Christianity and Hate

Another week, another counter-protest in Hamilton, complete with Yellow Vest fascist fuckery on a variety of levels, including a yellow-vester attacking three anti-fascist protesters, police inaction, my being called “faggot” and “cocksucker” by one of the so-called “christian” contingent and — interestingly — Yellow Vest leader Justin Long making a speech denouncing racism and homophobia and singling out noted homophobic demonstrator Lily, in the same vein as his rambling wall of text announcement on Facebook last Friday.

Basically, being called a racist and homophobic fascist hurts his feelings and contributes to a media climate where the Yellow Vesters are viewed as fascists, so Long claims they won’t be racist anymore and everyone needs to stop being mean because that makes you the real fascists. And he can’t be a racist because he has a Jamaican girlfriend. And also American History X fits in there somewhere as well.

Insert derisive noise here.

I’m not going to bother to analyze Justin Long’s statements, because I genuinely doubt he’s sincere. And even if he is sincere, words are cheap; I’ll cling to my skepticism until I see some real action on the part of the Yellow Vests to reform their membership. And I won’t be holding my breath, even because the most cursory glance at the public pages of Yellow Vests Canada shows that nothing has changed: Their public pages are still full of racist, Islamophobic and homophobic comments, along with the usual torrent of abuse directed at the Prime Minister. God knows what the private pages are saying.

But it’s the self-identified Christians holding up the homophobic signs that I want to talk about.

You remember Lily, who’ve I’ve mentioned before on this blog? Lily is something of a feature at the Yellow Vests protests, and she is violently homophobic. My own interaction with her at the previous week’s counter-protest was so over the top that I found it actually rather disturbing instead of threatening. Well, this past week she was joined at the Yellow Vests protest by several people wearing Christian-themed t-shirts.

I watched from a distance — the police actually deigned to put up barriers to try and keep the two sides separate — and I watched as they gathered with Lily and her other homophobic sign-holding friend, and had a little conversation. I hoped, as I witnessed it, that they were sincere Christians who had come to discuss Lily’s homophobia with her, bring her to the understanding that Christ would not approve of such virulent hatred, and convince her to join with them in a better understanding of community, acceptance, and Christ’s message of love.

Nope. Lily rooted out some spare signs from a bag and they stood next to her, enabling and supporting her homophobic hate.

Bullshit like this is why I’m not a Christian.

I was raised Catholic, for the record. I went to Catholic schools and was active in our parish and even, in a teen-aged fit of internalized homophobia, considered the seminary. The Catholic church’s policies on LGBTQ people, especially Benedict XVI’s infamous statement that gays were “ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil” put paid to my already-strained trust in Roman Catholicism as a spiritual path. I walked away from the Church and from Christianity and I expect my departure to be permanent.

In fact, I’ve actually been accused, in the past, of being anti-Christian. I’m not, and I retain enough of my early beliefs to hold the core message of Christianity with some regard, in the same way that I have respect for the basic tenets of, say, Buddhism or Islam… or, for that matter, secular humanism: It’s interesting at times, I hope it helps some people, and it distresses me when people abuse those tenets to justify hatred but overall it’s got very little to do with me.

So no, I’m not anti-Christian. I’m anti-homophobe, though. I’m anti-hypocrite. I’m anti-misogynist. But in this wretched year-of-our-lord 2019, you have to admit that the overlap with the word “Christian” on that particular Venn diagram is fairly substantial.

Now, I know I’ve got a number of people who will read this and claim “not all Christians are like that.” And that’s true. I’ve known several Christians who live up to the hype.

Like, maybe a dozen.

What I see a hell of a lot more of, to be brutally frank, is homophobia and hatred perpetrated against me and people like be in the name of Christianity. The attack on Hamilton Pride earlier this summer is a prime example: most of the people who came to disrupt Pride, including some of the most violent, identify as Christian. Some of those people have also been identified as being part of a group which burst into a “Drag Queen Story Hour” in Ottawa over the weekend; including prominent Yellow Vest organizers Rick Boswick and Derek Storie.

