tfam Gaylord

Gaylord's Millions

By John Taylor; 2008 June 13, 09 Nur, 165 BE

 

Dear Mavaddat,

 

Just after I wrote my facile and superficial comments on the phenomenon of homosexuality in humans last time the Beloved reached out and touched my heart. He tore me in two, ripped out my insides and excoriated them. God love thee, God! God's caress is sooo sweet. I have been in tears for two days, without exaggeration. His sweet caress is always a bounty unalloyed, but it is also a tremendous test, especially heavy for an ignorant and impure one like me to bear. Scorpions crawl over my flesh and bite and I cry out in His praise. I now see now how wrong I was to speak as I did. You write in your latest comment,

 

"If I said you were a bad person for tying your shoelaces, then that would be immoral of me!"

 

This is true. I implied that homosexuals are bad and I beg forgiveness. God created us all and loves us all! I failed and have always failed to love and understand the God of Love as He deserves. I will try from now on to speak on the plane of the heart, a locale where all are the same and equal and where we abide forever, no matter what our sexual orientation, inclination or whatever you want to call it.

 

The very existence of sex, sexuality and sex differences is given of God as a test. Love too is surely meant as an even harder trial; just ask the scorpions. We can run away and fail by default, or we can respond creatively.

 

Who can doubt that there is a mysterious, creative purpose in some sweet souls being born with the unimaginably difficult test of loving and desiring members of the same sex? Yet among these wonderful souls have arisen some of history's greatest artists, writers, dancers and other creative people. God must love them. A test is always proof of love. If God does not burn us with tests beyond the pale of our ability, he is punishing a wrong. To be left alone from his touch is to sink in mediocrity, and that is the greatest torment for His sincere lovers. The contented and complacent are not creative, whatever their potential. It would be utterly cruel, ungodly and ungrateful of any believer not to treasure, pay high honor to and love our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters with all our hearts.

 

I realize now that I was committing the same fallacy that I was trying not long ago to dispel with regard to capital punishment. A casual reader of the Aqdas sees the sanctions for murder and arson and says, "Baha'is believe in capital punishment." A shallow reader sees the provision for collective security in the Tablets to the Kings and jumps to the conclusion that Baha'is believe in war. A scatterbrained follower of Baha'u'llah reads His strong condemnation of sodomy and supposes that we should continue the cruel and shameful tradition of discriminating against gays. God forbid! God forgive us all!

 

You write:

 

"Think carefully: If speaking for God implies speaking justly, then it follows that speaking unjustly necessarily means not speaking for God."

 

Okay, let us both think carefully here. I am a lover of Baha'u'llah. I know that anything He says comes from God and that for all intents and purposes and in a crucial sense, He *is* God. So if He condemns sodomy, I have to believe that God is not only just but kind and loving in forbidding this particular expression of attraction. How can that possibly be? I know I am boring my older readers by repeating this, but I hope you appreciate that I have no choice but to go through this chain of logic with Mavaddat, since the justice of our One True Beloved has been challenged.

 

Consider Adolph Hitler, probably the most unjust man in history. He started the Second World War and thereby brought about the death of a hundred million people, among whom were gays and Baha'is, plus a broad cross-section of the rest of humanity.

 

Consider this possibility. Imagine there being born an extremely eloquent and persuasive gay rights advocate in the 18th Century. Let us call this hypothetical reformer Gaylord. Gaylord meets famous contemporaries like Voltaire and Rousseau and, long story short, his incisive arguments persuade the world that we have been wrong in promoting heterosexuality exclusively. We should protect the sacred right of gays to express their love to their heart's content by means of sodomy and same-sex marriages. Say that over the next couple of centuries he persuades a hundred million men and a similar number of women to form gay unions where otherwise they would have been pressured into marrying and having children.

 

What would be the result? Gaylord is gay himself, but I am afraid like many people today, he does not think things through in the long term. He imagines that he loves and is helping other gays by advocating for their freedom of expression. But what would happen?

 

Assuming that these people of gay leanings would otherwise have given birth to between one and three children in marriages to straights, the end effect of Gaylord's reforms might well be that a hundred million children would not be born who otherwise would have been alive in the time of Hitler. Gaylord would have reduced the world's population by exactly the same number that Hitler killed, a hundred million.

 

Okay.

 

You may say that there is nothing cruel in a hundred million people not being born, and that Hitler tore living, productive people out of their ordinary routine and gave them painful, violent deaths; and that therefore there can be no moral comparison between Gaylord and Hitler. I will concede that point. But consider that nature is not moral. It is totally amoral. From an evolutionary perspective, the result is exactly the same. A hundred million removed forever from the gene pool.

 But wait, Gaylord's 1/10th billion have not been chosen more or less randomly like Hitler's were. Gaylord's hundred million is targeted at one population and one only: gays. It is impossible to calculate this with exactitude because so little is known about homosexuality in the first place; but I think it is fair to speculate that by the 1940's Gaylord would be succeeding where the worst bigots and gay-bashers (Hitler himself included) have always failed. He would be well on the way to wiping homosexuality off the face of the earth.

 

So I ask you Mavaddat: who really loves gays, Gaylord or Baha'u'llah? When Baha'u'llah denies physical expression of their love to gays, He is assuring that the gay gene -- if there is such a thing -- will be perpetuated indefinitely. If there is no gay gene, whatever causes homosexuality will not result in the brutal, permanent removal of their progeny, their glorious attributes and qualities created by God Himself.

 

In the commonwealth of Baha'u'llah, in the city of love, there is and always will be a place for His servants of gay inclination because his Law all but forces them to marry and reproduce. He loves them far more than all the deluded Gaylords of the world. He wants their progeny to stay in the gene pool and never leave. As the prayer says, God is a far better friend to us than we are to ourselves.