Today, we are at sea (or were by the time I post this :-)). These days are a good deal of fun too, even without a port. There are many seminars and such.I’ve been to a couple seminars on parenting, and realized we’ve maybe have got to let our boys go a bit, not hover about them so much, and give them more responsibility now. As our Aunt Beanie says, maybe we do “mother them too much.” In our situation, it’s tough to not be over protective and it’s something I’m going to work on and am putting out there so it’s been said on record :-).
Then there was the teen panel, which I commented on last year. I think I’ll save that for a post of its own.
Here Ill talk about a seminar on “Love Won Out;” it left an impression. The new tactics of our opponents are smart and a bit frightening, for their reformulated and yet all too historically familiar packaging. It’s all about love now, wrapping hostile anti-golden-rule action in the feelings of love. Pull your gay kids close, but never accept their orientation or relationships. Sneak into pride events as a “gay-welcoming” church and then show those you trick into attending love as you try to cure them of their curse akin to alcoholism. Get involved in AIDS charities, so you can get sick and desperate people to fight with their orientation. Even try to get to the children of gays and lesbians and get them to turn on their families through kid-friendly internet tools.
Hurt people, basically, but do it in such a way that you look PC and feel good about yourself for it.
It’s a common enough theme in humanity that it was on my derailed list of aphorisms :-):
Hate may harden a heart; to completely solidify a heart a person must pretend love.
It’s true, even in the most sever examples. The Spanish Inquisition wasn’t conducted solely by hateful people; there was a set of intellectual word play and twisted logic to get others on board. They caught the gay man to stop imagined supernatural calamities, for the good of all. They tortured him to get a confession and therefore a chance at heaven, avoiding eternal torture. They “relaxed” him into the custody of the executioner, and they burned him to protect the public and set the now-repentant gay man into eternal paradise. Great motives, right?
Hate does a lot of harm, but it’s love and good intentions used to move the mass of people to do what the worst of us never could.
To know such large groups are formally implementing these tactics is disturbing. This is not just the love which the G*d Hates Fags folks feel in their horrible actions, and if you do listen to their interviews, I think you will also agree they do, as they claim, feel a mind-settling, self affirming love for gay people, and think they’re doing right. But this packaged much more insidiously, as it doesn’t have the shocking book-cover image of picketers in front of a soldier’s funeral. People don’t shy away from Love Won Out; they pack mega-churches for it.
One thing about Love Won Out really stuck with me. The people giving the seminar had personally been to the event. At lunch they ate with a woman who told them she had a gay son. They asked if he was gay or ex-gay or struggling and the woman told them to wait until her husband spoke later in the day; she said she wanted it to be a surprise.
For us, they later played the audio of that portion of the husband’s speech. In short, their son came out to them, they rejected him, and then, after attending Love Won Out they tried to get close to him again, now with the motive of changing him. They tried, though lovingly, to get him to change his “identity” and leave his partner, and the son could apparently see right through it. Eventually the son told them he didn’t want parents in his life who’d not accept him and his partner for who they are. So the parents are the victims now, right? Still, who wants parents constantly trying to undermine your home and not-so-subtly thinking one of the best things about yourself, your path to love, is sin and rightly punished by death in the times of Moses? Right? Even lovingly?
The recording ends with the father describing how their son was killed in a car accident soon after. He said, and I wrote it down for the shocking force with which it hit me, “Our prayers were answered. Our son was healed.” Then there was clapping. Clapping!
Love.
Love won out; even the name implies love’s use as a tool in some sort of competition.
Is that the sort of familial love the “pro-family” side of this debate is becoming about, then? Love that turns parents into that? Love that makes you feel good, that you’re doing God’s work to hurt your children in such ways? That makes you pray for them to be changed or take up life-long celibacy? Change even if it means their death, and feeling grateful if it does? Love that keeps you constantly trying to split up your family’s or friend’s home, even if it’s the home of the happiest family on the continent?
In some instances, the feeling of love really can be one of the crueler, more insidious weapons. In some instances, I’d prefer an enemy fueled by honest and open hate, free from feel-good self-deception. At least that opponent is willing to feel and show the emotional consequences of the harm they choose to inflict on others.
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