G. K. Wuori

Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That

Some stories look like they’re going to be hard to write, and then they’re not.

I’m not much interested in Africa.

I’m probably less interested in Uganda.

I’m not all that interested in gay issues.

I find it hard to write about evangelicals because they make me feel like I’m brain dead.

Not long ago, however, these things all came together in one package and awakened my Inner Babbler.

So what is it that we know, then?

I don’t know that I would like to meet Scott Lively, Caleb Brundidge or Don Schmierer. Evangelicals aren’t exactly my cup of tea. Truthfully, I don’t engage the occasional Witness or Mormon missionary who shows up at my front door. I know people who will do that engaging, who will display their own crooked self-righteousness in attempting to teach the evangelical the error of his or her ways.

Mostly, for me, I think I’m just suspicious of anyone walking the streets wearing only slacks, a long-sleeve white shirt, and a tie on a hot summer day. Or, as is more likely the case, I’m just busy and embrace that intrusion about the way I embrace a telemarketer’s call.

Or it could be that I was just a little put off when I read that Caleb Brundidge was involved in a ministry that claimed to be able to bring the dead back to life. That he’s from Florida I wouldn’t much hold against him, though I’ve always had my doubts about people who choose to live in hot places. That he proudly proselytizes about being cured of his addiction to homosexuality is something else altogether. I’ve never felt addicted to heterosexuality any more than I’ve felt addicted to eating so I’m not sure how the flip side of that might work.

Can we be cured of our heterosexuality? Has that happened to the Pope?

Or it could be that when I read about Scott Lively I found out that he not only strongly believed that Nazi homosexuals were behind the holocaust, he actually wrote a book to that effect called The Pink Swastika. It’s a nose-holding book with astounding passages like the following: “the Nazi Party was entirely controlled by militaristic male homosexuals throughout its short history.” And “History discloses that the most warlike nations are those whose male leaders were the most addicted to sexual relations with young boys.” Take that, General Petraeus.

Even Donald Schmierer, a businessman who seems the more innocent of the three, has had his work featured by the World Congress of Families, a group devoted to the “natural family” (read: mom, dad, kids, marriage) that believes that changes in that structure lead to all sorts of deviance such as “divorce, devaluation of parenting, declining family time, morally relativistic public education, confusions over sexual identity, promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases, abortion, poverty, human trafficking, violence against women, child abuse, isolation of the elderly, excessive taxation and below-replacement fertility.”

In other words, the family is a club with its bylaws writ in granite. Take that, you Mormons.

Schmierer was also credited with the following profundity: “Some of the nicest people I have ever met are gay people.”

That various ideologues on the right have had an anti-gay bias for a long time should come as no surprise to anyone. It is, after all, just a point of view regardless of whether it comes from a reading of Biblical texts or some profoundly wrought moral sensitivity.

I’ve had a few gay acquaintances in my lifetime, though not many. While I’ve sometimes thought that sexuality played a bit too much of a role in their lives, they’ve never seemed much different to me than anyone else – all of us mostly strangers traveling a common road.

Certainly, I’ve never wished them dead.

That view is apparently not shared by the three folks mentioned above. What ties them all together is a visit the three made last March to Uganda. For three days they spoke to huge audiences of Ugandans on the perils of homosexuality. The recruitment of children, threats to the family, health risks, and the general gay agenda of universal promiscuity were among the highlights of their talks.

Shortly after they left, the Ugandan legislature began considering a bill that would make homosexuality punishable by death. As I write, there have been strong efforts to remove that codicil from the bill but it’s still in there along with the possibility of life imprisonment for homosexuals and/or those found to be afflicted with HIV/AIDS.

So I begin to wonder if I should write to Uganda, though I’m not sure how one would do that. I suppose I could write to Lively, Brundidge, or Schmierer but you just know that inside those hard shells of evangelism is a nut that’s not going to grow into a rose.

Besides, the furious back-pedaling those three are engaged in now would make them almost impossible to locate. Maybe Schmierer will have to change his little homily above to, “Some of the nicest people I have ever met are on death row.”

Or maybe the world was a little better place years ago when all we exported were Ford’s and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Schwinn bikes.

G. K. Wuori © 2010
Photoillustration by the author