Letter to the editor: Being gay is not an indulgence

OPINION:

Mr. Piper misunderstands the purpose — and indeed the function — of a gay identity: one made necessary not by desire, but by hostile external pressures (“Dear Christians: Please stop calling people gay,” Web, June 8). We do not name ourselves solely to broadcast our personal inclinations, but to forge solidarity in response to struggles imposed from without — often by churches, legislatures and courts that have long sought to silence and even harm us.

Words like gay, lesbian, transgender and queer exist not to divide, but to defend. Visibility is not a threat to dignity; it’s a shield against enmity, harassment and violence, not unlike the embrace of a Christian identity in spite of similar forms of enmity long directed at Christians. Is one to assume that identifying openly as Christian constitutes a similar “flattening” of an individual’s broader humanity? Would this, too, be cast as an indulgence — one permitted only by those unwilling to distinguish between Christianity as a choice and Christianity as an identity? I doubt Piper would make that argument. He has barely made the one he has. In fact, in characterizing queer identities as no more than  expressions of libido rather than what they have historically and accurately represented, it is Mr. Piper who renders the “flattening” — in obvious pursuit of erasure.

It is, too, entirely possible to be both gay and Christian, as much as it might surprise Mr. Piper (or not) — and without subscribing to the pious fiction of a life spent in penitential conflict with one’s own desires, affections and, yes, identity. I live in a community of the kindred in spirit as well as experience. It is not I who has made this wholly about my sexuality.

Rather than urging Christians to police their language, Mr. Piper would do better to call on them to confront the tradition’s role in historical injustice — not entirely unlike what Christians themselves have endured — and to cultivate a sense of his much-lauded humanity, along with empathy and compassion. As Christ did.

ARMEY DEAN

Altus, Oklahoma