How Christian is gay bashing?

By Chris Mooney

I was visitor 440,359 to the website www.godhatesfags.com, a web inferno packed with GIFs of devils marching gays into flames, terrifying Bible quotations, and sound-bites like "All who say it's okay to be gay have the blood of Matthew [Shepard] and millions more on their hands."

I stumbled on Internet Hell trying to investigate the Westboro Baptist Church, a Topeka-based ministry that protests around 40 funerals for homosexuals a week. I guess the attractive URL gets them more hits. Indeed, the church has recently attracted national media attention for its decision to picket the funeral of Matthew Shepard, the 21-year-old openly gay University of Wyoming student who was killed Mon., Oct. 12, by being pistol-whipped and tied to a fence in near-freezing temperatures outside Laramie.

Sadly, despite its antediluvian intolerance, the Westboro Baptist Church cannot easily be dismissed as "fringe." Since the rise of the Religious Right, gay bashing in the name of God has become legitimate--even mainstream. Christian Coalition President Pat Robertson recently raved that gay rights demonstrators risked God's wrath in the form of "terrorist bombs, earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor." Whatever world he lives in, Robertson has millions of zealous followers in our own.

Indeed, anti-gay sentiment pervades the GOP and hence both houses of Congress. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) has called homosexuality a "sin" and likened it to alcoholism and kleptomania. Meanwhile, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) has publicly dubbed his openly-gay fellow Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) "Barney Fag." Hating gays, it seems, has become at least as American as the Republican party.

When pressed, our current plague of religious homophobes draws a seemingly humane distinction between loving the sinner and hating the sin. Such a tack has recently been employed by Exodus International, a ministry claiming that gayness can be escaped by "ongoing submission to the Lordship of Christ." Exodus and like-minded organizations made national headlines this summer with an ad campaign in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today, trumpeting to homosexuals that "Truth can set you free." How gracious.

In the wake of this barrage of religiously grounded hatred toward homosexuals, gay rights activists and First Amendment defenders may feel strongly tempted to denounce Christianity in general for fostering intolerance. After all, the Bible reads, "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them" (Leviticus 20:13).

Pegging all Christians as anti-gay would be premature--but not by much. Given the extent of religiously based gay bashing, it has become urgent that liberal, tolerant Christians not only publicly defuse all such potentially dangerous Biblical passages, but also collectively and uncompromisingly denounce the Religious Right.

We have arrived at the point where truly tolerant Christians must either turn against fundamentalists or watch Americans slough off Christianity entirely. Only the religious can counter religious conservatives; atheists and homosexuals have already been demonized into oblivion by the Right.

We need a powerful, politically active, nationwide organization of Christians against the Christian Right--perhaps "Christians for Separation of Church and State." The waffling in liberal Christian congregations must cease; Pat Robertson and cohorts have simply become too dangerous. They are the veritable exponents of an American theocracy in which gays--and indeed all non-Christians--will be relegated to second-class citizens, quashed, abused, or far worse.

It is now solely in the hands of American Christians to show how "Christian" they truly are.

Chris Mooney, the co-president of the Society of Humanists, Atheists, and Agnostics, is a senior in Silliman.

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