The Dangerous Rainbow
01/09/2003
- Opinión
"Five centuries are a drop in the immense ocean of our
history..."
Richard Nixon, prestigious historian, had it clear. In
1972, when he was President of the United States, gave to
his closest collaborators a short lecture on the decadence
of Greece and Rome:
-"You know what happened with the Greeks? Homosexuality
destroyed them! Sure. Aristotle was a homo. We all know
that. And also Socrates. You know what happened with the
Romans? Their last six emperors were gay."
In 1513, centuries before this pompous lesson, Vasco Nuñez
de Balboa had thrown fifty Indians to the mouths of wild
dogs that they disemboweled them, "because to be women they
only lack tits and give birth".
In Panama, as in many other places of America,
homosexuality was free, until the conquerors invaded the
land. That night of 1513, Balboa inaugurated in these
lands the punishment for the nefarious sin of sodomy.
Those were the times of the Holy Inquisition. Times
without end. The Inquisition lasted three and a half
centuries in Spain. The heresy of diversity, in all its
forms, was punished with torture or death in various places
of Europe and America. Many homosexuals, men and women,
were burned alive. The fire reduced them to ashes "so that
there be not memory of them".
An epoch left behind, so we thought. But the flames of
hell call.
The Holy Family
Instead of asking forgiveness from its victims, the Roman
Catholic Church repeats the old curses. Recently, the Holy
Inquisition, that is now called, Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, launched from the Vatican a world
campaign against the marriage of homosexual couples, "a
serious immorality that contradicts the plan of God and the
natural law".
Immediately, high officials of the Catholic Church in the
world echoed to the voice of command. In Uruguay,
archbishop Nicolas Cotugno declared homosexuality "a
contagious disease", recommended to isolate its bearers and
compared homosexual marriage with the union between a man
and an animal.
The Catholic Church is worried, for already a few
centuries, with human sexuality. From pope to pope, she
has been establishing the stiff boundary between sin, that
is almost everything, and the little bit that is left to us
for consolation, because we must reproduce, in some way.
From His Holiness to the last priest of town, there is not
a priest that is not an expert in sex. Since all of them
have made a vote of chastity, it is not known how can they
understand so much about an activity they are prohibited to
practice.
Reading this last Vatican condemnation, desires come to ask
to the celestial sexologists: if heterosexual marriage is a
"natural law", why you do not marry? And if homosexuals
contradict "the plan of God", why God made them that way?
Another specialist in Good and Evil, president George W.
Bush, coincides with the Vatican in the condemnation of
homosexual marriage and stands against adoption of children
by couples that do not make a normal marriage, "of a man
and a woman".
The president, that is not a catholic, makes his own this
papal crusade. It is not the first time that Bush and the
Pope discover they are two of a kind. The two of them have
direct communication with Heaven, by different telephones.
In some instances, as in the recent war of Iraq, they
receive contradictory orders. In others, on the other
hand, they form a common front. They have been, and they
will continue being, united in causes as sacred as the
promotion of youth sexual abstinence and the fight against
all means of contraception and against abortion.
With his usual broad-mindedness, Bush has not only
coincided in these topics with the Vatican theocracy, but
also with Islamic fundamentalists: puritans united will
never be defeated. And each time such matters have been
presented in the United Nations, Bush has voted by common
consent with his main enemies, Iran, Libya, Sudan, and
including Iraq, before that country received the hurricane
of missiles that Bush sent to Iraq in the name of God and
of petroleum.
"But... It moves"
The cross and the sword are being brandished, as in old
times. And with good reason: in the last months,
homophobia has suffered serious attacks. Everywhere
propagates what the Pope calls "devious conduct" and
"legalization of Evil".
The Supreme Court of the United States issued a historic
decision, six months ago. The Texas law that punishes
homosexuality as a crime is unconstitutional, says the
Supreme Court. That decision nullifies similar laws in
other 12 states of the nation.
In the meantime, in New Hampshire, for the first time in
the history of Christianity, the faithful and the clergy of
the Episcopal Church have elected a bishop that is openly
gay. Massachusetts is about to legalize homosexual
marriages. In Vermont, the Civil Registry already
recognizes the legitimacy of those couples. In Canada,
since early this year, homosexuals can marry in Ontario and
Columbia. Now there are homosexual weddings in Belgium, as
there were already in Denmark, Holland and Sweden.
There are diverse varieties of legal union, more or less
similar to marriage according to the country, in Norway,
Finland, Iceland, France, Germany, Hungary, Croatia and in
some regions of Spain. And for first time in Latin-
American history, the city of Buenos Aires already
celebrates the legal union among persons of the same sex.
All these "grave immoralities", acts of liberty and of
mental health, are not gifts: they are conquests. They are
the results of stubborn fights of gays and lesbians against
discrimination and violence.
Of all the pleasures deserving hell, homosexual love is,
still, the most ferociously repressed. "Machismo" and
armed stupidity have disguised this atrocity of normality
and have turned it into custom. In more than seventy
countries, the law punishes homosexual relations. In many
with jail. In some with flagellation or death. In others,
where capital punishment is not legal, para-police
squadrons and lovers of fanaticism do their ceremonies of
purification: clean the streets torturing, mutilating and
murdering those who, by the simple fact of existing,
constitute a public scandal.
Gays and lesbians are damned in earth and in heaven. Five
years ago, the prime minister of Malaya denounced them as a
threat to national security. They also have the doors of
Heaven closed. I heard the mother of a young lesbian say:
"What hurts me more is to know that we will not be together
in Paradise".
But they, the gay and lesbians, the rare, the despised, are
generating now some of the better news that our times send
to history. Armed with the flag of the rainbow, symbol of
human diversity, gays and lesbians are overcoming one of
the most sinister inheritances of the past. The walls of
intolerance have begun to fall.
This affirmation of dignity, that dignifies us all, is born
of the courage to be different and of the pride to be it.
As Milton Nascimento sings:
Any way of loving is worthwhile,
any form of love is worth to love.
any form of love is worth to love.
https://www.alainet.org/es/node/108754?language=en
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