In the days following the
Orlando massacre in which 49 persons were slaughtered at the Pulse Nightclub
before the shooter was himself finally killed, a number of statements were
issued by representatives of faith traditions around the world. Many of us in Orlando
could feel the powerful support of the prayers offered on our behalf as we
sought to come to grips with the unimaginable, a slaughter in a public venue
using weapons of war which indiscriminately took the lives of young and
old, gay and straight and persons of all colors alike.
The bishop of the Episcopal
Diocese of Central Florida quickly issued a statement which began with a
recognition that “Words of condolence have little value in the face of this
carnage.” This was a particularly insightful statement that, to his credit,
recognized both the enormity of the tragedy at hand as well as the limitations
that any words of condolence could offer in the face of that tragedy.
Words are often inadequate
when it comes to dealing with occurrences which transcend day-to-day realities,
particularly one as horrific as the massacre at Pulse. What people come to
recognize immediately in such cases is that symbolic actions become essential,
playing roles that are larger than life. Flickering candles, flowers, silent
vigils, mournful processions, spontaneous displays of art all play a role in
processing a grief that is too deep for words to convey and beginning down the
long road to healing.
When words are spoken in such
contexts, they are routinely judged by the actions which occur in the wake of
their utterance. Not only do “words of condolence have little value in the face
of…carnage,” words generally prove to be pretty cheap when they do not match
the actions which ensue.
Words spoken in contexts such
as the Orlando Massacre are always subject to high levels of scrutiny and can
create liabilities for their speakers should the tenor of their actions fail to
match the words they have spoken. To be seen as authentic, all statements must
evidence awareness of the context which gave rise to the events that are
mourned.
“Homophobic Rage” – Confronting Inner Demons
Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the
stomach, and goes out into the sewer? 18 But what comes out of the mouth
proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. 19 For out of the heart come
evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.
20 These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not
defile.’ Matthew 15:17-19
In the days that followed the
shooting, most immediate knee jerk assessments of the Orlando shooter
constructed him as simply another agent of ISIS terrorism. These assessments,
aimed as much at relieving us of looking at this event in all its complexity –
much less our own complicity - as solving a crime, have largely come apart. The FBI found Omar Mateen’s connections to ISIS prior to the shooting were largely
the stuff of random internet searches. No real contact between ISIS and Mateen
was ever established.
What did emerge, however, was
the picture of a mentally unstable man with a life history of abuse in a highly
pressurized family. Omar was often shamed by his very demanding father using
homophobic epithets. No doubt his father intuitively sensed what Omar’s first
wife readily reported: Omar was gay. And a number of reports of Mateen’s online
search for gay sex and his regular presence at the club he eventually destroyed
suggest that Omar Mateen was a rather classic case of internalized homophobia.
His quest to destroy that
outside of him which he could not root out within his own being took a deadly
form at the Pulse nightclub the night of June 12, 2016. Omar is reported to
have been rejected by several Latin men which helped hone his homicidal calculations
to be carried out on Latin Night at the club.
From the outside, it’s easy to
dismiss this event as a “homophobic rage,” the description used by the bishop
in his press release to the Episcopal News Service: “There will be time later
raise questions about security, gun violence, and homophobic rage. There is no
justification for this atrocity. I categorically condemn what has happened.”
Clearly the events of that
night did take the form of a “homophobic rage.” But for Omar Mateen that rage
arose in the context of a hellacious life in which the homophobia endured during this young man’s development was ultimately internalized,
becoming a silent but deadly cancer of the soul.
Mateen’s actions are highly
consistent with a wealth of psychological studies which have found that
externalized homophobia often arises from a profound fear on the part of the
individual of their own homosexual tendencies. For many homophobic men, it’s
easier to confront the homosexuality experienced outside oneself than to deal
with the homosexuality within that can never be expressed. The more virulent
the homophobia, the greater the internal fear.
Of course, this is hardly
difficult for most LBGTQ people to grasp. Many of us, particularly those of us
who are in our second half of life, know only too well the soul-draining
suffocation of the closet and the exteriorized desire to rid ourselves of those
aspects of our very being which made us different and, in a deeply homophobic
culture such as our own, unacceptable. Indeed, we know first-hand a bit of what
Omar’s rage felt like. In many ways, such rage is little more than the logical
extreme to which any internalized homophobia can easily go.
In the wake of the atrocity at
the Pulse nightclub, it is hard to imagine what Omar Mateen must have been like
as a newborn. My guess is that he was a beautiful baby, full of curiosity and
energy, just beginning a far too brief life that would bring him to such an
unpredictable blood-drenched ending.
Baby Omar did not come
pre-programmed with the homophobia that would ultimately consume him. He
learned that from his life context both within his own dysfunctional family and
within the broader societal context into which he was born. He grew up in a United
States that has long been a deeply homophobic culture, particularly in its more
religious sectors.
In the end, Omar proved an apt
pupil.
“Homophobic Rage” – Arising from a Context
I do not fear truth. I welcome it. But I wish all of my
facts to be in their proper context. Gordon B. Hinckley
I do not like your Bible verse, It makes no sense, it is
too terse, It is devoid of all context, What will your Holy Book say next? I do
not like your Bible verse, it seems to go from bad to worse. - Niall McAuley
The chief progenitor, promoter
and preserver of the common social prejudice of homophobia in the West has
historically been the Christian religious tradition. It arose in a first
century middle eastern culture in which heteronormative understandings were
seen as self-evident and thus provided the worldview which would shape its
scripture.
While many critics of
Christianity point to the scriptures and the resulting theology as themselves
the source of homophobia, it was in fact the latent homophobia as a cultural
value held by the writers of scripture which would ultimately express itself in
those writings. In this case, the chicken (culture) clearly precedes the egg
(scripture).
