Howdy rus! I always appreciate your replies because they are well thought out and articulate. I'm also glad you got the MASH reference, perhaps if we had more quality shows like that we could counteract the dumbing down of America via pop culture, but that's for another day.
I think you may misunderstand. No, I don't support the LGBT whatever acronym they're going by these days. Like our fellow poster SamanthaAnastasia
, I too believe that we shouldn't go out and start beating or killing people simply because they are under the delusion they are gay. Like I said in my earlier post, they are still people created in the image of God; living, breathing human beings. The first time I used the word homophobic was actually in the early 2000s when I was in Catholic school because there was a group of kids in my 6th grade class who's desire in life was to go out and kill the gays. That's an extreme form of homophobia. I had two issues with their plan 1) that went against the very basic Christian teaching of "thou shalt not kill" and also went against what we were taught about everyone being made in the image of God and 2) This was the year of 9/11 and killing people out of hate and extremism didn't make us any better than those 19 Arabs who had brought down the Twin Towers mere months before. I encountered more extreme homophobes like them after we had moved to a more rural part of the state where, again, there were idiot kids who called themselves Christians, but wanted to kill gays and sexually assault lesbians thinking that that would "make them straight again". No. As flawed as the gay community may be, human sexuality simply doesn't work that way. Such actions actually have the opposite effect. My father was a federal investigator for thirty years and retired in the early 2010s. Based on the training that they had, it was estimated that roughly 30% of all Black American males were themselves victims of male-on-male sexual assault which more than likely part of why there is a disproportionately high gay population within that community. That number has likely gone up since the early 2000s. The point there, is that there have been societal causes that have led to the increase of their numbers and it isn't things like no-fault divorce, serial marriage, and cohabitation. It is much simpler than that: sin.
Those may be extreme cases, yes, but it is the reality. Thank God it is a very small minority of the overall 320million+ people living in the USA, but it is still there. And they call themselves Christians. And that gives us a bad name and bad reputation to the point that some of the gay community feel it gives them license to harass us and vandalize our churches. Perhaps that is a form of persecution that we may have to endure, who knows, but considering we have done nothing to correct the extremists in our own communities we really shouldn't be surprised that that's the effect. Hatred in any way, shape, or form is not Christian. It isn't Orthodox. It isn't who we are and it isn't who we are called to be. We are not called to be murderers. Gay Pride parades? I wish they would end. Pride month? I wish it wasn't a thing especially since Black History Month gets sidelined and that community suffered a lot more for a lot longer. Gay marriage? I voted against it. Gay clergy? Sadly, there are some out there and frankly they should be defrocked. Celebrating accomplishments by those who are/were gay just for the sake of their gayness? I'm against it. Calling those people slurs? Also against it. Hate someone because they struggle with it? Against it. Should we call them to the Church which is the hospital of the soul so they could repent? I'm all for it. But, I have to draw the line at violence. That isn't who we are and it isn't what Christ died on the cross for us to do.
Does that community overuse the word homophobe to describe us? Certainly. Do they overuse it to describe anyone that doesn't support their so-called lifestyle 100%? Certainly. They are misguided and don't always know what they are doing. But I don't think that their overuse of it is reason enough for us to never say it. Homophobia is a type of hatred, and hatred is un-Christian, and I will call it out when I see it just like other forms of hatred like racism, sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, even Islamophobia, etc. But again, I refuse to not use that word simply because they overuse it because not using it allows them to win. It gives in to them and says they can dictate what we say. If we give them that, what's next, they rewrite the Diving Liturgy? God gave us free will and I refuse to allow them to tell me what I can and can not say or should or should not say. My Irish ancestry is too stubborn for that
Hello again!
I have theoretically been on vacation starting at the beginning of the month; a long-needed vacation. But the demands of reality have prevented it from really being a vacation; even up to today, when I had to worry about getting airline tickets to bring my wife and daughter back to me, robbing Peter to pay Paul and still having to wait for someone with money on their account to actually buy the tickets and handing them the cash. There has been some form of stress and demands every day. I say all that to explain why it takes me so long to respond to any post that I feel is going to require any serious mental energy. The deeper I feel I will have to go, the more I procrastinate, and this school year truly wiped me out.
