human being towards other human beings. You can vote and speak out against the rights of non-hetero folks all day long and still not demean or dehumanize them. Greene, for her part, said her actions were intended to defend religious liberty and were part of her commitments as a Christian. Herein lies the problem as the religion of Jesus is transformed from a faith of love, grace, and acceptance and into a cudgel with which to bludgeon another. Bigotry and hate that masquerades as faith is still bigotry and hate and the true followers of Jesus must be able to distinguish between the love he commanded and the hatred espouses by those who would carry his name. It is critically important that we in the Church get this part right if we are going to survive the next hundred years.
Paul, for his part, denied the humanity of the person sitting in his midst because he didn’t agree with her set of beliefs (or her gender identity). At no point in his questioning did Paul query Levine about her qualifications for the position or what her guiding philosophy would be in her work with the Health and Human services. Rather, Paul did what all would-be playground bullies do. He found the place that he perceived to be the weakest, not in talents or abilities, but in her spirit. He tried to strike at the vulnerability that virtually all members of the trans community possess—a persistent feeling that they are a square peg in a round hole. Like anyone else who is not perceived by the majority as falling in the parameters believed to be “normal,” members of the LGBTQIA+ communities must always be on the lookout for those who have designated themselves as guardians of the “honor,” “purity,” and “normalcy” of a society. This gives these protectors of the realm, like Greene and Paul, carte blanche to engage in whatever behavior they deem necessary for the protection of an ideal. These types of responses to difference should be repugnant to anyone but often when thinly veiled under the guise of religion whatever comes after is deemed wholly (holy) appropriate.
Religious beliefs, ever how wrong they may seem to those who do not hold them, are (and should be) protected at virtually all costs. Anyone should be free to believe the earth to be flat and the moon made of Limburger cheese if that want to. Beliefs, in and of themselves, do not and cannot do harm the way they can when put into practice. At the same time, it is possible to find someone’s choices different from your own while still affording them dignity, autonomy, and the right not to be treated with contempt and hatred. It turns out it is possible to be both against something and a decent human being at the very same time.
Albany Area Pride Parade, 2014
A few weeks ago my spouse and I were talking about a trans flag that we saw flying somewhere and we were trying to suss out why it was where it was. My eldest son, hearing our conversation said, “maybe they are transgender or nonbinary.” He is growing up in a world in which he can tell you the difference between those things and finds them as normalized as any other gender identify. He could teach Rep. Greene and Sen. Paul a lot about how to treat those who are different from you because right now, they aren’t being good Christians, just lousy human beings. We should expect better from those who represent our government, our society, and, for those who follow in the footsteps of Christ, our faith.