LEAP OF FAITH
Michael Coren describes his change of heart on same-sex marriage, in an excerpt from his new book, Epiphany,
Igrew up in an intensely secular home on the edge of London, England. Three of my grandparents were Jewish, but my mother’s mother — and it’s the maternal line that has to be Jewish — was not. My parents weren’t only secular, but as Jews or “sort of” Jews, they had known even in generally tolerant or indifferent Britain what discrimination was like.
This was the 1960s and ’70s, and homosexuality was mentioned only in whispers. When people like my parents used the word queer — which was pretty much the only word used for gay people — it was from them less pejorative than descriptive.
The only acceptable face of homosexuality was on television, with comics camping it up and playing effeminate stereotypes all the while assuring their public that in real life they could barely keep their pants on when an attractive woman walked past. They were, of course, all gay men off camera but never the caricatures they created on TV. If they’d revealed their secret, their careers would probably have been over.
From a working-class home, I was propelled into university and then into London literary society, where I first encountered, at least in its inchoate stages, a proud and openly gay community. My first book, released in 1984, came about with the help of a highly respected and extremely gay theatre critic named Jim Hiley, who had very kindly recommended me to a publisher. There was no other way a 25-year-old would have landed a book contract.
Then I went to work at the New Statesman, the country’s premier left-leaning magazine, when the late and great Christopher Hitchens still was on the staff. Ours was a masthead full of privately educated, clever, good-looking boys all seduced by socialism and many of them ambivalent about their sexuality or openly gay. Homosexual influence was everywhere we looked, but still outside of specific areas none of us dared speak its name, or at least said it just a little too quietly.
In1985 after almost a year of instruction from a delightful if bitingly conservative priest, I joined the Roman Catholic Church, which then led and still in many ways leads the culture war against gay rights but employs more gay men than any other institution in the world. If that claim appears to be exaggerated, hysterical or malicious, I assure you that it is none of those things. Many of these men are celibate, but numerous gay priests are in relationships, which makes the whole thing even more absurd.
The Roman Catholic Church is certainly not full of hatred and homophobia but it has, as with some elements of the Protestant right, elevated the issue to a level that has no basis in scripture. Jesus never mentions same-sex attraction, lesbianism is not referred to at all in the Old Testament, the letters of the Apostles mention homosexuality only briefly, and what references to homosexuality that do exist make up a tiny, insignificant sliver of theological texts, a splash of minutiae within the primary Christian text and the basis of the Christian faith.
But the gay issue has become the prism through which myriad conservative Christians judge not only their but other people’s faith, morality and conviction. It’s tragic, reductive and destructive on so many levels. As a newly minted Catholic in Britain and then, after I married a Canadian and came to live in Canada in 1987 as a loyal Catholic journalist, I was thrown into the marriage debate and I wrote and broadcast about the issue many times, defending the doctrine I had adopted as part of my converted creed.
The issue was never a major part of my work but, goodness me, it sometimes felt like it. And I’m sure to gays and lesbians, who were understandably more interested in my views on them than my opinions on the Middle East, taxation policies or international trade, for example, I probably became something of a monster. I said some very careless things and at the very least empowered those who genuinely did have a hateful agenda.
I tried to be compassionate and empathetic in my arguments but didn’t try hard enough and because of that — and I don’t blame them — some of the more extreme gay activists insulted and abused me and even tried to have me fired. On one occasion, a leading political figure in Toronto approached the publisher of a newspaper for which I wrote a column and insisted that I be let go. My employer didn’t necessarily agree with me but he believed that my right to speak my mind was sacrosanct.
On another occasion, a gay activist contacted various companies and businesses and asked them to withdraw their advertising until and unless a television network on which I hosted a daily show terminated my contract. The various businesses did not respond and the network defended me. I was, over the years, subjected to many obscene and angry tweets, emails and letters, and threats. Not, however, anywhere near as many as I was to experience later on when I changed my thinking about all of this and had to contend with the unleashed anger of the Christian right. It was like watching a clash of ideas through the other side of the window, and what I saw revolted me and made me feel deeply ashamed.
The change, the conversion on the road to the rainbow, was incremental and multi-faceted and I don’t suppose I will ever be able to properly articulate all of the reasons, the processes and the stages. The first I realized that there was a problem was when my Christian life, my devotional life, my prayer life, kept running into obstacles, to dead ends, and to painful realizations that the quintessence of the Christ I so worshipped was and is love and that in my stance and statements concerning homosexuality I was not living that love.
I realize that to non-Christians, that might sound obscure, irrelevant or even absurd but none of this makes any sense unless you see me as someone struggling to be a follower of Christ. On a personal level, I felt as if I was being torn and battered. Honesty has to be a central plank of this book, and I say now what I have never publicly revealed before: there were times when I wept at the thought that God was disappointed in me and that much of what I had said and written had caused harm rather than good and had divided rather than united. It caused enormous inner pain.
Anybody who had read my writing, watched me on television and read between the lines may have realized what was happening, but by the middle of 2013 it was becoming obvious, at least to me. In August all of this was brought into sharp focus by, paradoxically, the Ugandan government. Yes, God bless the lunatic homophobes of Ugandan politics because they changed my life. Those people in that nation who happen to have such a biting obsession with the gay community and such a chronic and violent homophobia brought me to my senses.
Canada’s then foreign minister, John Baird, had gently and entirely correctly criticized a Kampala official about proposed legislation to further criminalize homosexuality, even going so far as to make it a capital offence.
Baird, a Conservative party stalwart who was no friend of liberals, had long been a great defender of persecuted Christians and was merely speaking up for another persecuted minority group. But instead of being thanked, he was immediately and stridently condemned by those very conservative Christian groups who had previously praised him for his work. How dare he, they shouted, criticize noble Uganda and question the country’s political autonomy and independence. Suddenly all these far-right social conservatives were pretending they opposed western chauvinism and colonial attitudes toward Africa — it would have been laughable if it weren’t so repugnant.
I was outraged at Uganda’s homophobia and outraged at the treatment of Baird, and I said so on television, on radio and in print. I invited the leader of one of these conservative Christian groups to come on to my television show and explain her anger, which she did. I asked her how she could not be revolted by the idea that people could be executed for being homosexual. She said the policy was “unwise.” I was incredulous but not rude and insisted that she was being unfair to the government minister in question and severely unfeeling toward Ugandans with same-sex attraction. This was not only murderous and barbaric, I argued, but was also anti-Christian.
The interview was watched by a few thousand people on television but by many more on the Internet as various social conservatives posted it on their sites as proof that I was becoming horribly soft and selling out. Here was the evidence that their suspicions were justified. