HOMOPHOBIC TEXAS

My successor at Sterling High School in Baytown, theater arts teacher Kyle Martin, has a nice little rant up over at his blog, Great Blogs of Fire, about the recent passage of a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage:

"The Religious Right is Flexing It's Might...."

Which brings me to my next point. What kind of jackass would go out of his way to deny a right from another person. Well, the Ku Klux Klan made their presence known in Austin yesterday. They certainly want to take a stand on this issue.

But, what about the typical, non-hatefilled Texan who just simply finds the homosexual lifestyle to be sinful. Surely they don't hate gays but hate the act, right? Hate the sin, but love the sinner, and all that jazz. What could possibly compell a person like this to push for an amendment to the constitution to ban a practice that is already banned. Aside from the aforementioned likelyhood that if this ammendment was rejected legalizing gay marriage was next, I can't think of any reason. All this ammendment serves to do is further widen the socialogical gap between gays and mainstream culture. It is a slap in the face to gays, plain and simple. It is mainstream Texans saying to a minority, "We don't just oppose your lifestyle, we oppose you." What happened to loving the sinner?

Maybe you truly don't hate the sinner, then why vote for this rediculous bill? Did you vote on principle? It's as if any opportunity to show the world you are a Bible-thumping Christian can't just pass on by. The WWJD t-shirts and horribly cheesy bumper stickers aren't enough anymore, apperently. And, far be it from anyone within the fundamentalist Christian community to actually try acting like Christ!

Click here for the rest.

You know, I've been thinking about why fundamentalists are so rabid in their opposition to gay rights for some years now because it just doesn't make sense. For Christians, homosexual behavior is simply one sin among thousands, but for some reason it just drives them nuts. If you judged how important an issue is by how much emphasis is placed on it, homosexuality is clearly, from the fundamentalist perspective, the biggest issue facing Christianity today. However, if the Southern Baptist Sunday school and church training classes I took as a youth are reliable indicators of fundamentalist theology, the most important issue for Christians ought to be salvation. Strangely, all I seem to hear them going on about is abortion and gay marriage. What's up with that?

There is only one conclusion a rational person can make: fundamentalists are mortally afraid of gay people. My suspicion is that it has less to do with plain old fashioned homophobia, although I'm certain that plays a big role, and more to do with what gay people represent to fundamentalists. That is, homosexuals, who must necessarily defy the conventional societal wisdom regarding sexuality, symbolize sexual freedom. And for the Puritanical, extraordinarily sexually repressed fundamentalists, sexual freedom is Satanic temptation numero uno. As human beings, they really do, deep down, want to have wild and fun sex, but as fundamentalists, they're unable to take any sort of nuanced view of sexuality, unable to come to terms with their innate physical drives and make healthy and informed choices about having sex. To them, it's all black and white; do it God's way, but not all these other ways.

Of course, their only solution to this problem is more absolute thinking: repress the gays; it'll all work out. You know, quitting the Southern Baptist Church was the best decision I've ever made.

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