Adam & Eve

Seminary class can be an interesting period for a gay kid in a stiflingly homophobic community! I have sat in on meetings between our Seminary teachers and our school's GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance, a tolerance club) leaders where an understanding has been reached, but unfortunately some venom still makes it through.

During Tolerance Week, an event sponsored by our school's GSA chapter, posters showcasing victims of hate crimes (including many homosexuals) were posted around the school. As a sort of retaliation (apparently the individual in question supports hate crimes), one student started sporting an "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" t-shirt with a blatantly homophobic image on it; he would also privately peddle these in our Seminary class. Neither the Administration at school nor the teachers at the Seminary intervened. (In all fairness, our area is so overwhelmingly conservative that angry parents demanded that the posters be taken down, and amazingly, the principals more or less complied!) It was an especially sensitive issue because Tolerance Week happened to be near the 2008 elections, and the members of the Church in our area had been pumping massive amounts of money into the Yes-on-Prop 8 campaign.

I felt I had to take a stand, but it was, as you might guess, an awkward situation to be in. The t-shirt fellow could claim to our Seminary teacher that he was innocently defending God's definition of marriage and family (the tired slogan is derived from the Bible, and the homophobic image, a gay couple crossed out in red, would not have been as demeaning to others as it was to me), which I didn't necessarily want to be perceived as attacking in Seminary. Certainly I would never want to strip anyone of their freedom of speech, but I did feel an obligation to refute the hatred, and a sickening sense of hypocrisy if I stayed silent.

We made an unspoken compromise: I gave a devotional one day on Christlike love, which incorporated Mother Teresa's quote, "I'll never go to an anti-war rally, but if you have a peace rally, invite me." My advice was to love everyone and build up your own causes rather than tearing down those of others, and the t-shirts weren't seen again.

Had I a little more time and nerve, my devotional would have gone differently. I might have asked, If you want to look to Biblical examples of marriages, let's look to the Abraham model, which makes a provision for slaves. Or do you prefer Jacob (who fathered children with two sisters and their servants) as your marital exemplar? I would never mean to slander these prophets, and that is most emphatically not my intention here; the point is, there are some things in the Bible that we can't apply to ourselves in the strictly literal sense.

Perhaps he would have then retorted, "But you are opening up the definition of marriage, and where will that end? With people marrying animals, or even inanimate objects?" Ah, but has our own Church, I would respond, always conformed to the traditional marriage definition? It may not have been "Adam and Steve" in the Garden, but it wasn't "Adam and Eve and Jane and Sarah", either. I doubt your t-shirt's message would have been well-received by the early prophets of this dispensation.

"But we had our reasons!" he would protest. Precisely, I'd reply. We had our reasons, and no one understood. No one tried to understand--it was simply too abstract, too alien.
...Sound familiar? There are reasons for homosexual relationships and marriages, too, but at the end of the day it's "just too different" for many people to even want to attempt to understand.

As it is, we can't pry people's minds open, or squeeze hearts or necks into softness. We have to persuade using reason and feeling. I tried to do this, and by the time I completed this year's Seminary course a few weeks ago, I was respected for standing up for my beliefs in the face of the majority. I may have been swatted at as the class gadfly, but I had stung everyone into a consciousness of their words and opinions.

However, I confess that I am far from the defender I could be. The next step would be to emerge from the closet--an irrevocable but incredibly powerful course of action. Admittedly, there are only two reasons I am in the closet: hope and cowardice. Hope, because there is a chance that my attractions could be reversed, as has been the reported experience of some people. Stranger things have happened--Lazurus rising from the dead, et al. I'm not saying that SSA is an affliction necessarily, as the Church describes it, but why lock a door simply because it hasn't yet been opened? At least at my tender age, there is something to be said for keeping one's options open.

The other, more motivating reason is cowardice. Little more need be said! I'm afraid to break my grandmother's heart, afraid to lose my beloved but prejudiced grandfather, who was born in the segregated South and has in effect cut ties with both of his sons for reasons much less severe than homosexuality! How could I hope to change an attitude that rigid? There must be a balance between idealism and pragmatism.

Still there is a fine line between prudence and hypocrisy, and my conscience won't let me forget it.