| The following column appeared in The River Reporter on October 29, 1998. |
By Bert S. Feldman
The Recusant Reporter
Thursday, October 29, 1998
"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."
-– Jonathan Swift, 1711.
No other animal except mankind will attack another of its species unless it involves a struggle over a mate, invasion of territory or a fresh kill. And in those cases the loser leaves the scene of the fight to lick his wounds.
Mankind, the supposed ultimate rung on the ladder of creation, does not abide by the rules of the so-called lower level of the other animals. Mankind has developed another emotion foreign to the dwellers in the fields or jungles – hate. Mankind, in its supposedly superior brain, has learned to despise any other member of its species who may differ in the color of his skin, who may worship God in a different fashion, one who might be physically or mentally different. And then he will employ some learned text, usually incorrectly, to support his stand.
Two glaring cases recently have shown that, in Mark Twain’s words, God created the monkey because he was dissatisfied with man.
In Texas, a group of Good Old Boys shot a man, then tied him to the rear bumper of their pickup, and dragged him along the road for over a mile. This because the offender had more melanin in his skin cells than they did. No other excuse was given.
Wyoming topped this display of Good Old Boy superiority. In the city of Laramie, near the state university, two prize specimens, namely Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, both 21-year old high school dropouts, and their girlfriends, Chasity Pasley and Kristin Price, encountered one Matthew Shepard, a student at the university, at a local bar.
Shepard, a runty, five-foot-one dweeb was also a self-proclaimed homosexual, an individual whom many churches have declared to be undesirable in the sight of God. Jesus may have loved lepers, but homosexuals are persona non grata in the places where He is worshipped.
The fun-loving Rover boys took Shepard outside the city to teach him of the sins he had committed by being a homosexual. After they beat him severely by punching and kicking him, they allegedly crushed in his skull with a heavy object, probably the butt of a pistol. Then they fastened him to a fence post, as another had been fastened to a post for His sins two thousand years ago, and left him to die. To their credit, the floozies present will likely only be charged with aiding and abetting.
What is homosexuality anyway? Is it, as certain religious bodies proclaim, the work of the Devil? Blame it on the old Nick is what they believed in the 17th century when several women were hanged or burned alive for being suspected of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts.
Our proclivities towards being male or female oriented are determined by certain hormones which we inherit at birth. No man is one-hundred-percent male, nor any woman one-hundred-percent female. Thus we have tomboys and we have sissies, so-called. However, sometimes the amount of hormones can not be in balance. The male becomes inclined to being more a female, and vice versa.
No one, to my limited knowledge, has ever become either gay or lesbian by choice. Them’s the cards he/she was dealt.
These natural differences are not looked upon kindly by our superior intellectual-oriented society of mankind. People with deformed body parts are made fun of and called "gimpy," cerebral palsy victims are teased and the deaf and blind are mimicked.
At the hearing in Wyoming, it was reported that a group of evangelical Christians marched before the courthouse chanting and carrying signs. These adherents of misunderstood Christianity proclaimed such beliefs as: "God Hates Fags," "No Tears for Queers," and "No Fags in Heaven."
The political far right, which includes the misnamed Christian Coalition, supports these hate-filled yahoos. As reported by Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times Magazine: "[The Starr Report] was the creation of a conservatism become Puritanism, a conservatism which lost sight of the principles of privacy and restraint, modesty and constitutionalism which used to be its trademark."
