At last month’s rally against racism and general minority discrimination, I, along with several others, spoke out against the intimidation and persecution of the estimated 2,500 to 5,000 gay and bisexual students on this campus. Gay Awareness Week marked a time of increased awareness of this discrimination.

Gay men and women are not the remote and distant people many believe they are. Like left-handed men and women, they comprise roughly 10 percent of the population. This means that, on average, one in every four families has a child who is left-handed and a child who is gay. No one chooses to be gay or bisexual just as no one chooses to be straight or left-handed.

Because of the social stigma which has persisted in most Western societies during the last 800 years, only about 10 percent of the gay community is “out” to one degree or another. (That’s about 400 students at NIU.) The others, like members of persecuted minorities through the centuries, choose not to make this one aspect of their lives known to either friends, family or public. Christians in first century Rome, left-handed people (“sinister” people) under the Spanish Inquisition and Jewish, gay and Christian men and women under dictatorships like the Soviet Union find life difficult simply because they are different.

Here at NIU, a group of Christian students leaves hate-letters in Lambda’s mailbox telling us they are the ones attempting to halt open dialogue by tearing down LCF fliers. I suspect these people are unaware that all NIU campus ministers (including the IVCF and CCC leaders) agree that such censorship is unChristian; the student counsel say it is a class A misdemeanor. I believe that, like the distribution of racial hate-letters, these letters constitute grounds for suspension.

For the first time in at least 800 years it is possible for scholars to question popular interpretations and translations of Judeo-Christian scriptures without fear of reprisal. So it is only recently that a great mass of evidence has begun to accumulate contradicting the common interpretations of the six biblical passages said to speak of homosexuality. And today, even those churches which continue to hold their traditional interpretations to be true, have made statements denouncing anti-gay discrimination and persecution as immoral.

For example, in 1976 the Roman Catholic Bishops of the U.S. declared, “Homosexuals, like everyone else, should not suffer from prejudice against their basic human rights. They deserve the right to respect, friendship and justice. They should have an active role in the Christian community.” Churches which have made similar statements include the Lutheran Church of America, the Episcopal Church, the United Presbyterian Church, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Society of Friends (Quakers), the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ and many others.

But Christians need not look beyond the words of the founder of Christianity for support of human rights and stern warnings for those who judge or seek to punish others. And non-Christians, I think, should contemplate these words spoken by a Protestant minister of the Nazis he encountered 45 years ago. He said. “When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out. When they came for the homosexuals, I did not speak out. When they came for the Catholics, I did not speak out. And when they came for me, no one was left to speak out.” Though many gay and bisexual man and women adapt well to their situation, many, like myself, turn to suicide as the only answer to the hatred and hypocrisy they see in the eyes and deeds of their brothers and sisters. For “the poor in spirit” I have this to say: Tis nobler in mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune than to die.

Jim McDermott

director

lambda christian fellowship