A Parents Guide to Preventing Homosexuality is essentially saying: A Parents Guide to Preventing a Child’s Love.
While homosexuality, for centuries, has been something ridiculed, bullied, and stigmatized, many have liked to believe that we are reaching a point where love prevails above hate. But unfortunately, it seems that the race is still on. To the dismay of many, people in every crevice of the planet are still under the cruel and burning fire of hate. Hate that journeys past adults, but onto children. It’s a weapon wielded both carefully and thoughtlessly. At some point, you hold little regard for who it is you’re hurting with your hatred, you hold no regard for how it may spread through your entire being and swallow you whole. Eventually, you become nothing more than the hate you hold, and that—is a tragedy.
I find myself in mourning. I mourn the simple yet wishful idea that love can simply exist as it is, without constantly battling hatred and prejudice. I mourn the imaginary world in which a child picks up a toy that their eyes were drawn to, and their parents don’t punish them for choosing the wrong one. I am in deep grieving for the people who fall asleep at night dreaming of a place where they can smile lovingly at their partner, no longer afraid of who’s watching. I mourn, everyday, the people who will live without love solely because they know that their own blood would shun them for feeling it.
I have terrible news for the anti-gays, and wonderful news for the gays that may be reading this. Homosexual love is no different from heterosexual love. It’s quite simple, but hardly understood. Love resides within us all, in the same way, the same places. It never falters, never fades, but sometimes it grows quiet. Other times it’s loud, it demands, it celebrates. It can silently resign and it can relentlessly fight. Love stirs and flows and it occurs in every single moment. We feel it for the small, we feel it for the big, we simply feel it. And no matter who you are, you will probably meet at least one person who wishes to stifle your love because they struggle with their own. But, love? It can’t be stifled. Not truly, not really. Every attempt you make to erase it, eradicate it, stifle it, and kill it, will be met with one result. Failure.
The author very clearly struggles with love. The idea of loving someone who is different from himself is deeply scary. In a way, I can empathize with this. The fear some people must have for those who do not think the same way, it must be suffocating. Surviving under one shared belief of love when love is meant to be both individual and collective. It cannot be right or wrong, it can only be, and whether your love is right for you is your idea and your belief alone. It’s not one to be shoved down another’s throat. Another persons love is not YOURS to attempt to destroy.
This books starts with the pressing matter of people feeling dissatisfied with their sexuality. They feel uncomfortable, stuck, disgusted. I can tell you now, in full confidence, that it is NOT because gender roles weren’t taught and defined to these children. Rather, it’s because they exist. It’s because they’ve watched as men like Joseph have promoted these gender roles as a necessity. We do not need these roles to survive. We do not need these roles to thrive. They exist because they benefited very specific individuals and purposefully harmed others. These men feel dissatisfied with their sexuality because they were taught to be unhappy with it, taught that they should hate it just as others do. You may critique the idea that people should have the freedom to be themselves without concern for the societal norms and values, but by that logic you are striking down uniqueness and individuality. You will never think the same way as the person beside you, never look the same, feel the same, not truly. Difference can be found in each and every one of us, right beside our strongest similarities. Somehow, someway, we have managed to take something that links us together, love, and twist it into something that divides us. ”They speak as if our anatomy was in no way our destiny.” Correct. Your anatomy is not your destiny, it is a part of who you are, but it is not by any means your destiny. Perhaps these men were uncomfortable with their sexuality because of this world’s people and their own very loud discomfort. Maybe, just maybe, these hateful thoughts for themself were not planted on their own. Maybe it was you. Maybe it was the people they looked up to, a random post on the internet, a celebrities speech. Stop planting your man-made seeds of hate and then calling it “natural” once it grows.
I want to divert people to another book. One that may truly impact parents struggling with this topic.
Prayers for Bobby by Leroy F. Aarons
This is a book about love. A parent’s hate for homosexuality being misinterpreted as love. Prayers for Bobby is about a woman who weaponizes her religion and eventually drives her own son (yes, gay.) to his devastating death. Only after does she finally realize, his love was not a sin. His love was not wrong. His love was just that, love. The problem was not Bobby and who his heart beat for, but rather—the problem was ignorance and the way it resides in us. The monster is not homosexuality, the monster is hatred and how it pierces our hearts and drains us of our love.
“I am here today because I have learned in the most painful way possible that ignorance, hatred, bigotry, and prejudice lead to violence and tragedy.... And I have learned that love, honesty, support, and acceptance... lead to health, wholeness, and self-esteem for our children.”
It is our choice, as people, how we treat other people. Do we meet them with disgust? Anger? Hatred? Or do we meet them with the love that lives inside of us all, no matter how deep? It’s a choice we get to make everyday, a stepping stone to a happier world that we can either ignore or take.
"Mary's self-discovery that her son had had nothing to repent, that he had been untainted by sin from the start, was at once a huge relief and a terrible indictment. It enabled her to believe, at last, that Bobby was not eternally damned but was instead a happy and free spirit enjoying the benefits of a blissful afterlife somewhere in the firmament. On the other hand, Mary for the first time grasped the full implication of what had transpired during those final years. There was no getting away from it: her well-meaning campaign to save her son had merely helped drive him to his death.”
“If no one had ever challenged religious authority there would be no democracy, no public schools, women's rights, pursuit of science, medicine, abolition of slavery, and no laws against child abuse.”
When the sun leaves the sky and I’m left with only darkness, when the leaves stop rustling and I am left with only silence, when the wind stops blowing and I’m left with only stillness, I have but one question when everything is stripped away and I’m left with merely my own thoughts. If this world is truly nothing without the love we all hold, why are we so eager to rid each other of it?
How many hearts will we break? How many lives will we take? How many children will we lead astray? How many adults will we leave in loneliness and despair for their entire lives? When will we stop?
I want to share the most random bundle of quotes with you all. Quotes that speak to me, and may speak to you, but should HOPEFULLY speak to everyone. Some from songs, from books, from movies. Words that capture our hearts and seep into them, nurturing the love that thrives within us.
”Love was the law and religion was taught, I’m not bought, I feel when we argue our skin starts to rot.”
-Gigi Perez
”Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.”
-Buddha
"Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated."
-Martin Luther King Jr.
"Holding hate in your heart is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die."
"We hate some persons because we do not know them; and will not know them because we hate them.”
-Charles Caleb Colton
“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in this world, but it has not solved one yet.
-Maya Angelou
”The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.”
-Audrey Hepburn
”Where there is love, there is life.
-Gandhi
"Love is a force of nature. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused."
-Paulo Coelho