WHY WESTBORO BAPTIST CHURCH’S STRAIGHT OUT HOMOPHOBIA MIGHT ACTUALLY BE LESS DANGEROUS THAN THOSE WHO “TOLERATE” US
By Cody J. Sanders
While most readily dismiss the notorious anti-gay Likewise, physical violence gets the most visibility in the press Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka as a fanatical fringe group, other anti-gay groups are beginning to qualify their speech in very peculiar ways.
Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International, for example, is reported to have said, “All the recent attention to bullying helped us to realize that we need to equip kids to live out biblical tolerance and grace while treating their neighbors as they’d like to be treated, whether they agree with them or not.”
Focus on the Family has even launched a project called True Tolerance to address sexuality (i.e. “homosexual advocacy”) and bullying (i.e. “deceptive” anti-bullying initiatives) in schools.
All of this talk about “tolerance” scares me. More than Westboro’s vitriolic speech that is obviously hateful (e.g. signs that read “God Hates Fags”), these advocates for tolerance toward LGBT persons have me more than a bit concerned.
They concern me because people generally like this talk about tolerance – a lot. Practicing tolerance seems like a virtuous striving in our quest to “get along.” But talk about “tolerance” sounds different based on one’s position in the conversation. The talk takes on particular meaning depending on whether one is doing the tolerating or being tolerated. To queer ears, tolerance doesn’t seem like such a gift.
What exactly does it mean to be tolerated? Those who were once persecuted are later tolerated. Those who were once treated with violence are now allowed to exist in an atmosphere of “beneficent” tolerance. Tolerance says, “You shouldn’t be here, but I’ll allow you to exist.” We commit ourselves to overlooking the offense, the annoyance, the violation to our senses caused by the things and people we merely tolerate. Indeed, toleration is no gift to the tolerated.
Further, tolerance is a poor excuse for a theological notion. We should practice intolerance toward any notion of “tolerance” that creeps into our theological imagination and vocabulary. The only way in which we can practice tolerance is if we have constructed our theological understanding of the world in a hierarchical fashion. And depending on your position in the hierarchy (straight white men presumably near the top) determines whether you get to do the tolerating or are simply the object of someone’s toleration. Tolerance only works one way on the hierarchy.
Above all, the trouble with tolerance is that it presumes acquiescence to, even an acceptance of, an oppressive status quo. There is no prophetic imagination or dream of justice embodied in a resolve to tolerate. If our goal is to practice tolerance, then we have given up on a quest for a more radical acceptance and embrace of difference and Otherness. Tolerance assumes that the hierarchical theological constructions we hold are “natural” and that the binary ways that we construct the group we call “us” and the groups we call “them” have some basis in reality. Tolerance allows our unearned privilege (whether racial privilege, class privilege, heterosexist privilege, etc.) to go unquestioned and unchallenged.
So beneath the theological surface of the iceberg’s tip-Westboro and the like – we do not find less hateful and violent theological and ideological views, just more subtly expressed ones.
Unfortunately, it is the power that does not look like power that is most effective in maintaining circumstances of oppression. While violence to the psyche and the soul is easily overlooked. And speech has everything to do with how this oppressive power and violence is enacted.
As much as our commitment seems to enshrine freedom of speech as a value we hold dear, it often serves to display how inconsequential we actually believe “speech” to be. Far more than syllabic utterances strung together and pushed out into the world by our vocal chords, speech produces real consequences. That is, free speech is not free from consequences that affect our bodily, material reality. Our speech, our words, our language constructs our world, defines reality and gives meaning to our sense of self.
Michel Foucault called this type of power “discourse.” The term “discourse” describes the stories we as a society tell about ourselves and the world, from what perspective we tell them, with what authority, and in support of whose way of being in the world. Discourse describes whose stories get told in public and whose do not. Discourse is the way we define reality. And those stories, perspectives, and ways of being that fall outside of the constructed “norm” are subjugated to the dominant discourse. Narratives that challenge the norm are silenced.
The trouble with tolerance is that it presumes acquiescence to, even an acceptance of, an oppressive status quo
The dominant heterosexist discourse in our society is one seeking to define reality solely from the perspective of heterosexual experience and to subjugate the narratives and lives of LGBT people. We can see the active struggle over definitional power in the questions surrounding who gets to define “marriage” (both in the legal and the sacred lexicons). In the end, this heterosexist discourse seeks to make non-persons of LGBT people. It defines the experience of heterosexuality as the only reality that counts and all other experiences as subjugated narratives that represent deviance, sinfulness, or illness.
Perhaps the most insidious way in which the personhood of LGBT persons is called into question is through theological discourse. When being gay, lesbian, transgender, or bisexual is presented as a violation of the sacred, the transcendent order, the Divine will, etc., theological notions are used to construct a reality, a way of being in the world that supports the heterosexist status quo and benefits a certain privileged few to the detriment of those whose lives look different.
For Westboro, this is expressed in simple language like “God Hates Fags.” But there are various levels of nuance to the message that LGBT people are unacceptable to God, and these often pass under the guise of tolerance.
Cody J. Sanders is a Baptist minister and Ph.D. student in Pastoral Theology and Counseling at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, TX.