Posting again and a Letter to the Editor

What follows is the letter I wrote and will be submitting to the Lanthorn office later today. Let me know what you think.

Letter to the Editor

I normally ignore articles in newspapers that agitate me, but a particular columnist for the Lanthorn has displayed a pattern of offensive statements and attitudes in several articles that I think merit a response.

First though, I want to apologize to any in the GLBT community who’ve been attacked or insulted by Christians. I know it happens. It’s sad, and it’s inconsistent with the message of Jesus.

But it’s sad, too, when the language of hate is reversed. Stereotypes are a dangerous thing no matter who they are directed toward. Caricatures are even worse. A generalization made about a majority rather than a minority is no more just or righteous. It’s no better to suggest—even hyperbolically—that all Christians, conservative or otherwise, “salivate” over archaic religious rituals or “hate on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people” than it is to suggest that all homosexuals dress like the Village People every day of the week. They are both unhealthy, harmful, and thoughtless assumptions that do more to highlight the poles and give voice to the extremists than to do the hard work of reconciliation and healing. They ignore the constructive work that’s being done by both parties—which are not mutually exclusive, as much as some people might want to claim they are—on this campus by way of the LGBT and Spirituality Roundtables sponsored by the LGBT Resource Center, and throughout the country by groups like the Marin Foundation.

And it’s sad when respect and agreement are conflated so that there’s no room for dialogue without the assumption that one side is disrespecting the other. It’s hard to listen to someone who acts as if anyone who disagrees with him, by default, disrespects him. If such a false dichotomy between disagreement and respect were accurate, then no one would get married. At the very least there would be no such thing as a respectful marriage. But there are respectful marriages that mature and flourish, not in spite of disagreement but because of it, because without disagreement there would be no option for change.

I reserve my own opinions about the question of whether homosexuality is sinful or not both because they’re too messy and imprecise to get across in any short piece of writing and because they don’t serve the issue I want to address here. What I want to suggest is that it never helps when the pot calls the kettle black. Any fair and honest critique requires that the critic remove the plank from his own eye so he can see clearly to remove a speck (or another plank) from his brother’s eye. In other words, we’ve got to get our own unhealthy attitudes in check. We’ve got to identify them and deal with them before publicizing a critique about someone else’s unhealthy attitudes. It doesn’t do much good to point out how much other groups demonize me and my friends by immediately demonizing them and their friends. In fact, it doesn’t even help to create a situation where we pit “us” vs. “them” in the first place. It runs contrary to the Christian commission to make disciples of all ethnos (reach out to everyone who’s different than us) and to the concept of a country that proposes to be united.

To the columnist who inspired this response (I’m assuming you know who you are): feel free to contact me. Email me or find me on Facebook—I’d be happy to talk. Go talk to one of the Campus Ministers. I know they’d be glad to talk. Please don’t pigeonhole us. Don’t demonize us for the sake of an editorial. But do get to know us.

So, to the columnist who inspired this response, feel free to contact me. Email me—I’d be happy to talk. Go to one of the GLBT and Spirituality Roundtables. Find some Christians on campus. Don’t argue with them. Just talk with them. My hope and expectation is that they’ll return the favor. But don’t pigeonhole us. Don’t demonize us for the sake of an editorial. Get to know us.

Sincerely,

Kyle Nolan, GVSU Senior