The Other Shall Be the One

Just imagine for a moment – imagine if you got to create a country where you have complete control over everything that happens in this fantasy country – you make the laws, you create the system for keeping those laws, and you decide just who and what is acceptable or taboo. Rights and freedoms, ethics and morality, tolerance and abuse; you decide it all. Can you imagine that?

It’s too bad the real world does not work that way, isn’t it? But what if it does? English philosopher John Stuart Mill said, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” Racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, transphobia, heterosexism, religionism (okay, I made that one up, but in Ireland and the Middle East they know all about people getting killed for following a different religion); these are all wrongs that continue to be perpetrated because the people of privilege allow them to continue. We may never see peace in Palestine, but we could see true equality and acceptance easily if enough people believed in the equal value of everyone and stood up to make that happen. The thing is, though, that African American people might never have overturned slavery if there had been no Caucasian people who also believed it should happen (I say “might” because I am not a social scientist or a researcher, and I cannot verify such a claim). I do not believe women will ever experience true equality unless enough men also champion it, because it is the men who deny the women equality. I have actually been told by women that men cannot be feminists, which I think is an incredibly self-destructive view, because if men do not become feminists then women will not become equal, but that is a topic for another conversation. You and I, we, need to all value equality and the acceptance of everyone, because only then can we make that fantasy come true.

During a recent conversation on acceptance for trans people, a good friend of mine commented that it is ironic that “2 gays and a good Christian boy” were having a discussion that everyone should be having. Perhaps he was surprised that a straight white church boy would even be arguing for acceptance for trans people, who knows? Could you blame him if that was the case? Not at all. Either way, the truth is that heterosexual Caucasians identifying as male are not the only ones with a right to acceptance. And people who say they believe in Jesus have even less excuse for bigotry and exclusion, because he preached and lived love and acceptance for everyone. Not everyone who meets our determination of moral appropriateness – everyone. So if you claim to believe in Jesus but you don’t practice showing love and acceptance for everyone, you need to take a good, hard look at yourself. Read 1 Corinthians 13… I read a story last year about a Baptist pastor down in the southern USA whose son came out as gay. That pastor had his elders hold his son’s arms while he laid a beating on his own child. That really broke my heart, that even a father was only willing to accept his son if his son was "acceptable". You see, we have a tendency to only accept people whose life choices and states of being we find acceptable. If we don’t agree with homosexuality, then we cannot accept homosexuals. Or women. Or lesbians. Or trans people. We seem to be constitutionally incapable of separating our acceptance from our approval, and that is a terrible shortcoming. There is an old saying, I don’t know if the author is even known – “what we do not understand, we fear; what we fear, we judge as evil; what we judge as evil, we attempt to control; and what we cannot control we attack”. There is “us”, and there is “the other”, and the other is controlled and attacked.

Do you know what is hard for me to wrap my head around? The multiple and flexible gender identities that are now so common. I confess, it’s true. I understand to some degree feeling like you were born in the wrong body, and I understand to some degree not identifying with the gender and therefore gender role you are assigned at birth. I struggle with understanding how someone can be non-binary, and I struggle with understanding how an individual can feel the need to be identified as “they” or “them”. The truth is I may never understand it, but guess what? It doesn’t matter. The right of those people to be loved, respected, and accepted is not dependent upon my understanding. It’s dependent on my acknowledgement that they have every bit as much right to those things as I do. That acknowledgement holds true for every other person walking the face of the planet who is not me – I may not agree with them, I may not understand them, but I will do my best to treat them with respect and acceptance, because that is what they deserve. The Golden Rule is still and will always be relevant, because we will never get to true equality together as a species until the other becomes part of the one.