People should be allowed to think that my love of another man is a sin. They too have to live in a world in which I judge them, says Eusebius McKaiser.
Johannesburg - A couple of years ago I argued against Bishop Gene Robinson, who is an openly gay man, about whether or not homosexuality should bar one from becoming a bishop. The debate, with a number of other speakers on either side of the motion in the Oxford Debate Union, was heated, and unsurprisingly solicited deep disagreement.
My friends, gay and straight but all progressive, were surprised that I was not, as a liberal gay man, on the same side as Bishop Robinson. And that is because, as I still believe, they misunderstand the meaning and demands of living in a pluralistic society based on liberal values.
Let me cut to the chase of that debate: I regard the church as a private membership club. So long as they do not do unlawful things, like killing gay people, I have to live, and happily so, with the existence of spaces where people congregate and affirm their mistaken belief that my sexual orientation is a sin. What I, to be honest, never understood, is why on earth so many of my gay Christian friends choose, of their own free accord, to remain in institutions that regard their same-sex attraction as some kind of disorder, or a sin, or morally unacceptable or worse. Just leave, frankly, if that offends you deeply.
The strongest response to my view thus far is that while the church may not be the state itself, it is fanciful to deny the public role and influence of such institutions when assessing what goes on inside them. And, even if they are voluntary membership clubs, they should not have practices that are at odds with the provisions, and the spirit, of human rights. I will return to that later.
The flipside of my comfort that people be allowed to think that my love of another man is a sin, is that they too have to live in a world in which I judge them. I think, for example, that belief in God is intellectually unjustified. Anyone who thinks that they know, let alone that they know with certainty and through direct evidence, that God exists, is not thinking clearly.
Or, at the very least, they are comfortable with evidence-insensitive beliefs in their belief-set. And that’s fine: Sometimes it comforts me to pretend that there is a little green monster in the garden smiling at me. It is not unlawful to have false or poorly grounded beliefs. I have never been harmed as a result of the weird beliefs about God that some of my mates have. Some of my best friends are weird like that.
Some are so weak that they even ask the non-existing God to tell them what they must do when they wake up! Why on earth would I outsource such precious, and deeply personal, and important, questions like ‘What should I do when choosing between buying expensive takkies and giving to the poor?’ Why ask a being to help you when you don’t know if that being exists let alone whether they have the answer? I think it is morally feeble to ignore your own brain, and experiences, and agency, and not reason for yourself about moral questions. God, like the famous puppet Chester Missing, is incredible: influencing life despite not being proven to be real things.
Here’s the point if it’s not obvious: My commitment as a democrat to pluralism means that I can live with a church having a rule that says: “Inside this venue no one who is gay should be a bishop!” just as I demand believers to live with me saying:”People who believe in God are intellectually weak and have underdeveloped moral capacities!”
This brings us to Democratic Alliance leader Mmusi Maimane and, for that matter, President Jacob Zuma.
Are Maimane and Zuma homophobes?
It is impossible to say that either Maimane or Zuma are homophobes. Stay with me: When I say someone is a homophobe I am making quite a fundamental judgment about their character. It is the same with racism. When you say someone is a racist, you are suggesting that, as a matter of habit, they display, routinely, and consistently, racist attitudes, habitually utter racist statements and regularly perform racist actions. The same applies to homophobia: You need to know a biggish slice of someone’s life to be in a position to make the damning judgment: “You’re a homophobe.” Does Minister Bathabile Dlamini, who claims Maimane is a homophobe, know more of his life than the rest of the public?
I do not have that kind of data, when it comes to the issue of homosexuality, to either say that these politicians are homophobes or to protect them from claims by some that they are. The evidence is inconclusive.
But they are guilty of tactical errors when we assess them as politicians. Zuma, by his own admission, wanted to beat up gay people when he was younger. That desire to do so was homophobic. Specific actions and specific comments can be homophobic even if someone’s more enduring character is not soaked in homophobic attitudes.
It is particularly unbecoming of someone who is the first citizen of a country founded on substantive equality for gay people, including lesbian women who are often assaulted, raped and even killed. Although Zuma was referring to his younger-self, as a now-adult leader of the nation, he should have done much more over the years to help reduce discrimination and violence against gay men and women.
So what we can say is this: Zuma isn’t an ally of the LGBTI community, and activists who work hard in our communities to root out homophobia have not been adequately supported by the state in general, with very rare exceptions among our politicians. But does that make Zuma a homophobe in the sense that homophobia goes to the heart of who and what he is as a person? No, at least not on the basis of what is in the public space thus far. It’s not much comfort to gay people of course: We’d rather he passes the tougher leadership test of being a visible champion for substantive equality. He fails that test.
