Imagine a man. A man with a law degree from the University of North Carolina. A man who served as a member of the state house of representatives. A man who is now a judge on the state Superior Court. A man who attends church regularly. A man who is gay.
Ray Warren wouldn't be terribly unusual, except that he is a Republican, and he plans to stay one. There is also the issue of his wife and children, but they haven't spoken out against him.
His mother has, though.
Edy Brotherton has blamed some sort of gay conspiracy network for recruiting her son into "their" ranks. She says she knows he's not gay, that he's only confused. That she knows him better than he knows himself.
Well, family matters can be tricky, and I'll leave that arena for now. Let's consider what the head of the state Republican party had to say. Lee Currie, the executive director of the N.C. G.O.P., toed the Christian conservative line, accusing Warren of betraying Republicans everywhere and of engaging in deviant and destructive behavior.
I guess that's what "they" mean by hating the sin and loving the sinner.
The first step in pushing a group of people out of society is by claiming that "they" are not "one of us". Somehow, gays and lesbians are not quite human, but deviants and freaks. This makes it easier to discriminate against "them", to make those people feel unwelcome in "our" communities. The next step is to encourage actions against "them". Like, say, the ongoing homosexual "conversion" movement.
Now, I'm not going to claim that homosexuality, per se, is strictly genetic. I think any serious sexuality study done in the past 50 years has shown that most folks' sexuality lies along a continuum between "straight" and "gay". Most straight folks have the occasional homosexual crush, particularly during adolescence, and most gay folks have the occasional straight crush, also particularly during adolescence. While most people "settle" on one or the other ends of the sexuality continuum, contrary urges can remain. In other words, it's kinda dumb to assume people are one or the other. Most of us are a combination of both.
In other words, "they" are part of "us".
It's a widely held notion that the folks who vent most profusely about the "sin" of homosexuality are probably afraid of their own homosexual urges. This makes a lot of sense, particularly when you figure that fear and ignorance are the main ingredients in hate.
And ignorance abounds. While Judge Warren claims to be weathering this media storm calmly, the fact that this "news" made the front page of most newspapers in the state (not to mention the Jay Leno show) simply proves that a lot of people are idiots. Hateful idiots. What a person does (or doesn't do) behind closed doors is of no concern to the public. I figure Warren's mother has every right to say what she said, but only to Warren himself, not to every newspaper, radio and TV station that she could contact. Reaching out to smear your own son is hateful, there's no two ways about it. And branding someone a deviant for how he lawfully conducts himself in the bedroom is just as hateful.
In my short time down here in the New South, I've come across a saying I hadn't heard before. "Not very Christian" is how it goes, and it is used as a gentle chide. Say I arrogantly described how I bumped some kid out of the way while scoring a CD at the record store. "Not very Christian" would be the retort. And while I'm not a believer myself, that's the only phrase that came to mind when I read Judge Warren's story.
There's the golden rule, and there's that saying about glass houses, and there's the notion of casting the first stone. I learned about all of those in Sunday School a long time ago. And the moral of each is that we should treat everyone with love and respect. After all, Jesus didn't browbeat the whores and the lepers. The only folks he upbraided were the Pharisees. A bunch of self-righteous freaks who thought they knew God's word better than anyone else.
Guess who fits that description these days?
Jon Worley chooses not to attend church in Durham, N.C.