What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • What institutional homophobia looks like

    Here’s a quick example to illustrate what institutional homophobia looks like.

    Yesterday the report of the Theological Forum of the Church of Scotland to the General Assembly was published and it deals with a number of issues of interest to LGBT people. (It is well worth a read).

    Amongst the “deliverances” ie proposals to go to the General Assembly from that Forum is this very clear call for an apology to LGBT people.

    The General Assembly:

    Invite the Church to take stock of its history of discrimination at different levels and in different ways against gay people and to apologise individually and corporately and seek to do better.

    What could be clearer? Should the General Assembly apologise for discrimination against gay people it would be a huge and significant moment and very much to be welcomed.

    However, listen to what the Principal Clerk to the General Assembly, the Very Rev John Chalmers of the Church of Scotland said on TV last night about the proposal:

    “What the General Assembly is being asked to do this year  is acknowledge and apologise for some of the harsh things that have been said on both sides of this debate over the last 20 to 30 years and I think the General Assembly will readily want to do that.”

    This is very clearly not what the General Assembly is being asked to do.

    This is a good example of institutional homophobia. In describing a call to apologise to gay people, gay people and their supporters are represented as being people making statements for 20 or 30 years which need to be apologised for.

    I don’t believe that John Chalmers is a homophobe. Just the opposite. I’m quite sure that he is charming to gay people and I suspect he wants the church to accept gay people. However, put in a public position to explain a proposal to apologise for discrimination he gets it very wrong.

    I have no doubt that there are huge institutional pressures on him over this issue and that is why he speaks as he does.

    However, this looks to me like a very clear example of what institutional homophobia looks like. Institutional homophobia seems to come most often from people who are personally supportive of those of us who are gay.

    Ironically, this is the kind of thing that needs to be apologised for.

    We have it in our church too.

    I find that people don’t like me pointing it out.

15 responses to “The Trump of Judgement for Liberals”

  1. Guy Avatar
    Guy

    I heard someone talking on the radio who had looked at actual voting data (wherever such people get that from). Predictors of whether someone was a Trump voter, though by no means decisive ones, were whether someone earned more than $50000, had never gone to college or had done so but dropped out, was male, and over 44 years old. But there were people in those categories who had voted for Clinton as well. Even the much spoken of Hispanic vote was not as big a predictor of voting preference as thought and there were too many women who hated Hilary Clinton for misogyny to be the overarching factor.

    The stand out predictor which went across all categories was colour, whites going for Trump, up to %58.

    This vote was an anti-Obama backlash from people who couldn’t quite forgive the fact that an African-American had been running the show for eight years, whether the racism was of the vitriolic nasty sort or the more urbane sort that says that some of the other lot are probably ok, but only as long as we don’t have to actually mix with them and they’re somewhere else, it amounts to the same thing. The analyst speaking referred to a sort of nostalgia for when whites seemed to be in overall charge of everything.

    As to our response: as far as I can see the reason American politics is so vitriolic is because Liberals and Conservatives hate each other and also want to remake the other side in their own image.

    Love the other: well very gospel, but pretty darned hard when you struggle to even like xenophobic misogynistic lgbt-haters, let alone love them!

    Love might be the attitude that those of us who call ourselves Christians have to struggle towards, but I’m less sanguine than Kelvin is on this one and the verse that keeps going through my mind is the bit in Ecclesiastes about there being a time for this a time for that.

    Sometimes conflict is inevitable and has to be fought to a finish. You can’t react to the kind of person who shouted out at Trump’s victory speech “jail Obama” on the basis of well, six of one and half a dozen of the other. And such people aren’t exactly amenable to sweet reason.

    On the other hand sometimes people have just to be left alone. Forceably trying to remake the other in your own image just antagonises.

    I think our response has to be to discern the difference between the two situations. And to redouble our efforts to make sure that a Trump can’t become Prime Minister in the UK.

    Reply
  2. Eamonn Avatar
    Eamonn

    A prophetic and timely warning, Kelvin. What Trump represents is on the way to becoming a global phenomenon. The tone of his rallies, and the chanting of mindless slogans, is all too reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s. The fact that his election has been welcomed by Marine le Pen and other far-right leaders in Europe speaks volumes.

    Reply
  3. Guy Avatar
    Guy

    Something to think about: when it penetrates the general consciousness that the majority of white conservative evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, what if anything will be the fall out for Christianity as a whole?

    Reply

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