Petrowski versus gay pride’s rainbow
In a world that so often seems like a constantly shifting fog of chaos, it’s comforting that some things don’t change.
No matter what side of the bed you wake up on, an object will still fall to the earth at a rate of 9.75 metres per second per second thanks to the gravitational constant. And no matter if you’ve been fired or won the lottery, the internal angles of a triangle will always add up to 180 degrees.
Oh, and St. Catharines regional Coun. Andy Petrowski will inevitably say something awful. There is no equation to express that, but there really should be.
Think back to July 2015. That was when Petrowski took to Twitter to say that American President Barack Obama singing Amazing Grace on the same day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage became legal was the work of a “perverted mind.”
Through the lens of his particular interpretation of Christianity, Petrowski drew a moral equivalence between murder and gay marriage when I asked him about the tweet.
“You can’t stand for the Christian faith and say you are pro samesex marriage because Christianity deems marriage to be between a man and woman. It’s simple,” he said. “If you are now going to say, ‘I believe in murder and I call myself a Christian,’ that would be perverted. That would be twisted. It’s the same thing, the same concept.”
Many of the 130,000 citizens Petrowski represents were understandably outraged.
The ensuing political storm eventually took over a meeting of regional council — which for weeks remained shamefully silent on the issue — and saw Petrowski temporarily deactivate his Twitter account and apologize.
After all that, you’d think that Petrowski would have learned his lesson.
If you thought that, you’d be wrong. On Saturday, Petrowski went after the gay community again tweeting, “Does the gay ‘PRIDE’ community understand where the rainbow came from? PRIDE is a sin. James 4:6”
The tweet was accompanied by a photo of a T-shirt with a large rainbow on it. Under the arch, the text reads, “God made the rainbow & it still belongs to him. Romans 1: 26-27”
I reached out to Petrowski to explain his tweet and asked whether he thought this was reflective of the views of the community he was elected to represent. He did not answer my questions about the community, but denied he was attacking the gay community and quoted several Bible verses about pride and rainbows.
“As you should know, the rainbow was created by God (Genesis 9:13) as a symbol of His covenant between Him and all living creatures on Earth that He would never destroy the world again by flood. The world at the time of Noah was incredibly corrupt and perverted,” Petrowski said via e-mail Monday. “Pride, and I’m referring to selfish pride, which we are all guilty of is sin. Psalm 59:12 teaches us, ‘For the sins of their mouths, for the words of their lips, let them be caught in their pride. For the curses and lies they utter.’”
In his e-mail, Petrowski also said that my fight is “with the author of truth, Jesus Christ,” and that he “will not (and cannot) apologize on behalf of our creator.”
There is just a shocking amount of material to unpack here.
Let’s begin with the rainbow. The rainbow flag has been a symbol of gay pride since the mid-1970s when homosexuals began to assert they had the same rights as everyone else.
As an icon, the rainbow doesn’t belong to anyone.
The rainbow does appear a couple of times in the Bible. Most famously, it is a sign from God after Noah’s flood that he wouldn’t destroy the world again in a fit of pique.
But so what? As a startling and beautiful result of light reflecting and refracting through water droplets in the sky — a fact discovered by the 10th-century Persian experimental physicist Alhazen, by the bye — the rainbow can be found in a variety of mythologies.
To the ancient Norse, it was the bridge between Midgard, the realm of humans, and Asgard, the city of the gods. For the Muisca people of Columbia, the rainbow was a manifestation of a god that protected women and the sick. And if you believe the commercials, you can use the rainbow to find a bowl of sickening, marshmallow-laden cereal and steal it from a leprechaun.
This seems like much ado about nothing. So why would anyone want to take the rainbow away from gay pride? The equation is simple. If you believe the rainbow is the property of your god, and that god says homosexuality is a sin, then gay people shouldn’t use it.
And this is where it starts to get ugly.
The first Bible verse Petrowski references is banal enough. James 4:6 says “God opposes the proud but shows favour to the humble.”
The other verse, however, is deeply problematic.
Romans 1: 26-27, referred to on the photo of the T-shirt that accompanies the tweet, says that homosexuality is unnatural and shameful. That would be bad enough, but if you take the entire chapter of Romans 1 in context, it is more chilling.
The very next verses, Romans 1: 29-32, rank homosexuality alongside a variety of things that upset the deity including murder, envy, being boastful or insolent, and disobeying your parents. Based on my reading of these verses, there is but one punishment for all these infractions.
“Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practise them.”
So there you have it, citizens of St. Catharines. Your representa- tive on regional council sent out a public message claiming the gay pride movement is sinful, its rainbow icon “belongs” to Petrowski’s god, and he said these things in the context of a Bible passage that appears to say homosexuality is a sin punishable by death.
This is not acceptable in a secular democracy where politicians are elected to represent all the members of a community, not merely one interpretation of one faction of one religion. We certainly don’t elect them to propagate a message that some citizens deserve death because of who they love.
Last year, the collected will of Niagara’s politicians was nowhere to be found. Regional politicians only spoke up when it was clear the winds of public outrage were blowing against Petrowski.
This time one hopes they will find the resolve to speak out in defence of gay men and women in Niagara before they are pushed into doing so.