Nate Knows Nada

Interesting article in the Times Magazine,
about the Christianist “real problem” with gay marriage. 
Unsurprisingly, they believe homosexuality to be a chosen, infectious
behavior that, like a disease, has to be eradicated. 

(Interestingly, Mark Jordan, a religious historian at Emory University, has written a history that shows , among other things, that this belief in the viral nature of homosexuality has existed for nearly 1000 years.)

What I found more interesting was the concluding bit of the
article.  If love is seen as hate, and hate is seen as love, then we’ve all lost already.

That means changing hearts. How difficult that will be was illustrated
by a single vignette. When I met Polyak, she told me how, when she
first testified before a legislative committee, an anti-gay-marriage
activist, a woman, confronted her with bitter language, asking her why
she was ”doing this” to the woman’s children and grandchildren.
Polyak said the encounter left her shaken. A few days later, as I sat
in Evalena Gray’s Christmas-lighted basement office, she told me a
story of how during the same testimony she approached a blond lesbian
and talked to her about the effect that gay marriage would have on her
grandchildren. ”Then I hugged her neck,” she said, ”and I said, ‘We
love you.’ I was kind of consoling her to some extent, out of
compassion.”

I realized I was hearing about the same encounter from both sides. What
was expressed as love was received as something close to hate. That’s a
hard gap to bridge.