How My Church Tried to Make Me Hate Gay People

http://www.alternet.org/belief/how-my-church-tried-make-me-hate-gay-people

They used a variety of tactics to make me fear and hate gays. "Hate the sin, love the sinner" is a lie.



In my church, homophobia was a matter of course. We didn’t spend a lot of time hashing out the Scriptural arguments against homosexuality. Occasionally Paul and Leviticus were cited, but more often, sermons would rattle out evidence of modern depravity along these lines: “…and Satan has so perverted this generation that it thinks there’s nothing wrong with divorce, abortion, contraception, homosexuality, and girls throwing their babies in trash cans and doing drugs.” Defiance of gender roles was just one of the most obvious signs of demonic control.

Whether or not my church explicitly intended for me to receive this message, I understood homosexuality as one of an array of perversions. Homosexuality, promiscuity, pedophilia drug addiction, alcoholism, cheating, self-harm, unwed pregnancy and abortion were not treated as separate issues. I was afraid of gay people because I was taught that it was impossible to be gay or lesbian without partaking in all of the above. It was a slippery slope argument of the worst kind. One image that absolutely never came to mind when my church talked about homosexuality was a committed, loving gay or lesbian couple. We were taught that sexuality was like a fire: if it was not contained, it would consume a person, annihilate their love for other people and cause them to abuse each other sexually. In other words, a gay man was a straight man who had failed to keep his carnal desires in check (or a straight man who had fallen prey to a demon).

My church badly wanted to pin an image on homosexuality, to label it abnormal and self-destructive. My church, after all, was fixated on the end times and craved evidence of increased moral depravity. The trouble is, sexual orientation is invisible. You can’t know that the feminine guy at your office is gay unless he tells you. You can’t spot lesbians in the grocery store, no matter what you think of the butch outfit the manager is wearing. You can’t even look at a crew-cut military officer, the paragon of masculinity for my church, and know that he’s straight. In order to be homophobic, a person has to have an image in mind of what homosexuality is. For my church, that image was pretty much Adam Lambert:

The great big argument against homosexuality? Blue hair, leather and chains. It scared us, just like the lost souls of the Hell’s Angels scared us. Goths and motorcyclists didn’t look holy. Therefore, they were probably gay.