How Fortunate the Immoral Gay

One of the more troubling aspects of these issues, from my side of the wall, must be in how the emotional distress of being gay does its targeting.

In a society and in families where being gay and following your orientation is called sin, there are a couple scenarios for the gay kid. He may have a strong sense of ethics and believe the majority in his culture regarding his orientation. He may have strong principles but believe differently from his culture. Or, finally, he may simply not care, or is morally flexible enough to have his quiche and eat it too (maybe with a side of guilt).

What eats at me is the fact that it’s the conscientious gay kid who is put through the most emotional trauma here; he’s most likely to be brought to desperation, and worse, for his orientation. Simply, being gay is not likely to feel like a reason for suicide to the kid who has no ethical concerns about his self. I think I can reasonable believe such people will suffer for their lack of care eventually, in different ways, often in the physical consequences of disease and addiction, but they don’t feel the deep tear between their ethics, or the supernatural, and their innate path to a very basic human joy. They "just do it."

Now, I don’t suppose I want some extra punishment to dull my sense that some gays are getting off easy :-). Nonetheless, in emotional trauma, the gay kid who doesn’t care ranks in the middle, between two principled groups who differ only by the morals they believe, and it grates on my sense of justice.

Thieves steal, murderers kill, and rapists rape, all because they don’t experience the value in the rights of other humans over their own urges. Rarely do you hear of such folks beating themselves up over such a personality trait, and when you do it’s often for being caught and the weak or even false quality of the regret is hard to ignore. But, for some, a person’s attraction to men has been posed to be on the same level as a compulsion for theft or worse, much worse. It can’t help but torment the most conscientious of individuals in those camps, those who do feel a strong aversion to hurting others, and sort the rest into whatever life they want. What's worse is when the principled kid goes through all the emotional trauma only to end up collapsing under the pressure in such a way that his ethics are ditched as a package deal for his orientation. That kid will get the worst of both worlds.

It's sad but expected. If we did the same for southpaws, I’m sure the same would happen. We’d have a bunch of conscientious people either holding different ethics or trying to write like the majority, and the rest without care.

Of course I think I can see what it looks like from the other side too. These otherwise good kids, from that vantage, really do seem to have a strong urge towards evil that they must resist, as though they had the compulsion to, say, rape. The resistance is for their own good, and even at high personal and emotional cost to themselves and sometimes even others in their lives. They seem to have a handicap of desire, and are given beliefs and strong motivating supernatural reasons to fight it, the sort that can go deeper into the heart of human desire and are said to be infinite. The angst makes sense. But, from my point of view, all I can see is the notable harm in treating something as wrong, when it is not. I see one more harmful moral idea that will eventually drop to the wayside of history with the others, making the current situation feel especially poignant.

Time will tell, though, and judge us all, and there really is nothing to be done about it here or now. It really does all come down to morals, where they reside, and the coastline of that country is something we’ve been discovering and mapping out at a rate measured in generations, through all human history. At least we could probably all agree the situation is too often a sad one, for one reason or the other.