Brody's Scribbles... Human Slavery & LGBTQ people

By Desmond Rutherford (Adelaide, Australia) FEB 4 | Author's note: When I refer to religious extremists, I am not referring to those sane and compassionate Christians like Kathy Baldock. As an agnostic I would be only too happy if all Christians had her sense of acceptance.

From Brody Levesque’s editorial: McCarthyism In Its Latest Manifestation: A Christian Minority Persecution Of Gay People;

"But, until the LGBTQ community gets its act together, gets its message across to those who really need to hear it and not the Christianazis like Spriggs, or those GOP extremists, or NOM, then we all will continue to lose and this nasty McCarthyism will continue to reign unchecked."

Okay and when this happens we will see that people who have the natural capacity to love others of the same sex, and celebrate that love intimately, are significantly, considerably greater than what I believe is nothing more than a convenient figure of 3% of the population which does not include the much larger percentage of the human population who would and often do relate to both sexes until they finally decide with whom they wish to spend the remainder of their lives.

To call for the LGBTQ community to “get its act together,” requires the social observation that organised religion is aimed at supplanting the individual's freedom to develop their full human potential for the sake of group comfort in cultural conformity. As such, the negative sermons and prayers from the pulpits pervert the message of compassion, which is common to all religions, with the aim of coercing individuals into denying reality through concocted fears of damnation, and condemnation leading to the forerunners of McCarthyism, Trial by Ordeal, the Inquisition and the resulting enslavement of body and mind.

For McCarthyism to prevail, to fester and corrupt the minds of the people, to subvert the individual, then it must engender fear, not love, hate, not compassion and it must enslave the mind, not free it.

Liberty is not won by waiting for deliverance, or by desire alone, but by the enslaved being willing to revolt for their freedom.

The trouble is too many people do not understand that they are oppressed.

Like their own personal McCarthyism, they have repressed their natural rights for the sake of imaginative deductions that cannot be substantiated.

Still the religious extremists claim they are the ones who are the oppressed and they have the audacity to claim that the human rights of others oppress their beliefs. They claim that their religious tenets set the conditions for moral goodness, that they have the moral high ground.

Yet 70 years before Christ, a Thracian man escaped his Roman masters to form a revolt against Roman slavery and did so without recourse to religious morals, with nothing more than the natural innate sense of being self aware, that slavery was wrong. The slaves wanted their freedom, but as the Roman Empire was dependent on slaves, the Roman Legions were used to overcome the revolt.

What stands out here is that the slaves wanted freedom, they knew they were slaves. Today many people, more than you might imagine, deny their slavery to religious, political and cultural dogma, they believe they have freely accepted their political allegiances, or the dogma of the Church of Rome, or any of the other derivatives of the Abrahamic religions. What is worse is that their own sense of human right and wrong, revolt against religious tyranny, against being told what to think has been repressed and distorted, often by themselves under influence of their culture, especially during childhood.

There is in our civilisation a taboo on knowing who you are, on knowing the difference between enslavement and human freedom, and on realising the right to human dignity. This was something that the Roman slaves never lost in their determination to be free even if they had to kill and plunder to survive. Theirs was a fight for a life of freedom. It was also a matter of honour, of righteous indignation against the inhuman horrors of slavery no matter how well some masters treated them.

Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter, was blacklisted in 1947 by McCarthy, so it isn’t surprising that when he wrote a screenplay about the Ancient Roman slave revolt, Trumbo had the Roman general Crassus demand that the defeated slaves reveal their leader so he could punish him for leading the revolt against Rome. In a wonderful irony of self denial, 6,000 slaves cried out one after the other until they all chorused together, “I am Spartacus.” This was the dignity of their revolt against enslavement, that even in the threat of death they were defiant to the injustice of their oppression. This they did without any decree from a god.

Yet it is the religious extremists who claim their belief is ironically being oppressed and suddenly irony becomes hypocrisy. They dare to insist that we, same sex lovers, should adhere to their choice of beliefs and deny the expression of our own natural human love for each other. How dare they! That is the essence of slavery; bondage to another’s control.

Let’s be quite clear, no one is telling the religious that they can’t believe in their doctrine, but what they believe cannot be imposed on us without taking away our right, our inalienable birthright to live free. We are born free and must not be slaves to the beliefs of others without our awareness and consent. We have the right to be whom we are, to proclaim it without interference, without threat, without intimidation and condemnation.

When some religious rightwing, extremist demands I submit to the beliefs of their imagination, I will speak with the same sense of indignation that burns in the mind of every slave, from whatever courage I can muster, in the face of adversity, injustice or loss of all I hold dear, then I will tell them,

I am life aware of itself, I love, and I am gay.

This is of course an act of defiance, and one that we must take to the streets, not without regard for our safety, and not with the violence of revolt, but with the dignity of demanding our rights as human beings to be free to love without being told it is somebody’s idea of being an abominable sin.

It is not in our nature to hate, we want only to love in the here and now, free from the harassment of religious dogma which is used to threaten us, enslave us. In fact what most human beings want is to be free to love in peace without being oppressed by someone else’s belief.

We are human, just like Spartacus, just like you, and if we choose anything, we will choose to be who we are, freely exploring the only sane and satisfactory answer for existence, Love.