Can God Make People Who Don't Fit Into Our Boxes? The Transgender Question

[cbayer]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/morgan-guyton/can-god-make-people-who-d_b_3996605.html

Morgan GuytonAssociate Pastor, Burke United Methodist Church

Posted: 09/27/2013 7:44 pm



Azusa Pacific University, a Christian college, recently decided to fire a theology professor named Heath Adam Ackley (formerly Heather Clements) for coming out as transgender. It got me thinking about a basic conflation that I think conservative evangelicals like Russell Moore are making in how they react to transgender people. In my early 20s I went through a David Bowie phase in which I dabbled with androgyny and sexual experimentation as part of a romantic-libertine quest to "find myself." I called myself "bi-curious" not because I was ever actually attracted to men but because I wanted to be exotic and different like the queer friends I had adopted as an interesting hobby. What I did was actually sinful and narcissistic (I'll explain why later), but it was completely different from the experience of people who were assigned one gender at birth but identify with another.

In Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt describes the role that Jews had in bourgeois, liberal continental European culture in the late 19th century, which played a part in sowing the seeds of anti-Semitism that would ripen half a century later. It was trendy to have a Jew at your cocktail party. It made you exotic and rebellious, especially if the Jew was an atheist, and even more so if he or she was queer. Of course, this exotic tokenism didn't translate into any genuine solidarity when the nationalist reactionaries used it to make "Jews" the symbols of, and the scapegoats for, bourgeois decadence when the libertine party culture came crashing down a few decades later with World War I.

I think queerness in white, American, bourgeois liberalism at the turn of the 21st century functions analogously to Jewishness in "bohemian," upper-class Europe of the late 19th century. Liberals fetishize queerness. Having a queer friend is the easiest way to be considered "open-minded" (whereas having a black friend, for example, is way more complicated), and it justifies indulging your libertine appetites. This is not the fault of people who are born into bodies that are wired differently from the default, "straightforward" gender identity and sexual orientation with which most people live. But there is a legitimately harmful libertine romanticism that needs to be disentangled from the real biological diversity of human beings whose existence should be validated but not fetishized.

As I mentioned above, what I did as a young 20-something was sinful. Why? Because I was playing around flippantly with something holy, trivializing God's beautiful gift of sexuality by making it into a navel-gazing, narcissistic venture. I wanted to fit in with the bohemians I lived with at the Collingwood Arts Center in Toledo, Ohio, so I partied, got high, and played around in my Rocky Horror Picture Show fantasy land. I worshiped created things instead of my creator. The infamous biblical clobber passage of Romans 1:18-32 could be legitimately applied to my behavior, because I experienced the degeneration and inner chaos of God's wrath as a result of it. The confusion and drama of that kind of lifestyle, compounded with my already naturally problematic brain chemistry, threw me deeply into depression.


more at link

[pinto]

1. "Liberals fetishize queerness." ? I don't get it.

[cbayer]

2. I think it's a reference to the "Some of my best friends are gay" kind of statement.

I think he is saying that liberals sometimes use their "open mindedness" towards GLBT people as a badge of their progressiveness.

[pinto]

4. Yeah. The phrase just struck me as odd.

Waded through his piece. Overall it seems his point is "live and let live" set in theological terms. Yet he gets there in a convoluted manner, imo. (I found it a bit hard to read, fwiw.)

[cbayer]

7. Agree that there was a certain degree of discomfort in reading this piece, though

I thought his conclusions were good. I think he was being intentionally inflammatory, particularly by using the word "queer" repeatedly.

[Bluenorthwest]

5. Because otherwise no straight liberal would have a gay friend?

Very creepy man you shared with us today. I wonder if religious folks on DU are able to discuss their 'faith' for a week without making posts about gay and trans people? Is the entire 'faith' about us?

[cbayer]

6. Sorry if this offends you, but since it is some religious groups that are the biggest threat

to GLBT civil rights, it seems entirely appropriate to post stories about that here.

This person is making a strong case for the eventual total acceptance of differences in sexuality becoming the norm.

And there are lots of stories about other things.

Would you prefer that this group just ignore the religious issues that impact on GLBT civil rights?

[Bluenorthwest]

3. Fetishized?

What a creep the 'minister' who wrote this is.

[Warren Stupidity]

8. This is a disgusting bigoted tract.

Please go ahead and defend this crap.

[cbayer]

9. What did you make of his conclusion?

[skepticscott]

10. Yes, we know you think it was a "good read"

And that you agree with his "conclusions". But that's rather scary.

If you're going to apply no other filter than that to whatever hack pops up on a Google search, expect to be criticized.

[Warren Stupidity]

11. Meanwhile every atheist utterance is cross examined

for all possible bad meanings and all atheists are condemned based on worst possible interpretations.

[cbayer]

12. Except that doesn't happen. So what did you think of the conclusion?

[dimbear]

13. Just for the information of the Associate Pastor: I have gay friends and Black friends and

it's as easy and uncomplicated as falling off a log.