One of the rules of polite company has long been that one does not talk sex, politics, or religion at social gatherings. I’ve always had difficulty following that particular guideline as those are, after all, three of my all time favourite subjects.
When one considers that virtually all my activism over the last 25 years has been around sexual politics -- the place of homosexuals in society, improving the sense of self worth amongst lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and in recent years transfolk, pushing for equal rights, and insisting that we as GLBTQ people have every right to live our lives as we live them – it’s not hard to see why I don’t get invited to many dinner parties anymore. I never really concerned myself too much with religion, despite my enduring interest in how individuals manage to suspend certain ideas in order to adhere to certain other ideas.
This is not to say I haven’t been conscious of religious issues as they pertain to GLBTQ rights. I just never publicly concerned myself too much with what various religious bodies had to say about homosexuality, pro or con, because, in Canada at any rate, we seemed quite able to separate out religious/moral concerns and secular concerns. In Canada, it once could be argued, we simply didn’t engage in the sort of hysteria and polarization we often see down in the United States.
When I first came out of the closet, Anita Bryant, a former beauty queen and mediocre gospel singer reduced to shilling for the Florida orange juice cartel to make a living, was creating mayhem throughout the USA by over-reacting to a Dade County Florida initiative to ensure equality in hiring when it came to lesbians and gay men. As a devout evangelical Christian, Ms. Bryant reacted with horror that, gay men especially, could be teaching children in Florida schools, and promptly launched her Save The Children campaign.
This was 1979/80, and understanding of lesbians and gay men was just beginning to blossom. There were even indications of a certain tolerance and acceptance. At least, there was until Ms. Bryant and her band of [un]merry Christian Evangelicals started spouting such inanities as gay men had an agenda to seduce the boy children of America, that hiring (or at least not firing) someone regardless of their sexual orientation posed a major threat to Family, Children, and The American Way. Homosexuals became the new Communists. At the time, many reasonable Americans simply dismissed her as a crackpot. Gay and lesbian communities throughout the USA and Canada promptly boycotted Florida orange juice (the California variety was less pulpy, anyway...), and the Florida Orange Juice Commission was eventually forced to fire Ms. Bryant as their spokesperson. She quickly faded into obscurity.
However, the die was struck. Throughout the 1980’s, as the gay and lesbian community became more organized, more visible, and as AIDS and the fight for better health care and drugs moved mainstream, the Christian Right likewise became more visible with such groups as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, the Colorado Christian Coalition, and a host of televangelists ranting against the abomination that homosexuality presented to God-fearing America. Counter reactions set in; the Moral Majority was often described, much to the delight of the mainstream press, as neither moral nor a majority. The Colorado Christian Coalition, and similar coalitions, were exposed as the hate-mongers they were, and the televangelists were almost all exposed as hypocrites and sleazemeisters, engaging in sexual harassment, prostitution, embezzlement, money-laundering schemes, and padding their own extravagant and often nouveau riche lifestyles at the expense of their often impoverished parishioners. It became easy to dismiss, even ridicule, the over-the-top theatrics of these backwater religious hicks who appeared to practice some sort of weird trailer trash and velvet-painting style of Christianity.
In Canada, we seemed satisfied that such populist Bible-thumping, fundamentalist theatrics simply did not have the same hold on Canadians as it appeared to have on Americans. Canada was not founded on the Puritan Protestantism the United States was; our national religious background was the far more genteel liturgy of The Church of England and Roman Catholicism, with a bit of Presbyterianism and Lutheranism thrown in for flavour, and a soupcon of United. We simply didn’t engage in the "Halleluiah’s" and "Praise Jeeee-zus!’s" of the Revival Tent.
That’s changing.
The issue of equal marriage has brought American-style evangelism into the urban mainstream. Actually, it’s been in the urban mainstream for several years, but nobody paid much attention to the McChurches of conservative Protestant congregations. In Canada, don’tcha know, we live and let live; we simply do not interfere in the religious and cultural expression of others. It’s just not done, old boy....
Suddenly, it seems, we have the Concerned Christians Canada (formerly the Concerned Christians Coalition Inc.), Focus On The Family (Canada), the Canadian Family Action Coalition (CFAC), and a host of other "pro-family" conservative Christian groups all denouncing ‘The Homosexual Agenda’ and launching full scale, and well-funded, attacks against anything that smacks of equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans-identified folk.
They take out full page or two page ads, averaging thousands of dollars per ad per paper, denouncing the evil the Martin government that has been unleashed on God-fearing Canadians. They hold rallies attended by hundreds of "concerned parents", and the rhetoric is all around Protection of the Family, Our Children, Tradition.
We see formerly vehemently anti-Papist conservative evangelical Christian congregations forming political alliances with the very church they once loudly condemned as little more than a bunch of idolaters. We see Roman Catholic clergy, once forbidden to ever preach in a Protestant church, being the guests of honour in those same churches. We have bishops and archbishops of a church that has some very real moral issues of its own to deal with speak out against the Government of Canada, lobbying the faithful to demand their MPs vote against the Civil Marriage Act. We see churches involving themselves in political lobbying and advocacy, while still benefiting from the tax-exempt charitable status being a religious denomination affords them, then crying loud and publicly about the undemocratic juggernaut of Revenue Canada daring to suggest to them they might be in contravention of their charitable status.
We hear Good Decent Christians describe us as "evil" and church leaders calling for the "coercive power of The State" to be brought down on all expressions of who we are. We are compared to polygamists (all of whom, by the way, are fundamentalist Christians albeit on the extreme frontier), murderers, pedophiles, drug addicts, and those who engage in bestiality. We are told our relationships are abhorrent to [their] God.
These self-appointed defenders of all that is good and pure are nothing of the sort. What they are, are common garden-variety schoolyard bullies – dressed up in their Sunday Best, perhaps – but bullies nevertheless. They try to intimidate, to frighten, to coerce us, and those who speak out in support of us, into complying with what they believe to be correct, or at least into silence. When an MP, like Jim Prentice, refuses to be bullied, they up the ante and organize a nasty and expensive campaign against him. You refuse to give a schoolyard bully your lunch money or new sneakers, he threatens to beat you up after school, and often does. This is no different.
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Contributor Stephen Lock |
Topic Politics |
