Ten years ago, I moved to Calgary, bought a bus pass and began journalism school in a new and terrifying city. The anniversary of this move has made me somewhat reflective, thinking back on a decade of opportunities and successes, failures and regrets.
Fittingly, this reflection coincides with Pride Week. One bothersome conversation in particular keeps coming back to me.
A couple years into college, a good friend asked me what I thought about his being gay. I answered honestly: I said that I believed some-thing was wrong with him.
I didn't word it that way. I recall performing some strange contortion act, saying that I didn't think it was wrong for him to be gay per se, but that it would be wrong for him to act out on those urges. (This didn't make a lot of sense, as you can tell.) I'd had it drilled into my head from childhood that same-sex at-traction was perverted and fundamentally wrong. My friend had challenged those views somewhat - so long as you were gay and celibate, all was OK, I thought - but still I believed romantic same-sex relationships were morally indefensible.
Looking back, I believe my position was the indefensible one. I recently wrote to my friend and apologized for what I said during that conversation. He was glad to hear it, graciously acknowledging that we were both conflicted at the time.
Looking at the beliefs of the churches in which I grew up, it's not difficult to understand why I felt as I did. Same-sex relationships were said to "contradict God's purpose for human sexuality" and were "contrary to the will of God."
They were "unnatural." This was black and white with no room for discussion.
These are not fringe views, either. They re-main the stance of most mainstream Christian de-nominations. The Catholic Church describes same-sex attraction as "intrinsically disordered," a problematic description if there ever was one. One of Canada's largest evangelical denominations, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, believes that "God is dishonoured" by gay sexual relationships, which are included in a list of offences alongside incest, pedophilia and bestiality.
As the presidential election draws near in the U.S., there is the usual talk of honouring the institution of marriage. Of course, this conversation isn't at all concerned with the substance of marriages, but whether or not certain Americans are qualified to have such intimate and loving relationships. Paul Ryan has described Mitt Romney as a "defender of marriage." This pleases many who subscribe to the religious views de-scribed above.
But many others find this irksome, including church-goers who struggle to reconcile religious condemnation of gays and lesbians with their spirituality. Officially, they may be affiliated with denominations that exclude people based on sexual orientation (or offer some variation on that tired line of "hate the sin, love the sinner"), but they person-ally find such exclusion abhorrent. An extensive 2011 study by the Public Religion Research Institute in the U.S. found that most American Catholics support gay marriage, a finding that isn't surprising to anyone. This is more significant: 44 per cent of white evangelicals aged 18 to 29 favour gay marriage, compared with 19 per cent of evangelicals overall.
Change is coming. But it's slow and incremental and messy. The church I currently attend is officially affiliated with doctrinal statements on homosexuality that are as appalling as the ones mentioned above. It's a situation unbefitting of a congregation that sees itself as inclusive. The leadership of our community is directly addressing this problem, but it will take time.
These days, it's seemingly open season on the United Church of Canada. The church is vilified because of its recent resolution on Israel. But where other de-nominations have clung to exclusion based on sexual orientation, the United Church has been unashamedly affirming. Its members can look at their church's official statements on sexuality with pride, while others of us look at ours and cringe in embarrassment, hoping for better.
Jeremy Klaszus is a Calgary writer. His column appears every second Monday.
? Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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