How is this OK? Dan Savage should not use the word “faggot” either.

So the Huffington Post is reporting that Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) got upset today when a conservative gay group called GOP Proud endorsed Mitt Romney for President. He tweeted the following response to the group’s announcement:

“The GOP’s house faggots grab their ankles, right on cue.”

How is it alright for Savage, a self-proclaimed gay rights activist, to use this word to describe other people that he disagrees with? He created the “It Gets Better Project” to help young people who are being bullied, yet he uses the word “faggot” in anger to disenfranchise and put down people who don’t agree with his political positions. Isn’t this what kids on the playground do all the time?

I’ve had a lot of respect for Dan Savage. I think he does some good work. This moment is not his finest. It’s disappointing.

I understand that people make mistakes. But if Dan Savage is going to position himself as the watchdog of others, then he needs to watch himself a little more carefully.

An educator finally got it right–”You Are Not Special”

LZ Granderson comments on a commencement speech at a high school graduation entitled “You Are Not Special.”  Here’s the link to Granderson’s commentary.

I need to listen to the speech, but based on what Granderson is saying in his piece, the high school English teacher hit something on the head: we need to stop telling everyone how great they are, and start playing in the Reality Sand Box.  As someone who teaches students after they come out of 13 years of being told they can do no wrong, it’s refreshing to know that at least this class of high school graduates got a bit of a reality check before traipsing out into the world.

A little humor goes a long way when you’re the supposed leader (or former leader) of the free world…

I’m not a George W fan by any stretch, but I appreciate the humor of all three speakers in this video: Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Laura Bush.

http://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2012/05/31/bts-bush-portrait-unveiling.cnn

Jesus had a lot of grays in his Crayola box

Now we have a “friend” in Kansas, pastor Curtis Knapp of New Hope Baptist Church, who preached this past Sunday that the government should be killing all homosexuals.  He defends his words using the infamous Leviticus 20:13: “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act. They shall surely be put to death.”

OK.  Now I know there are lots of other passages about lots of other things as well, but that’s beside the point.

After 23 years of practicing Catholicism, I do not know the Bible nearly as well as many of my friends who are affiliated with other Christian denominations.  I also have a couple of friends who have really spent the necessary time with the Bible to make their own meanings of what the Book has to say.  These are the people that I trust a bit more on the subject of biblical interpretation, as they have taken the agency to understand the message on their own terms.

So let’s be clear: I am not a Bible scholar, nor do I pretend to be one.  But I listened to the Gospel enough times as a kid and a young adult to know that Jesus would not be dealing with these statements so well.  If the teachings of Jesus are the foundation of Christianity, then some of these preachers and pastors are speaking from buildings that are about to sink into the ground.

And this strict interpretation of the Bible that people use raises another point for me.  Jesus seemed to have a lot of gray Crayons in his Crayola box.  He was not a “black and white” or “either or” kind of guy from what I can tell.  I write that with all the respect in the world, and because I think I internalized some of that viewpoint as a kid listening to the stories of Jesus forgiving sinners, spending time with the disenfranchised, and sacrificing his life for the sins of the world.  If this is what Christianity is about and we’re supposed to be living our lives based on the teachings of Jesus, as outlined by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, then these pastors and preachers who keep talking about deep sixing the gays are clearly not paying attention to the teachings of Jesus.

Now I may be missing something from the Book, and I’m not dealing with the Old Testament.  But the preachings that have come to light in the last few weeks really call into question how people are choosing to ignore the gray in the world.  For me, Jesus was all about embracing the moments of gray in the world.  And isn’t having faith supposed to be about believing in and embracing the gray of the unknown?

Hating the “Hateful”: We can’t do it

Yesterday we learned that the North Carolina preacher Pastor Worley delivered a sermon in 1978 that included a line that goes something like this:

“Forty years ago [gays] would’ve hung, bless God, from a white oak tree!”

Wow…

A friend of mine responded to my post yesterday with some excellent points, one of which was that Worley’s church in NC could not be a house of God.  She knows the Book well, and I was really touched by the time she took to respond to the post.

I started thinking about how we live in a time when religion is under attack and how that might actually parallel how LGBTQ people are under attack.  Of course, VERY DIFFERENT circumstances, but I think that in 21st century American society, religious practice could be viewed as non-normative by a lot of people.  In fact, I have been privy to any number of inappropriate comments from so-called liberals condemning and/or dismissing religious practices and beliefs.  This language often mirrors the language used by people going on a homophobic rant, and it gets to the heart of this post’s title.  Practitioners of religion have been taking it to the chin because of people like Pastor Worley, and I think we all need to take stock here.    Extreme practices and beliefs exist in all communities, but we have to be careful about how we respond to these moments when one person speaks for a larger community.  Or let me rephrase that.  The media holds up this person and insinuates that he speaks for an entire community.   That’s part of the problem.

I’m writing this out because I know I need to be more accountable for my own thoughts and feelings about moments like this.  Pastor Worley’s rhetoric frightens me, but I don’t believe that it’s a possibility.  Maybe that’s naive of me, but I’d rather be optimistic about my fellow man.  We need to be smart enough not to take the media’s or Pastor Worley’s bait.  We also need to have more compassion.  We can’t hate the “hateful.” If we do, we become Pastor Worley.

I don’t practice religion, and I’m not even sure how spiritual I feel at this point in my life.  But I do understand that religious teachings are meant to help us see the humanity in each and every individual–so that we see the face of God in the people around us.   Empathy, compassion, and humanity in a world where those three things are getting harder and harder to find.