P. A. Chacko S. J.
The day is observed to make us human beings accept members of the LGBTQ+ community as part of humanity.
LGBTQ means: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning).
Their characteristics include sexualities, romantic orientations, sex characteristics, and gender identities that are not heterosexual, or hetero-romantic
To many of us, people with different sexual orientations are worthy of being discarded into dump pits.
Without appreciating facts we put on coloured glasses and look at them with the binoculars of
contempt, prejudice, aversion, hatred, or antipathy.
Even religious beliefs or our fundamentalist long nose may make us keep such people beyond our circles.
The more we exclude them, the more they develop negative attitudes to themselves and towards the rest of society. To resist people’s aversion and misogyny, they take to begging, looking for children to add to their community, prostitution, lesbianism, homosexuality or forcing young men to part with money and the like. We see them in trains or buses, or market areas to make a living.
Even parents drive them away from their homes.
Are they at fault with different sexual orientations? Aren’t they human beings? If God created us, didn’t the same God create them? Or are their parents at fault for bringing them into this world?
A short video viral on social media is about the life of a young man without hands and legs. Yet full of life, inspiring us all with his words to face life squarely and accept with noble human feelings differently abled people.
Having lost his parents, he found a foster mother in the person of a Christian nun and, later, a priest guided and helped him up to graduation. He calls these people angels who gave him a second life.
When we accept people of a different make or orientation, guide and orient them with help or counselling, a lot of problems may be solved.
Let us not sweep under carpet the fact that even sadhus and sadhvins, priests and nuns, political leaders, professors, judges and a great many others are known to belong to this sexual minority.
A bisexual womanish looking person made history by taking courage and fought the general election in India and became a Member of Parliament. The initial reactions of most men in the Parliament was a look of aversion. Some even refused to sit near that person. Such condemnable behaviour arises from people who have not accepted their own sexuality and the human worth of others with different sexual orientations.
The late Pope Francis generally adopted a more accepting tone towards LGBTQ+ individuals. “If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord with good will, who am I to judge?” he stated.
However, the Catholic Church has a long way to go before it accepts people of sexual minority as fully human beings!
Does the Church think that the creator God, while at the potter’s wheel, had dozed off a while when he was fashioning some human entities?