[Note: This post is mostly regarding attitudes towards homosexuality in America. I'm Dutch, and while we are certainly ahead of the pack when it comes to the whole "treating gays as if they're human beings" thing, there's definitely still plenty of homophobia to go around here. But I want to focus on America because even though it's clearly an empire on the verge of collapse, the rest of the west (who are similarly on the verge of collapse, but haven't been able to rule the world on the backs of slaves for a while now anyway so the effects are less) still look up to them. America still dominates Europe culturally as well, because while they give us this:
the best Europe can come up with is this:
Also to fully analyze the attitudes towards homosexuality accurately would require too much reading and research for me right now. I have a Forensic Linguistics exam in a few hours, and I just need to get some of these ideas out there. Nobody reads this blog anyway.]
Quoth the bible:
Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is abomination.
Let’s leave out the fact that a two thousand year old text that has been translated and retranslated, edited and re-edited, can’t possibly have retained its message over that time. We can’t even understand some of the things Shakespeare wrote down, and that stuff is technically modern English. Those who believe in the Bible consider it the word of their god. Fine. Good. That’s what faith is. Alright then, why leave out all the other things? Why is nobody raging about blended fabrics? Why aren’t the physically deformed kept the hell away from churches? Why is slavery banned?
The Bible, like all successful religious texts, is so successful because it so easy to pick the things you like from it and ignore or bury the things you don’t. I mean look at it, it’s huge. You don’t really think that those who quote Leviticus to turn gays into subhumans have really read and studied the whole thing, do you? Ok then, fine, so why do they choose 18:22 over the passage that tells them they should be executed because they’re pissed at their parents?
Because it has nothing to do with the Bible. For most people who identify themselves as Christian, the Bible is in the background. It is the basis of their religion, and possibly their faith, but it isn’t more than that. Most Christians (and yes, I’m generalizing here, as indicated by my usage of the word “most”) are not Christian by conscious choice, but because they were raised Christians. Oh, there are plenty of people who may have doubted their faith at some point during their lives, and then still decided that they wished to follow Christ (whatever that may have meant for them personally), but it’s not really hard to decide you’re a Christian after all in a culture which has historically always been, and still predominantly is, Christian down to its core. I will most definitely concede that many of the values which are dominant in western society have Christianity as a source. But keeping it at that would ignore both the moral and cultural elements that Christianity itself had taken from the Romans and the Greeks, both during its early days and during the various revivals over the centuries. It would also ignore the moral and cultural knowledge taken from other, non-western cultures over the millennia. Most importantly, it would ignore the increasingly rapid moral, cultural, and even technological developments of the last century. To say that the majority of Christians get their morals from the Bible is as ignorant as to say that homosexuals enjoying the same rights as any other human beings is a threat to the stability of society.
For the politicians it’s, well, political, of course. Repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was a compromise for Obama. It was an easy way to convince those who voted for him on the basis of HOPE that he actually did have some form of power, however symbolic it might be. The current circus show of Republican candidates don’t believe in compromise or moderation, so they’re just screaming loudly over each other. Whatever active brain cells they still have remember that the gay marriage debate, much like the “debate” around evolution, riles up the base like a pack of howler monkeys, and more importantly gives the media something to distract us all from the real issues with, and confuse this with actual popularity.
Ok, so it’s an easy issue to distract people with. But what are we being distracted from? Lizard people? Donald Trump notwithstanding, no, it’s not the lizard people. Those screaming the loudest, the white Christian majority, are realizing what white supremacist racist dickshits have realized for a long time now: They are losing their monopoly. It’s not that their morals are actually being corrupted, it’s not that society is actually in any risk of decaying (at least for these reasons), it’s simply that they have always been the ones who were in complete control, and that’s now changing. Oh, sure, it’s still a ginormous majority. The western governments are still composed mostly of White Christian Males, after all, and a huge influx of poor non-white, non-Christian immigrants doesn’t change anything that much, as they would have to assimilate themselves into white Christian society to get anywhere anyway. But it’s no longer a monopoly. If 9/11 did anything outside of give the west excuses to invade the Middle-East, it’s that it put a big fat spotlight on the Muslim communities living in the Americas and Europe. Not always in a good way, as my pathetic excuse for a fellow Dutchman Geert Wilders so clearly illustrates, but we are no longer in denial. These people are here. They have been here for decades now. They are as much a part of our society as we are. This is an irreversible realization. That’s why you have people like Wilders proposing desperate solutions like “let’s just throw ‘em all out and go back to the way it used to be, please?”
And it spreads, of course. It starts with the Muslims. In the Americas, the realization that Mexicans are there to stay is leading to cognitive dissonance among hicks on a scale previously only reached by the Vatican. The idea seems to be that as long as they’re able to send the illegals back and prevent more coming in, all the legal Mexicans will stay quiet and not influence things too much. But more and more people are realizing that, hey, those Mexicans aren’t Mexican at all, they’ve been American all along! The majority Americans also realized that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to elect a black president after all.
Things are changing, and it’s scaring the hell out of the White Christian Majority. The funny thing is, of course, that the majority of the Majority doesn’t care. They couldn’t give two shits about the color of the president’s skin or the geographical origin of the country’s immigrants. So the Majority isn’t a majority at all, but they still have some power, and they’re screaming and shouting as if they’re going to lose it any day now.
So why target the gays? Aren’t most gays in the west white and Christian by default? Sure, but gay bashing is still morally accepted or at the very least ignored by a large section of the population. Overt racism just isn’t accepted anymore, which is not to say that all old white men get this, or that it doesn’t happen in the background anyway, but at least we’re living in a time when saying “fuck dem niggas” would swiftly end anyone’s political career (luckily I don’t have political aspirations). Racism itself causes some form of moral outrage these days, which only supports my point, but gay, uhh, -ism, doesn’t. It’s therefore a great political tool. And this does not just apply to those who are running for or are already a part of government. Anyone who is in a position of power, or believes he should be, whether its political, religious, or someone in the media, can easily rile up anger at, well, anything, either to get people to follow him directly, or to distract from the real issues like their actual impending loss of power. You see this happening in some African nations too, where to increasingly educated populace gets misled into hunting down gays by those who can feel the power slipping out of their hands. You might as well blame this for a shitload of injustices inflicted on the people of Middle-East by their leaders as well.
This is the true source of all racism, populism, homophobia, nationalism, etc. It’s not the fear of the thing itself. It’s not people reading the Bible and then all of a sudden realizing “hey, God doesn’t like this after all.” It’s preachers, politicians, the media, (unfortunately) influential people in power who are ridiculously desperate to maintain that power in the face of a changing world.
So don’t worry, gays, there’s nothing about your behavior that these people really think is wrong, nor are they actually afraid of you. You’re just a symbol of a world that is changing, and has in fact never really ever stood still anyway.
And to you homophobes out there, reality is hard to face, isn’t it?