Maimane’s political knot is different. Maimane thinks gay people are sinners because of their sexual orientation. We know this from a sermon he gave. Notice for example that Maimane keeps telling us, as this issue gains traction in the media and particularly on Twitter, that he has many gay friends – and I am sure ex-newspaper editor Allister Sparks has many black friends – and that he has even witnessed same-sex unions and been an officiating minister or officer or whatever the religious term for these things is. Fine, we hear you, sir. What Maimane has not done is to respond to questions about whether, gay rights aside, he thinks gay people are sinners, and homosexuality is immoral.
At the time of writing this analysis piece, he was in conversation with me and I had asked him directly: “Do you think homosexuality is a sin?” He declined the opportunity to respond. Since Maimane is a preacher, I would imagine that the answer does not require research to be done, but just a declaration to be made: “Yes” or “No”.
I know what’s going on here: Maimane has a dilemma. If he sits on the horn that affirms his view that gay people are sinners just because they are gay, then he risks really pissing off the classic liberals who have shown him so much faith – pardon the pun - thus far because it will sound like he is – as with the death penalty-referendum issue, initially – pandering to the conservative South African majority just to be popular. If, on the other hand, he was to say that he has revised his view that homosexuality is a sin, then he would be flip-flopping again, and trading his denomination’s doctrine on morality for political expediency.
What has he in fact done in this case? He has gone silent on the moral question (which he is entitled to, legally, but that silence remains politically awkward in a country where the fight against homophobia needs more public allies), and he hopes that answering the question legally – “gays have rights and stuff, and I accept that!” – and tweeting a picture of him with gay people next to him, will make the news cycle move on.
It won’t move quite so quickly: Maimane should just own his entitlement to a personal view on a moral question that need not be the same moral premises that constitutional court judges rely on when they develop gay rights jurisprudence.
Concluding thoughts
I feel sorry for Maimane on this one. In theory it should not be politically awkward to say that you hold a private view – a bit like our Chief Justice does also – to the effect that homosexuality is a sin but that you don’t mind being friends with sinners. But my Oxford friends, of course, had a point. They were right to be a little bit pissed off with my opposition to Bishop Robinson in that debate. The point they made to me is that, while it is intellectually fine to say that one can just leave the church, the social fact of the matter is that the church - like family structures now affirmed by the DA - plays an important role in the lives of many people including gay men and women. It gives structure, meaning, and a sense of communal bonding, grounded in commonly held religious convictions, for these congregants, straight and gay, even if Richard Dawkins can’t make sense of this.
It’s self-indulgent to have my view that simply advises gay Christians to become atheists or agnostics, or to form their own denominations not based on claims about homosexuality being a sin or a disorder. In the real world, real lives are hurt because of homophobia in our churches. Churches often, inadvertently, provide the basis on which people leave the church building to display more naked homophobia outside the church. Just look at church-sponsored homophobia of the vilest variety in places like Uganda, with the financial support of right-wing American donors.
In this context, I wonder whether Maimane’s remarks help. He actually said: “I remember listening to this message (being called by God to be a missionary), thinking to myself, ‘God, where are you challenging me in this area?’ And I’m not joking, you know the first thing I decided to do, I always think to myself, ‘Me? I really want to be a friend of sinners’. That’s part of the mission I believe God has given us: to be a friend of sinners.”
He goes on: “Because, you know, I am a sinner. So I guess we can be friends, right? But I don’t want to just be their friend cos I want them to think, I’m like, they are a project. I want them to sincerely know I’m their friend. So, you know what I am most grateful of, is that in my friendship circles there are Muslims, there are gay people - because I believe that is what God has called us to do. I take the verse that Jesus says, ‘I didn’t come for the well but I came for the sick.’ I take that quite seriously.”
Clearly these quotes will resonate with millions of South Africans. They might even be politically useful. But I don’t think they help us fight religious-inspired homophobia in our communities and I wonder how many of the classic liberals will be happy that these quotes are not only privately held (which is fine and easier to manage) but are expressed in the church and disseminated online (well, until the videos were taken down by Liberty Church on Thursday after the social media discussion about them had started- so much for loving liberty then).
All of the responses from activists and my friends make me wonder if my long-held distinction between public institutions and voluntary membership-institutions is insensitive to reality. I think that might well be so. It might be time for me to revise that view I argued for in my debate with Bishop Robinson. But commentators, and writers, do not get flak for flip-flopping. We can just claim our views, uhm, evolved with the evidence, and through paying better attention to counter-argument.
I am not an elected public official so do not have the pressure Maimane has to puzzle through these issues, including the time pressure that writers do not have. Maimane, broer, good luck with this one and may the man or woman upstairs, if he or she exists, offer you prudent advice on how to respond. Don’t bother praying for me, by the way: I am neither sick nor sinning, and I know this because I asked the garden gnome just now.
* Eusebius McKaiser is the author of Could I Vote DA? A Voter’s Dilemma.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.