Hi
King Dan of Great the 1st
I think that it's really very difficult, for someone that doesn't experience such things. It can be hard to see that other people face anger and hate over their personal lives from others. Just as it's very, very difficult for a white person to really know the feelings of fear or injustice that a black man may feel when people call him a monkey or make snide remarks as they walk by saying under their breath, "that nigger...". Now please don't send me all your stories about how some black person called you 'whitey' because generally the reason they would do that is a form of their retaliation. A 10 year old child of color spends his life with the 'good' white boys pushing him around and pushing his nose into the fountain when trying to get a drink... all because he's black. The fear that young child feels when 8-10 rowdy boys get around him and mock him and call him racial names.
I know that I've never had to deal with that in my life. But these things happen in their young lives and the scars of racisim can live and fester within them for many years, even their entire life. So, and I believe that it is much better than it was 50 years ago, there are feelings and emotions that we don't understand because we've never felt them.
True story. I worked for a large telecommunications company as a cable splicer. My group was made up of about 10 of us that went out and completed the various work tasks, and often the work would require two or more people to work together. One day, I was working with a man that was a particularly hate filled man and I knew of his seriously racist attitudes, but since we were working together we broke for lunch and headed to a local fast food restaurant. Once in the restaurant we placed our order and all of the staff behind the counter were people of color. I could literally see the disgust on his face that he even had to speak to them to order his meal. This was long before the ordering from a kiosk that so many such places have today. Then we got our food and went to sit down and the entire conversation, spoken in a fairly loud voice that many of the people around us could surely hear, he begins to talk about the 'niggers' at the counter. How his boys were never going to have to work like those 'niggers' and 'wetbacks'. Just a fairly constant diatribe on 'niggers' and 'wetbacks' ensued.
I pretty quickly gulped down my meal and got up and said, "well, I'll meet you back at the site."
I've never been sitting in a restaurant and heard some black man say things about how he can't stand those 'whiteys' and that his children wouldn't grow up to be like them, just based on the color of their skin. This is a part of what's called empathy. To feel, or at least understand the feelings of others. And to behave appropriately that you aren't an embarrassment and that you aren't tearing people down because of nothing more than the color of their skin.
Now for me, the difference between racial hate and sexual identity hate, is that the color of one's skin is not something they can reasonably do anything about. But yes, while I believe that the struggles people have with their sexual identity is a result of what God's word is telling us in his list of sinful behaviors in the first chapter of Paul's letter to the Roman believers, they still deserve the respect due them as members of the human race. Their minds have been given over to such reprobate behavior, but they are still people with feelings and families and jobs and loves and have the right to live with a certain amount of peace concerning any fear that they will be attacked in public by a group of people telling them that God is love.
God bless,
Ted
