Trigger warning: The following post contains frank descriptions of the hate speech against LGBTQ people that my church used to inculcate fear and contempt in its youth. I have decided to write about homophobia for two reasons: first, to demonstrate the falsity of fundamentalist rhetoric about “hating the sin and loving the sinner,” and, second, to shed light on the tools fundamentalists use to instill fear of LGBTQ people in their children.
This is the third and final part of a series called Homophobia: It Really Is About Fear. See the introduction here. Related posts are Fundamentalist Aesthetics and the Religious Fundamentalism and Sexuality Project, which is still accepting participants (until June 23).
In Part One, I described the way fundamentalist Christians construct an image of what LGBTQ people look like and how they taught their children to be afraid of that image. I imagine that an LGBTQ child growing up would find this kind of socialization very confusing, considering sexual orientation is not equal to a glitter-and-chains fetish. If you’re a boy with a crush on another boy, how do you interpret your feelings in the light of all this? As a straight woman, I can only speculate that it must be alienating, threatening, and confusing. In Part Two, I pointed out that subtle rhetorical tactics and body language were more powerful than the “logic” of anti-gay sermons in communicating to children that LGBTQ identities were not legitimate. Now, I’m going to talk about the realization that kept me from becoming another “hate the sin, love the sinner” fundamentalist.
The Phoenix and Olive Branch 