The Westboro Baptist Church: Forcing parents to explain homophobia 

 

The ink had barely dried on headlines announcing the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs this week than Margie Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church announced that they would be picketing his funeral with their anti-homosexuality signs because he…knew gay people and didn’t spit at them, I think. It’s not clear to me why they’re going to picket Jobs’ memorial except that the Westboro crew is like the Arnold Horshack of pop culture, thrusting their collective hat into the air and screaming “Ooo! Ooo! Ooo!” to gain our attention whenever something happens, regardless of the event’s relevance to their message of bigotry.

I’m well read enough to understand that the Westboro people have every right to show up and wave around signs that say terrible things about gay people as long as they don’t break any trespassing laws in so doing. The Constitution says they can and the Supreme Court recently upheld their right to be flagrant bigots. I get that and I’m mostly ok with that. I just wish they would stop because their flavor of hatred is so hard to explain to children.

I don’t have any mental hang ups about explaining homosexuality to my son when the time comes. That one’s easy: some men love women, some women love men, some men love men, some women love women. End of story. It’s as easy as explaining race: some people have lighter skin, some people have darker skin, some people have medium skin. Or height: some people are tall, some people are short. These are simple facts and don’t require a whole lot of complicated reasoning. Homosexuality just is. Race just is. Height just is.

What’s very, very hard to explain is the different sets of value judgments some people place on these facts. Racism doesn’t make nearly as much sense as the basics of race. I’m not sure I even have the vocabulary to explain why a person might dislike another person because of the appearance of their skin. I have the same problem with homophobia. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around why one person would judge another person because of who they’re attracted to.

OK, that’s not entirely true. If someone was too attracted to my husband to keep their hands off him, I would judge PLENTY.

I know there are people out there who think homosexuality is a sin or they think it’s a choice. I’m not gonna go there on the sin question because I’m not qualified to address that, seeing as I’m not a deity. But the choice thing? I don’t buy it. If it was a choice, then I would have had to choose heterosexuality at some point in my development and I never made that choice. It was innate, which is why, at the age of 15, the first time I saw Christian Slater in a movie, my reaction was “WANT!”. Whereas my reaction to Winona Ryder in the same movie was “She gets to make out with Christian Slater. JEALOUS!”. I’m pretty sure some of the gay guys I knew had the exact same reaction to that movie and their reaction was just as innate as mine. None of up sat down and reasoned out where we fell on the Winona Ryder/Christian Slater Attraction Matrix.

But for all the evidence that mounts up that sexual preference is as hardwired as eye color, there are still those who judge and condemn gay people in the ugliest of ways. It breaks my heart that someday, probably soon, I’ll have to explain to my son why people use mean words to talk about the parents of his friends just because those parents are gay. That judgment and condemnation isn’t a part of his world yet and I’d like to shield him from it for as long as I can. But those Westboro people don’t agree and they keep parading hate around in the streets.

The thing is, neither homosexuality nor homophobia is going anywhere.  That’s a pity because it means we parents have to figure out how to explain different kinds of hate as well as different kinds of love.

o