COMMUNITY COMMENTARY:Thoughts on faith, choice, hypocrisy

We are constantly amazed by the brazen hypocrisy of those self-styled “Christians” who choose to ignore the teachings of their own Christ, instead justifying their personal prejudices with selective excerpts from every book of the Bible except the four Gospels.

Jesus of Nazareth taught his followers to love one another, to feed the hungry, clothe the poor and nurse the sick. He taught them to pray privately, not to make a self-aggrandizing show of their faith. He condemned no one but the rich, the hypocritical and religious profiteers. He cautioned against judging others (“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone … “) and firmly endorsed the separation of church and state (“Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s”).

The fundamentalist fanatics of the Christian right wing preach not love, but hate. They ignore the underprivileged, preferring instead to focus their ministries on blanket condemnations of any and all who do not fit into their myopic worldview. They make a public spectacle of their “faith,” some even enriching themselves via the ignorance of their misguided followers. Many actively connive at destroying our democratic government to establish a “Christian” theocracy.

These homophobic American fundamentalists are no different from their Muslim counterparts in Al Qaeda, and are merely the latest perpetrators of an ancient and unholy tradition. Throughout history, religion has been used as justification for the most heinous of crimes; segregation, slavery, genocide, ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust, the Inquisition, the Crusades — all were carried out, in whole or in part, in the name of someone’s god.

With his absurd generalization that “homosexual identity is about sex,” the Rev. Bryan Griem (“No on same-sex marriages,” In Theory, Saturday) attempts to collectively reduce all gay men and women to one-dimensional villains. In reality, every gay person, like every straight person, owns an individual identity comprised of our innate personalities, our upbringing and experiences, our families and friends, our education and professions, our travels, interests and hobbies. Sexuality is only a fraction of the equation. To focus exclusively on one’s sexuality is to ignore the person as a whole.

To the hypocritical Griem, heterosexuality is superior because it is not expressed “in the back pages of magazines in West Hollywood” — magazines with which he is apparently quite familiar — yet he conveniently ignores the fact that heterosexuality is blatantly expressed in the back, front and middle pages of magazines such as “Playboy,” “Penthouse” and “Hustler.” And if “homosexual art is always sexual,” perhaps Griem can point out to us the gay sex in DaVinci’s “Last Supper” or Michelangelo’s “Pieta” (that these two most revered of artists were homosexuals is widely accepted by historians).

In his rush to glorify heterosexual relationships “expressed and nurtured in married families, producing children” — using bogus statistics from the biased and discredited Family Research Council — Griem chooses to ignore some of the less savory realities of contemporary heterosexuality: promiscuity, infidelity, unplanned pregnancies, a rising out-of-wedlock birthrate and a divorce rate of more than 50%. He also chooses to ignore the undeniable fact that every gay man and woman is the product of a heterosexual relationship.

Griem falsely claims that gay relationships are based solely on sex, and that they do not last because “emotional longings … can only be met in the opposite sex.” That’s certainly news to us, partnered for eight years, as well as to our dear lesbian friends who recently celebrated their 17th anniversary, and to a cousin and his partner who have been in a committed relationship for 30 years.

It seems that Griem knows nothing about gay people, but sees gay sex everywhere he looks. And as we have just seen in the case of the Rev. Ted Haggard, someone so obsessed with other people’s sex lives — and gay people’s sex lives in particular — clearly may be struggling with some issues of his own.

Griem’s ignorance would be almost laughable were it not so dangerous. For it is just this kind of bigotry couched as religious dogma that leads to harassment of, and violence toward, gay men, women and youths. Let us never forget those who, like Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, have died because of the hate spewed by people like Griem.

Glendale News-Press Managing Editor Danette Goulet was grossly irresponsible in giving Griem a public forum for his hate speech. The News-Press apparently considers gay bashing to be acceptable; we sincerely doubt that such vitriolic lies would have been published about any other minority group. News-Press readers, especially Glendale’s gay community, are owed a retraction and an apology. A Faith page that promotes hatred and intolerance toward, and the denial of civil rights to, any individual or group has no place in a legitimate news publication.

Although we obviously disagree with the other clerics quoted on the page — Pastor John Barta, Barbara Cramer and Rabbi Simcha Backman — they manage to state their positions without resorting to lies, defamation and hate. But Griem and his hatemongering must never again appear in the pages of the News-Press.

Some final thoughts for Griem to consider: Sexual orientation is not a choice, but ignorance and bigotry are. Homosexuality is not by nature immoral, but hate most definitely is.