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Remembrance and Reflection [1]

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Date: 2023-01-13

Oh, really?

As important a milestone as the Supreme Court decision in favor of marriage equality for all is, we should not lose sight of the often rugged and painful road that brought us to this impressive achievement. Because, sure enough, conservative religious leaders, politicians, and talk show hosts are still waxing wroth over the Supreme Court decision on marriage equality. They are still agitating to overturn the decision and unleashing the same old torrents of self righteous vituperation and arrogant moral posturing. Their angry pronouncements, now as always, serve to incite anti-gay sentiment and action and, as such, are a blast from the past, a past that should not be forgotten because the decision for marriage equality represents a mile post in a struggle that was long fought and dearly bought.

It was a past that had, for LGBT people its own Gulag, one that was secret, invisible, and deadly. Deadly in that it was often physically violent, but perhaps worse than that, it was always spiritually violent. The oppression was often self-imposed and self-enforced. I grew up during the 1950s when you were never "out" unless you had a death wish. I recall those high school days of obscene and vulgar anti-gay labels, comments, and jokes. I laughed with my classmates for fear that silence would mean detection. But silence meant worse than that because inside my heart was crying and my spirit was dying. The cost of this self denial is the loss of personal authenticity. No one can be truly effective in the world if not presenting one's true self. That's why coming out, brashly symbolized by the Stonewall Riot in 1969, was the essential first step to the gay liberation movement.

Perhaps the worst physical anti-gay violence in U.S. history was perpetrated in a deadly attack on June 24, 1973 in New Orleans. In an act of mass murder an arsonist set fire to a gay bar, the UpStairs Lounge, and burned 32 people to death. The massacre at the UpStairs Lounge was hardly a blip on the media radar screen at the time. The crime was never solved (largely because of police indifference), churches refused to do funerals for the dead, and four bodies went unclaimed by their families and were dumped in a mass grave. The sins of the arsonist, the indifferent police, and the hostile church stand in marked contrast to the putative evil of homosexuality. A concise summary of conservative spiritual values is this: "My moral superiority gives me every right to condemn your sins which are obviously heinous." Wrong! Indifference to the suffering of others and imprisonment of the human spirit are the truly heinous sins. And those are the sins for which a just God, if one existed, would hold everyone to account.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/13/1399278/-Remembrance-and-Reflection

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