Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Perspective on Sexual Orientation

This is a letter I stumbled upon online:

Sunday, April 30, 2000
By SHARON UNDERWOOD
For the Valley News (White River Junction, VT)

Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I've taken enough from you good people.

I'm tired of your foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual agenda" and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.

My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay.

He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called "fag" incessantly, starting when he was 6.

In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn't bear to continue living any longer, that he didn't want to be gay and that he couldn't face a life without dignity.

You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don't know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn't put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think, and it's about time you started doing that.

At the core of all your misguided beliefs is the belief that this could never happen to you, that there is some kind of subculture out there that people have chosen to join. The fact is that if it can happen to my family, it can happen to yours, and you won't get to choose. Whether it is genetic or whether something occurs during a critical time of fetal development, I don't know. I can only tell you with an absolute certainty that it is inborn.

If you want to tout your own morality, you'd best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it. For those of you who reduce sexual orientation to a simple choice, a character issue, a bad habit or something that can be changed by a 10-step program, I'm puzzled. Are you saying that your own sexual orientation is nothing more than something you have chosen, that you could change it at will? If that's not the case, then why would you suggest that someone else can?

A popular theme in your letters is that Vermont has been infiltrated by outsiders. Both sides of my family have lived in Vermont for generations. I am heart and soul a Vermonter, so I'll thank you to stop saying that you are speaking for "true Vermonters."

You invoke the memory of the brave people who have fought on the battlefield for this great country, saying that they didn't give their lives so that the "homosexual agenda" could tear down the principles they died defending. My 83-year-old father fought in some of the most horrific battles of World War II, was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart.

He shakes his head in sadness at the life his grandson has had to live. He says he fought alongside homosexuals in those battles, that they did their part and bothered no one. One of his best friends in the service was gay, and he never knew it until the end, and when he did find out, it mattered not at all. That wasn't the measure of the man.

You religious folk just can't bear the thought that as my son emerges from the hell that was his childhood he might like to find a lifelong companion and have a measure of happiness. It offends your sensibilities that he should request the right to visit that companion in the hospital, to make medical decisions for him or to benefit from tax laws governing inheritance.

How dare he? you say. These outrageous requests would threaten the very existence of your family, would undermine the sanctity of marriage.

You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people who find your attitudes repugnant. God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows my son has committed no sin.

The deep-thinking author of a letter to the April 12 Valley News who lectures about homosexual sin and tells us about "those of us who have been blessed with the benefits of a religious upbringing" asks: "What ever happened to the idea of striving . . . to be better human beings than we are?"

Indeed, sir, what ever happened to that?

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Suffering and Perspective

I was teaching an art class at the community kitchen last week where I encountered a homely lady that changed my life. I usually go to these classes in order to offer an artist’s perspective but today mine was altered. Having been unemployed for three and a half months has been very straining. I have barely gotten by on the good graces of my friends, loved ones, and, most importantly, Jesus. A few times I have found myself humbled and broken by my situation, but how bad is my situation?

The lady, whose name to my shame I have forgotten, sat at a table with me in order to paint a picture. Over the course of her work she started telling me her story: she was in her sixties, far from home (LaFayette, Arkansas), and lonely. Her husband of nine years and the adopted father of her daughter had died in a car wreck that left her in a coma. She awoke to a period of unrest in which her daughter was fighting the US military over burial rights. Needless to say, her life was taken out from under her. But her life was more than this man: her life was her dogs.

I have never heard a person talk about animals the way this woman did. She had two champion breed dogs that were lost due to unrelated tragedies. Oh, how she loved her dogs. She nonchalantly remarked to me that losing her dogs was like losing another child. But it was not her husband, health problems, distance from home, or her dogs that taught me a life lesson: it was her smile.

She looked like a woman who had been through hell. Her teeth were rotted probably due to her long cigarette addiction and her clothes shabby as a vagabond. But though she had walked through the valley she feared no evil for her God was with her. She spoke vehemently and joyfully of her faith that had sustained her. I often pity myself for not having the money to maintain a cell phone or pay credit card bills and cry out to God for my suffering. Suffering? No, this is not suffering. I am an intelligent and ambitious man with gifts, charisma, and the whole world in front of me. I have my health, food to eat, a car to drive, people around me to love me, and even a cigarette. She had lost everything she had ever loved yet smiled at me through her three front teeth with the sweet name of Jesus on her lips. I know no suffering and I weep for my pride.