It’s a little harder talking to you because you are using the language of the world, of extremely recent invention, and founded thoroughly in falsehood. The devil uses fallen language and teaches people to use it to lie, and those who receive and repeat it to naively believe that it doesn’t matter, and they mouth empty catchphrases like “language evolves” to avoid thinking about the matter. All language is fallen, of course, but when I say the language of the world, I mean the kind of terms the devil WANTS us to use. So I honestly think you fall into serious error by repeating these words invented the day before yesterday, and I would hope by now that I don’t have to play the language expert card, but it is true that I know more than the rest of you about language in the same way that a mechanic knows more about how cars work than the ordinary drivers. That’s not meant to sound prideful. I would instantly grant Fr Matt superior knowledge of theology, for instance. He’s spent a lot more time in it than I have, and done so professionally.
I asked you about the term “homophobe” for a reason. Now I grant you are telling the truth, but that essentially makes you the inventer of the term. It didn’t exist in public parlance until about ten years ago, so if you were using it before then, you either coined it, or picked it up from intellectual snobs and the very people who wanted to expand deceit. And that’s NOT meant to be a personal slight against you, but it is a fact that we do tend to repeat terms without thinking much about them. To this day, the OED lists it only in an older sense of “fear of humans” (@ 1908), it’s not even listed in the sense you use it in. You will only find it in the freshest dictionaries published in the last few years. The word, like “gay”, was always intended to be abused, and what little legitimacy it might have claimed from the tiny, tiny, percentage of the population that actually seeks to go out and hurt and kill these people, has already been thoroughly eclipsed by that intended deceit. There’s a reason why Jusse Smollett had to engage in fraud, and his deceit shamefully denigrated real suffering by blacks under Jim Crow. It is hard to find people that really want to maim or kill sodomites. Oh, you can, of course - one out of a million will actually be that psychopathic. But it is so far from being the rule in our society that it would be laughable if it wasn’t so destructive to truth. And that goes for all of the new “phobias” and “mis-s”. Only one man out of a million truly truly hates all women, only one man out of a million truly wants to murder people with that perverted sexual passion, and people who think Islam a major threat to Western civilization do not suffer from a “phobia”. The phobia logically means that the person falls into a quivering mass and falls on the floor or runs away at the site of the person they are supposed to irrationally fear. But I’ve never seen that once in my life. Again, any legitimate use that would attempt to describe this tiny minority of madmen is completely eclipsed by the deliberate use to attack and destroy truth. That’s why I can’t take your thoughts seriously when you use those words after I’ve explained all that to you. It means a commitment to that false language over and above truth. I’ll make a concession and grant it’s used for that tiny insane minority, but that is highly irrelevant, and essentially doesn’t exist in the Orthodox Church and if you really show it to me and I agree that’s what it is, then we will all unite to drive it out. We don’t hate women, we don’t hate Muslims, we are not unreasonable to think Islam as a religion to be a real threat, and we don’t call for attacks on people who suffer from passions, even those with attempt to affirm them as good things, so I think it is specious to claim otherwise. It’s not relevant to the discussion on how we should see, speak, and understand these things in the Church. But the wrong words do falsify understandings. No one is “gay” because we really don’t think people are their passions, but that the passions are things that we can struggle against and reject. That’s why it is wrong to use that language, which openly implies and assumes that that is their ontological identity. We have to look how the fathers and saints spoke about these things, and even in translation, we don’t find this Newspeak anywhere. The sin of Sodom was long held to be better left unnamed and unspoken, and only in our age was a legitimate term invented: “same-sex attraction” (about 25-30 years ago, I believe; much of the false language appeared over my lifetime).
So you have everything backwards in thinking that not saying it “lets them win”. My dear E.C., they are thrilled when you say it, every time you say it, even when you refer to the tiny number of psychopaths. After all, the psychopaths also serve the devil, and help create the image of these people, who are NOT a special and separate class of people, but sinners just like us, only suffering from different passions, as a persecuted class. They win both ways when you use the language, which they invented and wanted spread to cover both cases.The Divine Liturgy comes from the Church. This language comes from the devil.
I suppose I have an advantage in that I remember a time when nobody talked like that. I KNOW that the language was changed, deliberately, and through centrally controlled media and education. Changes began even before my lifetime, terms like “dating”, “boyfriend”, “have sex”, and “sleep with sb” having already been invented in this long and well-planned out attack on the sanctity of the family. To the extent to which we can learn that language really was created to change how we think about things, and to subvert our thinking from traditional Christian thought, we ought to stop saying the words that we learn really do communicate falsehood. We may not be able to do it perfectly but by golly, we ought to do our best. (Irony is not lost in the use of that last interjection)
