Religion and Gays & Lesbians
OP - February 20, 2011, 10:51 PM
It occured to me, that gays make the religious uneasy for a reason greater than the visceral prurient (and creepy) disgust engendered by the act of a man laying with a man or a woman with a woman.
And that is because gay liberation, gay equality, gay rights and the struggle to defeat prejudice against homosexuals is a struggle, a movement and a cause that definitively by-passed, ignored, rendered obsolete the moral claims of religion. The gay rights movement was rooted in enlightenment, humanist principles. Not the moral claims of religion. In fact, it is a great mass liberation that shamed religion and denied its ethical claims definitively.
Even now when there are reformist schools inside religions, especially Christianity and Judaism, they are responding to a moral reality engendered by secular humanism. As much as it gets dressed up as being in the name of a religious compassion, it is an adjustment to a new reality of modernity that is rooted in the enlightenment values that began to become manifest in the 1960's and 1970's, a great civil rights movement of our time. It is to that which reformist Christian and Jewish schools respond. In India there is a growing gay rights movement whose progress is not predicated on the largesse of Hinduism, but on the rights enshrined in the Indian constitution, which is a secular, enlightened document focussing on the rights of the individual.
In fact, gay equality is probably the one modern reality and struggle that negated the moral claims of the collective religious impulse most profoundly, because as much as anything else it struggled against the institutionalised and grassroots persecution that religion either directly inculcated or perpetuated, either by fire and brimstone directive, or through inhibiting the recognition of the humanity of the persecuted.
This makes religion uneasy on such a profound, deep level. It goes deeper than just the sexual issue. The ascendancy of gay rights and the struggle against prejudice against gays is directly contiguous with the ascendancy of liberal, secular, humanism and the priveliging of the rights of the individual and free conscience over those of the collective, especially the religious collective.
"we can smell traitors and country haters"
God is Love.
Love is Blind. Stevie Wonder is blind. Therefore, Stevie Wonder is God.
Topic: Religion and Gays & Lesbians