Indeed, it is hard to imagine
how the scriptures could have been written without reflecting the prejudices of
its writers any more than any of us writing in our own time could escape our
own culture. Historically Christians have been forced to come to begrudging
recognitions that the slavery, racism, sexism and a blind anthropocentrism that
today threatens G-d’s good creation itself can all be validated through a
superficial reading of scripture. Such readings require their readers to
uncritically adopt the values of a culture which is not our own.
When those of us who would
seriously appropriate scripture are being honest with ourselves, we know that
whatever spiritual truths can be found in scripture must be ferreted out
through diligent study, critical reason and compassionate application.
Intellectual honesty with ourselves and others requires that scripture of any
tradition must always be read in context to actually be understood. Of course,
this presumes that understanding is our ultimate goal in such reading.
Many Christians rightfully
object to being summed up as mere homophobes. As Sister Helen Prejean has so
thoughtfully pointed out in her work with the people held in our nation’s human
slaughterhouses, none of us can ever be adequately summed up by the worst thing
we ever did. Even so, our common social prejudices have consequences in our own
lives, the lives of others and our common life together.
There is no shortage of
scholarship from rigorous academic work to easily accessible theological
writings on how and why this misanthropic cultural value arose, how it is at
odds with the spiritual truths of our tradition and how it negatively impacts
human beings. It is when such work goes largely unread and unconsidered that we
begin to talk about the irrationality that drives the holders of this common
prejudice to so tenaciously cling to it. Indeed, it is precisely at that moment
that we move from a garden variety heterosexism presuming the dominant
experience of the majority to be normative for everyone to a more pathological
expression called homophobia.
Religiously driven homophobia
finds many creative ways to reveal itself. The same bishop who so candidly
recognizes the minimal value of words of condolence in the face of carnage
withdraws into a cocoon of brittle legalism when it comes to examination of the
subtle homophobia marking much evangelical thought including his own. When
asked to reconsider his ban on same sex marriages in parishes wishing to
conduct the same within his diocese, the bishop responds “[I]f I
felt that the Scriptures gave me permission to take such a stance, I would
happily do so.”
Such words echo the even less
thoughtful arguments of fundamentalist preacher Ted Swanson at the National
Religious Life Conference which several Republican presidential candidates
attended seeking support for their candidacies. Dancing across the conference
stage, Swanson shouted, “Romans Chapter 1 verse 32 the Apostle Paul does say
that homosexuals are worthy of death. His words not mine! And I am not ashamed
of the Gospel of Jesus Christ! And I am not ashamed of the truth of the word of
God. And I am willing to go to jail…”
In both cases there is an
uncritical appropriation of content as well as a rather naive
anthropomorphizing of the scriptures. Whatever else the Christian Bible might
be, it is not a parental figure who must give human children permission to
think. The Bible is a human artifact, crafted by human wordsmiths and
reflecting the often unrecognized worldview and values of the culture which
produced them. Bibles don’t speak, teach or permit. Those are human activities.
And neither St. Paul – much less G-d - are somehow trapped within their pages.
To consistently defer to a
selectively superficial reading of scripture outside of any critical context
when one is aware of its existence is childish. But to do so with an awareness
of its deleterious impact on one’s fellow children of G_d suggests more is
going on than a mere naïveté. Such behaviors are neither intellectually honest
nor worthy of respect. Indeed, it is simply impossible to reconcile them with
the Prime Directive of the Christian tradition: You shall love your neighbor as
yourself.
“Homophobic Rage” – Deadly Subtlety
“It is impossible for a Christian to pray for the salvation
of a man's soul and, at the same moment, seek to kill him. This seems obvious.
But that which seems so evident in any other context somehow becomes obscured
in times of war.” - Jeffrey
Bryant (American b.1965)
Homophobia does not have to be
expressed as rage for it to be deadly. Indeed, it is precisely the subtle
expressions of homophobia that set the context for deadly actions which
eventually do arise out of rage. Arguments that one has no choice but to hold
to homophobic understandings and policies attempt to provide the deniability
that all holders of social prejudices wishing to be seen in a positive social
light so desperately seek. They also seek to provide a means of avoiding
confrontation over those same prejudices, confrontations at which they likely
know that their position cannot prevail.
What they cannot provide their
makers is honesty with themselves and with others. The reality is that policies
which actively discriminate against LBGTQ people not only send a message to
those affected by these policies but to the larger culture as well that such
discrimination is somehow socially acceptable. It should hardly be surprising
when actual expressions of homophobic rage erupt out of such contexts.
Einstein’s observation about
war is helpful for understanding the events of Orlando this deadly summer. In
the current context, it would seem obvious that it is impossible to continue to
hold homophobic understandings and practice homophobic policies and
simultaneously prevent harm to those who bear the very image of G-d and discern
themselves to be LBGTQ. Symbolic actions
are larger than life. When you plunge down the slippery slope of refusing to
recognize the full humanity of another, anything is possible. Indeed, atrocity
will always be a possibility.
We are now some six weeks out
from the events of the Pulse nightclub. If it is true that “[t]here will be
time to later raise questions about security, gun violence, and homophobic
rage,” that time has now come. Whether honest discourse will occur remains to
be seen. But until we are able to talk about the elephant in the room with us
of contextual homophobia, that talk will remain pretty cheap. In the words of
the priest leaving the vigil for one of the Pulse victims at an Episcopal Cathedral which only a year ago initially denied baptism to the child of a married gay couple ,
“Actions always speak louder than words.”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an
unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do
justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to
complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. – Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Ages, Commentary on
Micah 6:8
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment