A New Archbishop for Chicago

Just now, our local (Chicago, Illinois, USA) television concluded the broadcast of the installation ceremony of a new Roman Catholic archbishop for Chicago. For those who care, his name is Blase Cupich and he had been the bishop of Spokane, Washington. More important, he is expected to further the policies and attitudes of Pope Francis.

 

I'd like to share some thoughts and reflections on this event.

I am not a Catholic nor even a Christian, but who the local Roman Catholic archbishop currently happens to be still might affect me. Who the archbishop happened to be at the time undoubtedly affected my Jewish ancestors in Europe as it could be a matter of whether they, as Jews, would be persecuted or, more likely, how vigorously they would be persecuted. (I find, more and more, that when I think about cathedrals or the Catholic Church I think about the persecution of Jews by their Christian neighbors for nearly 2000 years.)

And even today, I can still be affected by who currently is in power in the Roman Catholic Church because, if the Church preaches anti-gay prejudice, that has the potential to stir up those who hear such words and incite them to anti-gay prejudice and even anti-gay violence which I could be the victim of. Also, the Church has been influential in opposing anti-gay discrimination laws and same-sex marriage at the legislative level.

So, who the leaders of the Catholic Church are has the potential to affect me personally in several ways, and I am glad that the current pope and similarly his appointee, the Archbishop of Chicago, show signs that they are going to be more liberal, more human and more humane.

Copyright © 2014

African-Americans and Gay People: Have They Got a Lot in Common?

Recently I posted a comment on Huffington Post in which I said that African-American people should be more sympathetic or empathetic with gay people than they are since they are both minorities who have been discriminated against.

There was a reply to my comment in which the writer denied that the two groups should be compared. I have thought of a few reasons why maybe that person is right.

1. It was never illegal to be African-American.

2. It is not illegal for two African-Americans to marry one another nor for African-American couples to adopt children.

3. African-Americans are not told, from the pulpit, that they are sinners, simply because of who they are, or that they are going to hell because they are African-American.

4. No one has claimed that natural disasters such as floods and tornadoes are the result of God punishing America for tolerating African-Americans.

5. African-Americans may have their own bars and so forth, but those bars don't get raided by the police.

Yes, all those things have applied to gay people. And where discrimination in hiring and housing on the basis of race is illegal everywhere, gay people don't have that protection under federal law, so they may be legally discriminated against in some areas.

On the other hand, African-Americans do get called names (as gay people get called faggot) and sometimes are beaten up or even killed for who they are.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

The Caliber of Right-Wing Thought--on Gay Matters, on Guns

Unfortunately I often spend--quite possibly I should say waste--time reading articles on HuffPost (Huffington Post) on AOL; and further, reading and replying to the comments that other readers/users post.

I get saddened and frustrated by all the comments by homophobes, every time there's an article even remotely having to do with anything gay. They make the same tired, old comments--homosexuality is unnatural, it's a sin--and they point to their Bibles as telling them so. Never mind that they choose to pay attention to only some parts of the Bible and ignore others.

I argue with these people, by way of my comments on what they say and then their attempts at refuting me--etc., etc.

It's futile. As I said in a previous posting here, their logic is typically faulty, and you can't get them to understand that because they have little or no notion of logic, or of what is or is not faulty reasoning.

Then, in light of the recent shootings in Aurora, Colorado, I wrote that the United States has a problem with the wide and easy availability of guns and ammunition. To me the situation is quite clear--but not so to the gun-rights boys.

I provoked the argument they have used so many times in the past: cars can kill people, too, so would you ban cars?

I tried to point out that this is a faulty analogy. There is this important and fundamental difference between cars and guns: Cars do not have the primary purpose of killing people, but guns do.

So that is what I replied to the person who tried to make the comparison with cars. But he denies that his analogy is faulty.

As is so often the case with Right-wing types, they use faulty arguments and false "facts"; and their minds are so closed (not that closed minds are the sole property of those on the Right) that they cannot or will not acknowledge when their arguments are shown to be flawed.

You can get some really absurd and nonsensical comments out of them. One, recently, was writing about the 28th Amendment to the US Constitution. There is no 28th Amendment. The moral here is not about the general level of intelligence (low!) but how people can think and believe really wacky things.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Richard Stein

The "Logic" behind Anti-Gay Views

Along with many others who hold conservative views, anti-gay people often are hard-pressed to support their views with good, logical arguments.

Someone else--a frequent poster and commenter on HuffPost (formerly Huffington Post) who has, to my mind, intelligent and progressive views—pointed out that if you ask anti–gay marriage people how or why a same-sex couple getting married will affect them, they typically will simply change the subject. Because they can't show any way in which it would affect them, let alone hurt them.

Similarly and again on HuffPost, I challenged a woman (I think the person in question is female but it's often hard to tell their gender from people's online handles) to answer this question: If being gay is a choice, as she maintained, explain to me why anyone would choose to be gay—when being gay means discrimination in many spheres, being told you're a sinner from the pulpit, and even being physically attacked.

Her reply was that people "choose" to be gay to shirk responsibility or avoid pregnancy.

I assume that the responsibility she refers to means the responsibilities, etc., of being a parent. Well, many gay couples these days—mainly lesbian couples but definitely gay male couples as well—do want to be parents and do so through adoption or other means.

Second, many gay men are in fact married and may have fathered children in those marriages. Particularly among my generation, many gay men got married when they were young. (These marriages sometimes are successful but frequently end in divorce, so I'd say that generally it's not a good idea. Still, in these cases you can't say they have shirked the responsibilities of marriage and/or parenthood.)

As to her other argument, about avoiding pregnancy. That's simply silly. People can (and of course do) avoid pregnancy and conception, both within and outside marriage—and that has absolutely nothing to do with being gay.

So, my point is, press these people to back up their opinions and you get replies that are lame at best, totally nonsensical at worst. I have a feeling that, even as they are saying these things, they know they're not making very good sense. But is that going to make them open their minds? You know my answer to that question. Post a comment if you believe I'm wrong.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

I'm Sick and Tired of Homophobia

It seems that any time the Huffington Post (HuffPost) publishes any article online that relates, no matter how tangentially, to any gay issue (they do have a page called HuffPost Gay Voices, but sometimes gay-related things get posted elsewhere), for some reason all the homophobes come out of the woodwork, very happy to have a platform to express their anti-gay views.

So we hear (over, and over, and over again) that homosexuality is wrong, it's unnatural, it's perverted, it's against Nature and "God's law." So often religion is invoked. I've become firmly convinced that, as a gay man, religion is my enemy.

It makes me truly sad to have to think that homophobia is so widespread. One of these people touched on something very true when he or she said, "They just want to be accepted." I'd put a spin on that in a way that he or she probably did not intend and say, Yes, we gay people would very much like to be able to feel that we were not disliked (let alone hated), rejected, persecuted, discriminated against.

Let me tell you from personal experience that it is a tough row to hoe in life if you belong to any minority—and I belong to at least two or three.

I spend too much time reading and responding to many of those people. Here is what I wrote in reply to one:

There is an old American Indian proverb that says, "Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his moccasins." I only wish that you and others like you would have even a fraction of the humanity that is embodied in that saying.

I am getting very, very tired of you homophobes posting your ranting (and very, very tired) old, bigoted ideas any time there is anything posted on HuffPost that has anything to do with anything gay.

And, as to "abominations" named in the Bible, are you aware that Leviticus also says that you should not eat shellfish, you should not wear garments that have two fibers mixed, and that a woman who is not a virgin on her wedding night should be put to death?

Are we maybe just being a tad selective in what we do and don't point to in the Bible? It's not the Bible, it's just your bigotry.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Male-to-Male Sexual Abuse

Today on AOL there was a news item about an episode of the TV show "Law & Order: SVU," which I have never watched. The article was about the show's dealing with a taboo topic, male-to-male sexual violence. To put that even more bluntly, that would be a man raping another man. Yes, it can happen but it's rare. I think it's more the rarity than the taboo nature which is the reason you don't normally hear about it. (I believe I recall one news item that in fact was in our mainstream newspapers some years ago, about a man who got attacked in a downtown parking garage.)

Anyway, I knew--I just KNEW--that there would be a comment on the article that sought to tar all gay men with the (doubtless new to them) brush! The person wrote something like, "And this is why we need gays in the military?"

The online articles on AOL (which I confess to spending a lot of time reading, these days) normally allow the posting of comments, and replies to others' comments. In this instance I didn't see any provision for writing my rebuttal to that comment, so I'm using my blog as my forum.

As I hope nearly anyone would recognize, that's a ridiculous comment. Gay men do not typically go around raping other men. A large fraction of men raping men undoubtedly goes on in prisons; and it's well known that even that is not a result of the rapists' being gay. Sociologists (or whichever branch of scholarship studies such matters) call that "adventitious homosexuality," meaning that men will turn to other males when they don't have any other sexual outlet available. These men don't consider themselves gay, and once they are out of prison the resort to exclusively heterosexual behavior.

Religious Right and other homophobic types try to blame gay men for child sexual abuse, when statistics have shown, over and over, that the percentage of men abusing girls is much higher than for boys. But those people all too often don't care about facts and prefer to keep repeating the same misconceptions, distortions, and out-and-out lies.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

Growing Up Gay 50 Years Ago

This posting represents a departure for Mourning Dove Hill. My profile lets on that I am gay but I have not discussed that or any gay matters in a post. So here goes:

When I was growing up—my teen years were in the 1950s, a time that, strangely, is often romanticized—the word gay was never heard. (I first heard it in 1963, when it was explained to me as a code word, a word that you would slip into a conversation to let the other person know you were gay; and if he understood, of course he was gay too.) The popular culture of the time—songs and so forth—depicted a world in which 100 percent of men were attracted to women. In other words, gays didn't exist. For that reason I, and thousands of other young males growing up in small towns in that era, were able to believe, each of us, that we were the only ones in the whole world who were "different" in that way.

Heterosexual males have 50 percent of the population that they can pursue. (Well, we have to exclude the women who are too young, and I was going to add "and women who are married," but let's not be naïve; that doesn't stop a lot of men.) On the other hand, a gay man has to find a partner among the three or five or whatever percent of the male population who share his sexual orientation. I, like millions of others, learned that the major cities had significant gay enclaves, and so wanted to move to the big city. The pickings are a little better there!

The social conservative/Christian/evangelical community keeps insisting that being gay is a "choice." (Here, and in so many other cases, I have become more and more convinced that they do not really believe what they say. They really just are repelled by the idea of gay sex and will find any reason whatsoever—for instance that it's a choice, or that the Bible proscribes it—to justify a prejudice which at heart is disgust stemming from their sexual puritanism.) If you examine this idea with a modicum of reason, it can't possibly hold up. Why would someone choose to be gay when

1. People like them revile us.
2. It's harder to find a partner among that much smaller population.
3. There might be discrimination in finding a job, etc. In spite of all the progress and nondiscrimination legislation passed in many jurisdictions, it's still a disadvantage to be gay.
4. Gays and lesbians don't have equal rights, including the right to marry their partners (in most jurisdictions); their partners may not be able to visit them in the hospital when they are gravely ill; and their partners don't automatically inherit property or Social Security benefits as do spouses in married heterosexual couples.
5. Many gays and lesbians were raised in, and still wish to be affiliated with, churches that tell them that they are sinners. What damage does this do to one's psyche?
6. It's well documented that GLBT teen-agers are subjected to verbal and physical harassment by their peers and even teachers. And there is a higher rate of suicide among GLBT teens than among their straight peers.

If there is a greater incidence of alcoholism and other such problems among gays and lesbians, it very likely is due to the burden we must cope with, that of dealing with society's homophobia. The 1968 play (and 1970 movie) The Boys in the Band—one of the first plays to depict gay characters—leaves us with the sentiment, voiced by one of the characters, "If only we didn't hate ourselves so much."

The San Francisco Chronicle said, when the film version of The Boys in the Band was revived in 1999,

. . . in the attitudes of its characters, and their self-lacerating vision of themselves, it belongs to another time. And that's a good thing.

Of course it's a good thing, if it's true. I believe the Chronicle is saying that gays and lesbians growing up today do not have the baggage of internalized homophobia. I am sure it is correct that it's easier for young gays and lesbians today: there is greater societal acceptance of homosexuality and certainly it's a subject much more out in the open. A young GLBT person today can find others like himself or herself far more easily.

But not all of us of the Boys in the Band generation are yet gone from this Earth.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein