Light in Loafers

Think for a moment about a person you know (especially a male) who gets very angry about homosexuality or who resorts to moralizing about it -  often from a religous standpoint - to the point of obsession.  Or, even better, think of a male you know who might give off some effiminate vibes yet be totally against anybody being gay.  Picture them yet?  I can think of politicians and even ministers and military servicemen who are like this.

If you get around someone and they seem fixated on a particular subject, I dare you to look a bit deeper.  Let's take the case of the individual that came to mind for you.  What if he's fighting his attraction to males and that he perceives it as a struggle or sin due to personal beliefs and/or cultural pressures that come from a particular religious ideology?  Perhaps he's gay or a little "light in his loafers"?  And so, this need to rail against it emerges.  This could be a form of denial or self-hatred.

I know another type of person who gets very wound up (even angry) about homosexuality - sees it as a sin, a disease you catch, something to be eradicated, prayed away or fixed, certainly something to hide, etc..  Yet, it was a big AHA MOMENT when I met this person's father.  The father was clearly effeminate.  Kinda interesting, I must say!  In this case, maybe a sense of shame (about the father) is projected.  That's one way to think about it.

Let's think about religious influence, which can't be underestimated.  Look at ISIS, for example.  Is there any doubt that their motivations are religious in nature?!?!  We may not like the religion - certainly the sectarian element of it that's very radical and dangerous - but it's their identity and it gives their lives meaning.  Of course, it's not a coincidence that for the two examples I've already shared, they are also deeply religious (in this case, Christianity) with a strong fundamentalist bent: a black & white, us vs. them way of thinking and seeing the world.  We can laugh at it and say it's crazy, but a lot of people live in families and communities like this and have been carefully indoctrinated, most often in a very sincere fashion by goodhearted people who also experienced this indoctrination at the hands of others.  There's a pattern there, and it's easy to see.  This belief system forms the basis for how the world is interpreted and how you're supposed to interact with it.  And if there's punishment for questioning or living in opposition to the particular belief system (e.g. social alienation, bullying, economic loss, beheadings or hell), many people naturally go along with it.

For those who seem to have trouble pinpointing passages in the Bible that relate to homosexuality, here are two verses, representing the Old and the New.  By the way, most often it's the moderate Christians who say, "Well, that's not really even in the Bible."  Fundamentalist Christians know what's there, for sure. 

God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion (Romans 1:26-27)

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination (Leviticus 18:22)

Several years ago an Australian friend of mine (straight, btw) asked me why there's a block of people in the United States who seem so afraid of gays.  After giving it a considerable amount of thought, I just told him, "It's not that they fear homosexuals.  They may.  But what they really fear is that their belief system (or certain aspects of it) could be wrong.  And that's where the struggle exists for them."

Click here for a story that sure made me go hmmmm.