God hates fags, really? I have been told this is true. But what does God have against cigarettes? I mean, OK, maybe the carcinogenic properties probably aren’t that healthy, but who doesn’t have their addictions? Is this enough to merit people standing in the streets, making placards (using a full spectrum of variegated coloring, much like the “rainbow”) and promoting violent behavior against smoking fags? I mean that is simply ludicrous.
Why are so many people justifying their words and actions through a spiritual text and treating the one’s who they are meant to love as enemies? Doesn’t Jesus say somewhere about loving both one’s enemy and neighbor (as to imply, that your enemy IS your neighbour). What of the fag itself? Is this not a symbol of a penis? A sexual object. A phallic entity. A phallic object in psychoanalysis stands in for the lack of something. So why so much focus on this illusory object?
Maybe because what the attackers lack is the ability to embrace difference. In quite a violent reversal, they cannot embrace difference so they embrace the “same” — keep in mind that homosexual, means “of the <u>same</u> sex” — but the same is that of their own species. I intentionally employ the word species because of two reasons: 1) Christians (and others) who attack homosexuals based on some moral high-ground are nothing more than species racists (ultimately claiming they are better than others), and 2) they are ideologically perpetrating a form of “genocide” out of their desire to prohibit a more developed humanity.
I use the word genocide not in the Holocaust sense, but rather in the etymological sense. Genus pertains to a species, a certain type or classification. Which is itself a metaphysical category. What this also then means is that when people attack others (based on some ethical over-proximity to an issue) they put themselves (quite literally) “above” the other they are devaluing and create a subspecies “spiritualized” form of species annihilation. (Lacan refers to this as a “consumption of the other.”)
What they are aligning themselves to then is a modern ideology that doesn’t think for itself, but rather something that chooses to negate itself by negating the “other.” And so, in reality, when the attackers (whether people, conservative bodies, churches, police, the military [as an organizational standpoint; i.e, the “don’t ask, don’t tell” idea was simply another way to justify brutality] and so on) they are promoting not the end of homosexuality, but the end of humanity.
Their inability to love their neighbor is also the inability to love themselves. The violence of such an attack is ultimately the violence (and end) to self. Homosexuality, if anything frees us to open our historical boundaries and learn to let that which history was (initially) unable to let in and embrace a new kind of hospitality. It begins in the ability to recognize the other, and embrace them as the other, for their otherness. If we do not, the true homogeneity — as in embracing one own’s kind — is the very thing that will end up killing off any hope for a diversified existence.
So, to those who are picketing over fags (UK colloquialism: cigarettes), I say go find some issue you need help on and work on that, because last I remember hearing anything about God, love and fags was when God died for the whole world.
<em>I know I have been a bit ‘tongue and cheek’ here with the word ‘fag,’ which I hate the word used in a sexually pejorative context, but what we need with this issue is a bit of irreverence lest we deify the issue; plus sarcasm was employed by the ancient world as a literary/spoken tool to show the ‘stupidity’ of certain ideologies. I do that here.</em>