The Right to Hate

Spring of 2000. My family had just recently moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma from New York, and I was slowly adjusting to a very different life. One day some racist thugs went to a Jewish cemetery called Rose Hill Memorial Park and desecrated the graves, knocking them over, damaging the grounds, and spray-painting antisemitic epithets, Nazi swastikas, and other vile filth.

http://www.ujc.org/page.aspx?id=45105

I felt sick just thinking about it and what must have been going through the minds of anyone whose family members were buried there. And not just them but my mother, who had no loved ones buried there at all, but who must have worried for the safety of her kids in an environment like that.

What makes it even worse are the usual gang of people who claim they are not racist, but who fail to see the difference between desecrating an ethnic group's cemetery and writing "Fuck Wal-Mart" on the back of grocery store. The latter is annoying. The former scares the shit out of minorities.

And with good reason. Recently in New York of all places, a couple of Jewish guys were beaten to a pulp for saying "happy Hanukkah" when they were told to have a merry Christmas. Two gay youths were murdered in Tel Aviv earlier this month. An Arab woman was murdered in Germany last month.

These murders, attacks, and crimes are not a result of cheating spouses or robberies or drive-by shootings. They are meant to terrorize minorities--to put us in our place.

Thankfully, ethnic groups and religions are protected under the laws of hate crime legislation. Not so lucky are gays, who are not protected in every state. As always, religious bigots are the main impediment to progress.

Conservative evangelical group Concerned Women for America (do you love how the feminist-sounding name is supposed to sucker us in?) says that when gays are given equal protection, Bible-believing Christians will no longer be able to preach the Bible or to proclaim that homosexuality is a sin.

"We live in a world where even the Bible is being deemed "hate" literature. Christians have already been jailed for upholding traditional morality in public places, and if hate crime laws proliferate, the freedom to speak one's mind will be limited to those who celebrate and promote homosexuality."

This is amusing for two reasons.

First, these morons are protected by the same laws they want denied to gay people, which makes little sense considering that religion is a choice. I have known I was gay since I was a kid; I only realized Conservative Judaism was a good fit for me in my 20's. If one of these "Concerned Women" wakes up tomorrow and realizes she believes in Catholicism, she can simply study and take a test. Of course, religious groups should be safe from persecution, but it's difficult to overlook the hypocrisy of religious idiots who constantly call being gay a choice while failing to realize gays would happy to get a fraction of the rights granted to Moonies and Scientologists.

The second reason is that ethnic groups who are granted protection are not free from totally legal racism. For a perfect example, let's move just a wee bit to the right of Concerned Women for America and take a look at Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church. According to the Internet flier they distributed, their church plans to pickett “three fag-infested groups of Jews in Washington, DC," including the Holocaust Museum.

Along with "God Hates Fags," the WBC also wants us to know that "God Hates Jews" and that "The Jews Killed Our Lord." They have been amping up their antisemitic tirades lately by picketing outside synagogues and JCC's. And guess what? It's legal.

The Jewish Week says, "Interestingly, Westboro’s unrestrained anti-gay and anti-Jewish rhetoric, prominently displayed in the most inappropriate settings, is not illegal – which undercuts one of the key arguments of Christian right groups that are opposing a new hate crimes law that extends coverage to victims of crimes based on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability. Jews are already covered under existing hate crimes laws dealing with crimes based on the religion of victims, and yet there’s no legal barrier to Westboro publicly arguing that the “Jews killed the Lord Jesus,” and picketing a local synagogue as well as the memorial to victims of the Holocaust. So it’s a little hard to swallow the common argument that pastors would risk arrest if the new law is passed merely by preaching against homosexuality."

So if it's okay for Fred Phelps and his church of hate to protest the existence of Jews--even when Jews are legally protected as an ethnic and religious minority--I'm sure it will always be more than okay to continue protesting gays.

I thought of that desecrated Jewish cemetery a few weeks ago when there was a bomb threat at our local JCC. All those sick, helpless feelings came rushing back, and no amount of tough words from my brother could comfort me. Fortunately, it was not an antisemite who made the threat, but just some idiot trying to get his boyfriend to leave work to talk to him because they were fighting. (Although, he probably will hate Jews by the time he's finished with his prison sentence.)

The sense of relief that every Jew in my city felt when we realized it was not a hate crime was palpable. If that doesn't clearly show the difference, what will?

(Note: Regarding the desecration of the Jewish cemetery in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I should point out that the city took the incident very seriously. The thugs were found and sentenced, and leaders from the Baptist church, Methodist church, Catholic diocese, Islamic Society, and the Tulsa mayor all joined Rabbi Marc Fizterman of B'nai Emunah in a prayer vigil after the atrocious event.)