The threats and harassment at the Westcliffe Community Centre, by the way, happened at exactly the same moment as Long was standing up in front of Hamilton City hall claiming that the Yellow Vests denounce hatred, racism and homophobia.

So much for the repentance of Justin Long.

The problem is not so much that these people exist or are calling themselves Christians; there’s always going to be hate-filled shitheads justifying their hatred by dressing it up on an altar and calling it God. The problem I have is that moderate Christians are letting them do it.

Are there Christians standing up against the hate? Yes, there definitely are. I literally stood with some of them this weekend at Hamilton City Hall, and I’m grateful that they were there. But they also seem to be outliers on the spectrum of Christians that I’ve met — on the opposite end of the spectrum from the homophobes, no doubt, but still outliers. The vast majority of Christians, in my experience, either tacitly support the homophobic extremists or they simply don’t care enough about LGBTQ+ people to have an opinion one way or another.

And the extremists deliberately use that apathy to give the impression that they speak for all Christians.

I remember a conversation I had a couple of years ago with a now-former friend who, although being a very nice person and a devout Christian, responded to my despair over Christian evangelicals’ influence in promoting homophobia abroad with the statement that “it just isn’t really on the radar” for them to confront that sort of thing.

Not on the radar. Wow. It must be nice to have that sort of privilege, because speaking as an LGBTQ+ person it’s very much on our radar. In fact, it’s literally impossible to ignore it, because it’s something most of us have to deal with every single day. We live in real fear because of these self-described Christians.

The repeated disruption of LGBTQ+ events in Ontario this summer by religious fanatics — including the violent assaults which occurred at Hamilton Pride — are not something the LGBTQ+ community in Canada can simply disregard. And the fact that these attacks by hate preachers and neo-fascist thugs are being justified under the umbrella of Christianity should be something that the Christian community in Ontario as a whole needs to address.

Yes, this is a call-out. Yes, I’m sure I’m offending some moderate Christians by saying you’re not doing enough. But Christians are not doing enough to address the crimes that are being committed in their name.

And yes, there have been times when Christian denominations have stood up, I acknowledge it. The ongoing repercussions from the United Methodist Church’s split over LGBTQ+ inclusion have been fascinating and heartening, as a specific example. It’s a start… but we desperately need to see more of it, and we need to see more of it at street level, not just in the news.

What the LGBTQ+ community needs from the moderate Christian community is an end to the silence. At Hamilton City Hall every Saturday individual Christians are standing up against hate, and that’s to their credit. What we need, however, is to see organized groups from churches out there, clearly identified as such. Let’s see whole congregations support Pride. Let’s see a chain of clearly-self identified Christians stand between the hate preachers and Pride-goers… and between hate-preachers and anti-fascists, at that. Let’s hear Christian ministers denouncing homophobia and fascist hate from their pulpits, as loudly and as often as necessary. Let’s see hate group members ostracized and told to change their ways or leave their congregations. There are positive examples of outspoken Christians out there… we need more people to follow in their path.

I’m not, myself, a Christian. I was, and the institutionalized homophobia of the Catholic church drove me away from that faith. But despite not being Christian, I do still retain enough respect for the basic tenets of Christianity to know that the haters and the homophobes don’t truly represent the Christian community.

I just wish the Christian community would step up to the plate and make that clear, as often and as loudly as necessary.

Qui tacet consentire videtur: He who is silent is seen to agree.

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Update 14:00 – Okay, I feel like this is a weird thing to have to clarify, but homophobia is bad. Judging from some of the commentary that this post is getting in various forums – including an absolutely disgusting comment that I will not be approving – it’s come to my attention that I may have made some kind of unreasonable assumption when I thought everyone understood that.

Homophobia is wrong. Racism is wrong. Being against fascism is right. There is no moral equivalence between being a homophobe and condemning fascism. None. You don’t have a choice to be LGBTQ+ or a person of colour. You do have a choice whether or not to be a fascist. Being a fascist is a bad choice, as is being a homophobe or a racist. Choose better.

Also, and this bears repeating: Christ never mentions homosexuality in the Bible. Not once. Not a single time. He had a lot to say about welcoming the stranger, accepting those who are different, and his problems with hypocrisy in general. Apparently some folks need to look into that.