Letter number 1: the anti-gay rights amendment

(This item was originally written elsewhere in 2018. The rights holder has given me permission to reuse it and modify it.)

Older self: 44 years old
Younger self: 18 years old

You think that leading the “gay lifestyle” is sinful. You believe the laws that forbid discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation “recognize” and therefore legitimize that lifestyle. One reason people support the anti-discrimination laws in the first place is that they are one step toward legitimizing that lifestyle. That’s your real objection to those laws, and that’s why you support state constitutional amendment, which I'll call amendment 200. That amendment would overturn those laws.

While I think you’re missing the point that these laws are more about guaranteeing access to things you take for granted than they are about legitimizing the “gay lifestyle” and while I think that these laws can theoretically protect straight people as well as gay people, your objection is still an honest one, honestly come by. You see through the “special rights” argument that most supporters of the amendment claim to believe. You don’t put it in quite these terms yet, but you essentially see this amendment as a power play, much pretense that it’s anything other than a battle between your values and theirs.

It won’t suffice to tell you that you’ll change your mind eventually. I realize that at 18, you’re not ready to make the same claims that I am at 44. If I were to insist on that, you might double down on your current position. You’ve already seen enough Twilight Zone episodes to know that you can’t go back in time and change the past (except for when you can, and then probably in some way you weren’t anticipating). Instead, I have some thoughts that start with where you are right now.

Listen

I know the “No on Amendment 200” activists come off as insufferably self-righteous. Some of them seem to be just as hateful as the people they believe they are fighting against. And like most activists, they often resort to lazy reasoning. Whatever my own commitments right now, I still agree with you, for example, that activists of all kinds ought to abandon the “myth/fact” sheet for being almost completely useless. As a sometime target of these activists, just remember that all activists have to walk a line between raising awareness, rallying those who already agree with them, and convincing others.

More important, remember you have a lot to learn from the “No on 200” people, even if you don’t agree with them. Try listening. You think you already “listen” to them enough. That’s not true. You hear their slogans and hear them pontificate, but you don’t actually listen to them. Listening means going to some of their meetings, or actually asking questions and making it easy for them to answer. To listen better, don’t offer your own opinion unless asked. That’s not always good advice, but for you, on this issue, at this time in your life, it’s excellent advice.

Listening will do two things. First, it will force you to answer for yourself exactly why and where you disagree. You can uncover and hone your true objections on this issue. Second, it will help you see those you disagree with here as people with their own difficulties, hardships, and sufferings.

Remember your religion

I have a more ambiguous relationship to religion than you think you do now. So this might seem strange coming from me. Still, I advise you tokeep going to the weekly Campus Crusade for Christ meetings. Better yet, start going to church, too, even one that opposes homosexuality. Learn their reasons behind the objections to homosexuality or “the gay lifestyle.” Also consult more and other faith communities on the issue. If you do, you might find that the best thought-out reasons for opposing homosexuality aren’t quite what you think. They’re based on sometimes positive views of sex, or non-judgmental views, or judgmental but in a way you haven’t thought of before. I’ve come to reject those anti-gay views anyway, but if one accepts the assumptions on which they’re based, they’re not always and in every way wrong.

Before you get upset, I’m not advocating moral relativism. I'm not saying your views are good for you and my views are good for me. I believe my views on this issue are (ultimately) right and yours are (ultimately) wrong. We may both be wrong or we may both be partially right, but we’re not both wholly right.

Also, remember that your religion isn’t only about opposing homosexuality or even opposing “deviant” sexuality. It’s about much more. To mention only one thing, it’s about not judging lest you be judged yourself. You believe homosexuality is wrong. I now disagree, and I can’t change your mind. Instead, I ask you to remember something you’ve long known. We all have our besetting sins. You know yours, or think you do. You'll find out more later.

Write your sister a letter

In one sense, I don’t have to remind you not to judge others. You don’t judge your sister, not really. You harbor the intellectual thought that she’s in rebellion against God’s plan, but you don’t condemn her or claim any prerogative to condemn her. She and her partner have been too much a part of your life for you to bear them any real animosity.

I’m not saying that you love your sister and therefore Amendment 200 is wrong. I realize what you realize. It’s possible to care about someone, and even forgo judging them, while opposing what they do and believe in. That's not judgment. It's discernment.

But reach out to her. Write her a letter. Tell her you look up to her. Tell her how much you enjoyed it when you used to work together at that restaurant and how happy you were simply to be spending time with her. Tell her you look up to her.

You’re damn right it will be awkward. I don’t know how she’ll respond. There are things about her life and about your family that you won’t know for a few years. Even 26 years later, I’m still ignorant of much of it — and for what I do know and believe right now, it’s not my story to tell. I can say, though, that in about a decade, you’ll become closer. That will be nice, but it also will mean that you’ll have lost about ten years of a friendship that both of you could benefit from.

Beware your tenth plague

I don’t know quite how to say this, whether it’s telling you too much or too little, but I will say that a number of developments will prompt you to question your beliefs about gay rights and about your faith generally at a very visceral level. It won’t primarily be a logical challenge. The shell of your views will live for a little while. I can say it won’t be a particularly new challenge. Even now at 18, you’ve been dealing with the roots of this challenge for several years now. What you’re about to face will continue and intensify the seemingly unremitting loneliness and sadness of which you’ve already had many glimpses.

I don’t believe anything I can say now will adequately prepare you for that process. I’m not entirely sure I ought to prepare you for it if I could. Even now, I’m not sure if it was (will be) caused by something external to you or by your own choices, or both. It may be a random happenstance, a “just world” doing its magic, or something in between.

This challenge will both soften and harden your heart. You’ll improve your capacity to feel others’ pain but you will often double down in ways that hurt others, sometimes the same people. Whether that will eventually shake out for you the way I in retrospect think it did–I cannot say or know. Eyewitnesses aren’t always the best historians. But just remember that you will know some of what you now inflict on others.