Not Less of a Person

Here's what I've been trying to get at in my other posts on homosexuality, distilled: Someone doing something you feel is wrong or immoral does not make them less of a person.

It occurred to me today that that's what I've been really trying to say. Last night, on Project Runway, one of the designers came out as HIV+, a secret he's been hiding for 10 years because he was afraid of what the reaction would be. His mother knows he's gay, and told him to hide it from his father. She had not, at that point, known about the HIV status. (I'm gonna assume she and the rest of his family know now, because they've been watching the show.)

He's had to deal with the HIV+ status without any support from his family, because his family would not be able to deal with the fact that he's gay, because it's against their morals. Think about that for a bit.

What if you woke up one morning and realized that, yes, you have a problem with alcohol... but you can't tell anyone, because that would mean admitting you were drinking in the first place, and the people you love most in the world, who should love you unconditionally, think that drinking is wrong (and there are a lot of Christians who do), and have shown evidence that they may not love you unconditionally after all. You worry that if you admitted you were a drinker, they would cease to love and support you. That they would see you as inherently flawed, and that it would change how they see you as a person. You would no longer be "my child", but "my alcoholic child". You would be the label, not the person anymore.

Love should not work that way.

But for people who are gay, it all too often does. I will say it again: most Christians do not turn people out of their churches and their hearts for adultery or drinking or lying. They show willingness to accept those flaws, to accept that people are flawed, but that they're still people. "He's a great guy, this is just something we all have to deal with," they say, when their pastor admits to adultery. But that doesn't happen very often for gays. They're seen as something so inherently flawed that they don't deserve that consideration anymore. "Gays aren't welcome in our church. Murderers and thiefs and adulterers and drunkards, sure, but not gays."

And that's the tragedy. The tragedy is a man who for ten years, has known he has a medical condition that could easily shorten his lifespan, that we still don't know how to effectively treat and that in any event can get very expensive to treat, and who has been living in terror that he will no longer be able to count on the support of the people he loves if he admits this. That he will no longer be the person, just the label.

The tragedy is that people think that that's acceptable.

It's not.

ETA: This seems like a good post to link to the It Gets Better Project.