Does it really matter whether being gay is God’s way to test our faith, or Nature’s way to wipe out the bad, not-offspring-producing genes, or outcasts, or a result of a more or less conscious choice? In my opinion the answer to that question is up to everyone to decide for themselves. I am quite happy with a simple ‘no’ for we can’t be sure it is the right answer. More importantly, we don’t know whether there even is a right answer, a right path.
I want to believe that whatever we decide, it is our decision. And if there is a god or many gods that created us… they created us. All our genes and thoughts and insecurity came from them. I don’t want to think that we, all humans as well as animals and inanimate things, that we are just an experiment, thrown in the universe with nothing else but the certainty of death, to see if we would end up by accident do what they want us to do.
The number of different religions alone states that there is not one right way for all of us. The only thing we should live by is goodness, the rest is just a collection of details, things that do not overcome the goodness. The goodness, that we should at least try to get along with everyone else, no matter how different. We don’t have to like or love them, just to co-exist peacefully, without violence. To try to make Dr. King’s dream come true, not for him but for us and for our children.
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’-- I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. -- So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. -- Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”
We have to understand that the undefined abstract concepts, such as what is “normal” and “natural”, are all subjective concepts, that they are defined throughout the majority. But one should acknowledge that what is natural also includes all the beings in addition to humans on this earth. There are several animal species, including humans, to express homosexual behaviour: many, in not all, species in the subfamily Hominae; lamantines; penguins; some birds; some octopuses; some insects, such as banana flies; some toads; and dolphins, of course. A certain American lizard species consists only of females, which reproduce themselves by cloning. It is my opinion, as well as that of all the evolution biologists I have ever encountered, that homosexuality is anything but unnatural.
As for us human beings, homosexuality has become despised for all the monotheist religions that wanted to make a clear distinction to all the pagan religions that valued other forms of sexuality that just heterosexual interaction. In the ancient Greece being gay had prestige status. We know that Plato and his student Socrates had a sexual relationship, that Aristotle had relationships sexual in nature with other men, that the Roman emperor Nero was even married to a man. Julius Caesar had a nickname due to his bisexuality; he was said to be “the husband of every wife and the wife of every husband”. In the present-day world there are non-Christian communities that consider homosexuality as a necessary part of development, such as a tribe in New Guinea.
”Every day some people do get beaten up because they are different from the main population. Some do because they are black, some because they aren’t black, some because they are gay, some because they want their country to change. Is this the kind of world we want to live in? It seems as a world of clear injustice and racism. Maybe we should really do something to it. We cannot change the world overnight, but if we start the change today then tomorrow will be already a step taken on a road to a better world.”
”My genes may not be passed on to my children, and my soul might end up in Hell for all I know. But currently, while I am alive I might stand a chance to make something that has some value. It would make my life, whether it is just a genetic failure or God-given choice, worthwhile to live.”
