TIMES ONLINE: Legislation for equal rights won't eradicate the suffering of homosexual men and women
Anyone who has endured years of teenage, and often adult, angst coming to terms with their homosexual attraction, as Alexandra Mankowitz recounted in The Times Online last Monday, cannot help but be deeply moved.
Like her, I too came out at 17, and felt incredible shame and abject loneliness trying to dodge the assumption of heterosexuality and the homophobic bullying that was ever present in the Northern mining community in which I grew up.
Unlike her, however, my parents had no gay friends. Nor were there any visible gay role models within spitting distance of the Watford Gap to offer a hand of hope or consolation in my time of despair and silent suffering.
I was raised in a Christian household and experienced only unconditional love, both before and after declaring my homosexual nature. Yet for many in the gay community, religions represent nothing other than bastions of division and rejection. For some time I too shared this belief, until I was presented with a fresh challenge.
My life calling, I wholeheartedly believed, was to challenge the leaders of religion that homosexuals should be treated with the same dignity and rights as everyone else. This was especially true of the Christian community in which I had been raised. The more senior the religious leader’s role, the more I rose to the challenge.
Along the journey of acrimonious engagement with different expressions of Christianity I came across some startling, dare I say life-changing, revelations. In short, I came to understand that some of the people and organisations that I had consistently learned to blame and finger-wag for my despair were in fact conduits of my discovering an equal standing with others. This in turn led to a deeper sense of self-acceptance and my despair metamorphosing into a rich hope.
The season of Lent, the 40-day period in the run up to Easter, has become a great gift to me and to many homosexual men and women I know. It is the season where we recognise that no one gets it right all the time, that everyone is in need of compassion and mercy, and that before God we all experience apartheid, sexual or otherwise, in some form or other. >>> James Parker | Friday, March 12, 2010
