Pope Francis has blessed civil same-sex unions but says gays can’t be married in the church, because what they’re doing is a sin.
So gay people are good enough for the state but not good enough for the church. Good to know.
Whatever happened to religion’s famous “hate the sin but love the sinner”? That turns out to be an impossible needle to thread, for the sin is apparently inseparable from the sinner. Georgia’s Crapabble First Baptist Church has cut ties with Richard Aaron Long, who killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent., in the Atlanta massage parlor shootings because of what he described as a sexual addiction. (What is it with shooters and three names — Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth?) I make no excuses for this man, who belongs to the long list of the literature of rejection, filled with men, usually young and white, who have a sense of self-aggrandizement and a disproportionate rage at rejection or some other supposed grievance.
But perhaps if religion spent less time equating sexual pleasure with sin and guilt and more time concentrating on actual love for humanity, we would at least eliminate one motivating factor in Long’s hate crimes, for they are truly hate crimes in the deepest sense of the term — a hatred of self that he had to turn on others lest he implode.
Were his crimes, however, also racist? Surely, they were sexist, because we all know women are the “cause” of men’s psychosexual problems going back to Adam and Eve. (Why don’t men, but particularly white men who have held global power for millennia, simply take responsibility for their desires and own them, instead of always projecting them on to women?) But was Long’s target Asian women or rather massage parlors in which Asian women worked? It’s a subtle difference, one we may not be able to make, because it’s no longer possible to separate a person from his race. (As an aside. people may not like Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, because they just don’t like her. But given the racist comments in the media about her, it’s not an argument you can make.)
The obvious racism here is a culture that reduces Asian women to degrading sex acts in massage parlors. That has long been Asian women’s plight. If you want to disempower men, you control their women — so the thinking goes. There has been racist treatment of Asians in the United States at least going back to the 19th century when Chinese men who worked on the railroads were not allowed to become citizens. In World War II, Japanese-Americans were interred in prison camps. German-Americans were not, even though Germany and Japan were both Axis Power enemies of the U.S. (It’s not just the United States. What about the rape of Chinese and Korean women by the conquering Japanese in World War II? What about China’s now-defunct one-child policy, 1979-2015, that selected for boy babies and has now, ironically, put the fewer women of resulting generations in the marriage market driver’s seat?)
Then there is the not-so-subtle racism of Asians as “the model minorities.” They’re smart, striving immigrants who have a strong sense of family, work hard and attain the American dream. Many conservative Asian-Americans would describe themselves in this way. What’s wrong with this? It’s setup, critics say, as a wedge to denounce Blacks and Hispanics as being the opposite.
Similarly, Asian women and Asian-American women are held up as impossible role models — the good little wifey, the worker bee and, of course, the doll. (This may be a factor, exacerbated by Covid-19,, in the increasing rate of suicide among women, particularly younger women, in Japan.) Even as a child in the 1960s, I hated the musical “Flower Drum Song” (1961), in which Nancy Kwan’s showgirl Linda Low sings “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” all about being the stereotyped arm candy looking for a guy to give her status. In the musical, which is ostensibly about the tensions between the values of East and West, old world and new, Low is contrasted with meek, subservient Mei Li (Myoshi Umeki), who arrives in the United States from China illegally to take part in an arranged marriage.
This being a Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein musical, true love and Yankee Doodle independence triumph in the end for both women, and yet, much of the musical is a cliché that would never get off the ground today, even though in its time it was seen as ground-breaking for its virtually all Asian-American cast. (In reality, the idea of Japanese playing Chinese, as is the case in many parts in the film, would be deeply offensive to the Chinese, because of Japanese atrocities against the Chinese in World War II.)
The one moment of honest complexity comes in the character of Helen Chao (Reiko Sato, a Japanese-American dancer, actress and activist), a humble seamstress who pines for a man who can never be hers and who performs the musical’s best song, “Love Look Away,” (dubbed by mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne).
Only honest complexity will enable us to face the truth of American racism, sexism and violence.