http://www.pakachoag.org/Pastoral Message
The Rev. Dennis R. Knight
Pakachoag Church
October 10, 2010
The recent death by suicide of eighteen year old Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi has crystallized in a deeply stark and wrenching manner the plight of young people who are assaulted from without and within regarding their sexual identity. For most adolescents and teenagers, the “normal” sequences of coming of age are challenging and foreboding of themselves. Inner suspicions or growing awareness that their sexual orientation is not “like everyone else’s” can add stress of such measure that it can ultimately become self-destructive. Tyler Clementi’s circumstance was shared by four other documented teenagers in September alone who found the negativity associated with their own sexuality insurmountable. Billy Lucas, 15, Asher Brown, 13, Justin Aaberg, 15, and Seth Walsh, 13 all took their own lives “after being physically or verbally (or both) assaulted for being gay” according to published news reports.
It is a rare person who reads or hears such news without receiving it with a heavy heart. Still, for all that, soon enough the rationalizations and explanations begin to fill in the barren spaces. We allow ourselves to speculate whether these youth were overly sensitive, or whether they overreacted to the taunts they experienced, or perhaps failed to hear the positive messages that surely parents and others must have communicated along the way. This line of reasoning follows something in the manner of, “Life, after all, does not coddle us and we have to learn to stand up for ourselves and be ‘comfortable in our own skins.’”
Evidence of this response is as close at hand as an editorial that appeared in the October 5 edition of The Daily Targum, the Rutger’s University campus newspaper. Suggesting the press ran astray in its response to Tyler Clementi’s suicide, the editorial opined that, “The focal point of Clementi's tragic death should have been a boy's inability to deal with the hardships of life.” The same article disingenuously observed, “Homosexuality is not the only reason for which people kill themselves.” Such a sweeping and blithe dismissal of the core element in Tyler Clementi’s circumstance is sadly reflective of a common outlook that is simply unwilling to acknowledge the depth of the struggle this issue presents for some persons.
Such interpolations need to be called out for what they are: a rationalization for the failure on the part of society, at the minimum, to protect the segment of our humanity that is gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender. There are reasons youth cannot reconcile themselves to their own natures and a large measure of the obstacles to their lack of reconciliation derives from the public portraiture of g/l/b/t persons as abnormal, immoral or perverse.
While use of such as the “N” word has become impermissible in our society, the “F” word, fag, remains as an allowable slur that can be invoked in the public environment. To be sure, it may be thought of as crude or tasteless, but it does not result in the same immediate censure that other pejorative terms do. Under the guise of public discourse, we accommodate assertions that g/l/b/t persons are of diminished character or claims they are of lesser moral composition than heterosexual persons, when no other class, racial group, or category of persons can be so relentlessly scrutinized and frequently condemned.
Youth are like soft clay. An imprint sets easily and they can come to feel branded for life when they discover they are what so many other people disdain. That sense of disdain transfers easily to yet pliant minds, and the leap from disdain to self-loathing is short indeed. For Tyler Clementi and others, it was a span we can only wish they had not traversed.
Whether Tyler Clementi will have died in vain is yet to establish itself. The upwelling of dismay that his suicide engendered may transform itself into positive change that will come to benefit other people in his situation. Still, whatever may come from it, his death was needless and immeasurably grave. It stands as an occasion for profound grief. He was just coming into his own, as a man, as a musician, as a person capable of expressing love, and all that evaporated in a minute. He did not take his own life as much as he had it taken from him, in part by those who mocked him, but in part by all of us, who directly or indirectly have abided such mocking and who have failed to confront forcefully the prejudice and high-handed moralism about this issue that pervades the landscape of our society.
Who in 2010 would willingly and knowingly subject him/herself to surgery in an 1890's operating theater, using 1890's instruments and techniques, employed by an 1890's doctor? Yet many people stubbornly adhere to equally outdated and antiquated perceptions and stereotypes about human sexuality and more still succumb to those arguments, especially when they are presented under the guise of protecting family values or equivalent high sounding rubrics. In such scenarios, reason is subordinated to zeal and fervor irrespective of an absence of rational substance.
It is time to stop the malingering, and that is particularly so for those of us in the Church. The dominant religious voices that speak to this issue in the public sphere are not advocating for change and tolerance. Phrases such as “love the sinner but not the sin,” are poisonously disingenuous. Their singular purpose is to brand g/l/b/t persons as “defective” much as an imperfect product off an assembly line is labeled a “second.” Another favored “traditional” religious stance is the position that homosexuality is acceptable but that homosexual acts are not. This is demeaning. The ultimate aim of this sort of articulation is psychological castration and is therefore simply intolerable.
It is time for those religious bodies that see distortion and betrayal of the Gospel message in this type of formulation to speak with clarity and resolve, understanding that the very landscape of tolerance and understanding which is so central to our faith structure is itself under assault from the strident harangues issuing from religious zealots representing themselves as traditionalists.
The matter at hand is not about balanced discourse, as the liberal perspective so wants it to be, and may therefore be led to tolerate too much and too long the intolerable. The core issue centers on the attempted willful imposition of a formulaic set of values, presuppositions, and behaviors of one body of persons upon another body of persons whose values, presuppositions, and indeed very natures, may find alien and would require self-negation to adopt.
It is time to turn from staged debate to declaration. It is time to call out issues such as g/l/b/t persons serving in the military and the companion “don’t ask don’t tell policy,” or the struggle over same sex marriage, or the suitability of g/l/b/t to be adoptive parents for what they are: contrived rear guard utterances issued by those who seek to turn enlightenment into their own personal chattel, and who seek to envelope reason with hysteria, all in an effort to sustain the notion that the moral world is flat. The strident assaults against the legitimacy of a “homosexual lifestyle” reflect last gasp frantic utterances of captive minds that fear an emerging world.
* * *
“The king was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said ‘O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!’” 2 Samuel 18:33
Would it be that we could yield our hardness of hearts and minds lest any other Tyler Clementi should die at the behest of our vanity. Let us bid the mourning cease.
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