Jesus told us we should love our Lord, our God, (our Creator) with all our heart, mind, soul and strength; and that we should love our neighbors as ourselves. His disciples, rather puzzled by this teaching, immediately asked him to give them better definition as to who was their neighbor. Was it someone of a different tribe? Could it even be someone who was not a Jew? The Good Samaritan story immediate followed, in an effort to get them to understand that their neighbor was their far neighbor as well as their near neighbor. To add to this discomfort they had at this teaching, Jesus then told them on several separate occasions, using different approaches, that they should also love their enemies. His disciples must have gagged and taken a step back at this admonishment. The evidence is that, not only did they not accept this teaching, but that the human species since that time has avoided that advice in any way we can. We have shown that we can be especially good at hating our enemies, rather than loving them. We have been especially good at castigating all those who differ from the majority in any way.
The following story appeared in our local newspaper this week: 8 GANG SUSPECTS ARRAIGNED IN NYC ANTI-GAY ATTACK NEW YORK (AP) –Eight gang suspects arrested in the torture of two teenage boys and a man in an anti-gay attack were arraigned Sunday, standing in a courtroom with their heads down and their hands cuffed behind them as their relatives wept. They were expected to face charges including robbery, assault and unlawful imprisonment as hate crimes, but no charges were read aloud at the hearing. They didn’t enter pleas. Police were looking for a ninth subject, who had been expected to turn himself in but didn’t show up. The nine members of the Latin King Goonies gang earlier this month heard a rumor one of their teenage recruits was gay and then found the teen, stripped him, beat him and sodomized him with a plunger handle until he confessed to having had sex with a man, police say. The gang members then found a second teen they suspected was gay and tortured him and the man, police say. The gang members found the man by inviting him to a house, telling him they were having a party, police say. When he arrived, they burned, beat and tortured him for hours and sodomized him with a miniature baseball bat, police say.
Human rights have a long and suffering past history. The women’s suffrage movement first began in France in the eighteenth century, but did not get very far. F inland, in 1906, was the first nation to give women equality with men. The United States did not reach that level of freedom until 1920, with the passage of the Nineteenth amendment to the Constitution. Woman’s suffrage was not claimed as an inalienable right by the United Nations until 1976. Yet this right has not yet been granted in Arab countries and in the Vatican, where women are still subjugated as inferior. Child labor was an endemic part of society until the Nineteenth century. Previous attempts to limit the exploitation of children had all failed. One such act, limiting child labor, was struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States. It took the great depression of the 1920’s, when adults were willing to work for as much as children, that this odious human abuse was abolished. Blacks continued to live a life of subjugation in the United States until the efforts of Martin Luther King, resulting in the passage of the Civil Rights Act, signed by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. While this act declared that blacks should be free from discrimination, they still did not have the right to vote. That right was not declared a law of the land until the following year. The caste system in India was in full force, until India gained its independence in 1947, after 200 years of British rule, and more than 40 years of protest, spearheaded by the Mahatma Gandhi. The practice of untouchability was not formally outlawed in India until the adoption of the Constitution of India in 1950.
There is another worthy cause, which has been waiting in the wings for all these other human abuses to be corrected, before they state their case, and request equal rights under the law. Homosexuality has been a normal part of the human expression since the invention of this species. Since the beginning of recorded human history, about ten percent of the population has been homosexual. This population is simply one of many other populations who are not the majority. The human population is a bell shaped curve in most any category you wish to examine it. The majority of the population may be heterosexual, with an appetite for frequent sex, but there are all kinds of outliers to that expression. There are some who are hypersexual, who want to have sex multiple times every day. There are those who have little to no interest in sex, and would just as soon not indulge in that behavior. There are those who are bisexual, happy to have sex with both men and women. There are those who prefer to have sex only with themselves, and find sexual entanglements with any other human unappealing. And there are those who prefer sexual encounters only with another person of the same sex. Each of these sexual expressions carries its own categories of risks, advantages and disadvantages. That does not make any one of those expressions wrong, as long as we remain aware of those risks no matter which sexual expression we use. Sex is good, as long as it provides satisfaction and happiness without undue harm, as long as it is consensual, as long as the risks of that sexual activity are well understood, and as long as it is not exploitive.
How long will it take the human population to wake up to the fact that this also is a flagrant abuse of the human expression? How long will it take for the homosexual population to have equal civil rights to all those other members of the human species? If we leave it up to the religiously conservative members of our societies, they will deny this right as long as they live. This simply shows the abject ignorance of those religiously prejudiced, who declare that the Homo sapiens species has only one means of sexual expression. This is not just a matter of Gay rights. It is a matter of Human rights. We are all brothers and sisters in the sight of our Creator. We are all neighbors, whether near, far, or enemies. We must learn to treat each other as equals, with equal freedom of opportunity, for this nation to overcome its hypocrisy, and become “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.” We are not yet what we claim to be.