The Problem With Being Gay

I still remember when my sister told me that her youngest had come out.

I knew something was going on. She was distressed. The family priest had been called in for counseling about something and it quickly became self-evident that whatever it was, she found it troubling. I didn’t interfere but waited until she had time to deal with it and was ready to share it with the rest of the family and eventually she did.

She said to me, “I guess you’ve heard about Terry (not his real name).” I hadn’t heard anything, so my first thought was that he had been injured or become seriously ill. I told her “No”, I hadn’t heard anything and asked if he was ok. She went on to tell me in a halting voice that he wasn’t injured but that he had come out. I was still thinking injury so asked her what he had come out of and she said, “The closet.” She couldn’t bring herself to use the word gay. She asked me how I felt about that.

I said, “Relieved.” She gave me a confused look and asked, “Relieved?” I said yes, “I thought you were going to tell me he had switched politics and was going to vote left-wing socialist,” and smiled at her.

I don’t actually care how he or anyone votes, my response was an attempt to put Terry’s announcement in some kind of perspective. I didn’t consider his sexual orientation to be all that important and, as it turned out; neither did the rest of the extended family.

The problem with being gay isn’t being gay; it’s the prejudiced and ill-informed attitudes of too many who aren’t.

An excellent perspective on gays and  on gay marriage from

www.funnyordie.com

Being gay isn’t a choice. People don’t get out of bed one morning and decide to change their sexual orientation out of boredom or for a lark, it’s genetic. Sexual orientation is simply how we are wired and some are wired heterosexual and some homosexual. Big deal. Being upset about it is like being upset because we don’t all have the same hair colour.

Fundamentalists in most religions are violently opposed to homosexuality, sometimes with deadly results. More than one gay has been bullied, beaten or murdered simply because the righteous disapprove of that person’s sexuality. I confess that I don’t get it.

If you believe that all people come from God and that God is perfect how can you possibly bring yourself to believe that God screwed up by creating gay people? The simple fact is that fundamentalists, of all people, should be leading the charge to defend gays based on the principle that their God never makes a mistake.

You would also think that people of faith, particularly Christians, who preach love, tolerance and forgiveness, would be among the first to accept that gays are just one more of their God’s happy creation.

The prejudice isn’t limited to people of faith, however and you don’t have to believe in anything to be intolerant of others. All it takes is a narrow mind afraid of and threatened by something different from it. There is a lot of that going around these days. Much of it is political, some of it is based on religious affiliation, some racial and, of course, sexuality.

Sexuality? Are we really so insecure that we are threatened by who someone else loves or has sex with? There are more people upset about gays than pedophiles and that seems an awfully confused set of values to me. Of course, too many think that gays are some kind of evil manifestation only too ready to prey on children. I suggest you worry more about priests and the righteous with their repressed sexuality. Far more of the faithful have been charged with molesting children than gays. In fact, I don’t recall ever seeing a news report about a gay person abusing a child but I’ve seen many about the heterosexual righteous pursuing children.

The simple reality is that gays are no different from anyone else and there are gays in all areas of society including business, entertainment, politics, professional sports, academia and the trades. There are incredibly intelligent, accomplished gays and there are some who are just as stupid as the rest of us. 

I’ll grant you that some gays are a bit extreme with their ‘in-your-face’ attitude but we have to live with that in all areas of life including religion, politics and education. Sexual orientation, like everything else has its share of self-absorbed extrpverts and even dishonest people but that simply confirms that they're like the rest of us. It has nothing to do with being gay.

In my family we have people of all races (Japanese/Chinese, Nigerian, Caucasian, Pakistani and a blend of more than one of those). We have gays, lesbians, Christians, Buddhists (nope, not the Asians), atheists, agnostics, jerks and all are some really loving and wonderful people. We are a mini-United Nations but unlike the UN, we are actually united and care about each other, even those within the family with whom we disagree or who are different from us.

We are bemused by the intolerance thing because there is almost none of it among us. It isn’t that we’re better than anyone else, we’ve just lived with cultural, racial, political and sexual orientation differences and discovered they really aren’t as important as caring about each other. In fact, we’ve discovered they aren’t important at all because they don’t define who we are as a family or as individuals.

As a family, we believe we are defined by our values, our actions and our characters. It is those things that make us who and what we are collectively and individually. Hair colour, race and sexual orientation are irrelevant. It is the same with a society. We are defined by our values and when we allow the trivial to become more important than what really is important, we fail ourselves and each other.

I think there is a reason that homosexuality is called gay. There is nothing ugly or abnormal about it and we need to step back, take a breath and move on to bigger issues. As long as we aren’t prepared to do that, it is impossible to see how we will ever resolve the truly important issues facing us these days.

So what's the problem with being gay? There isn't one. The problem lies with those who think there is.

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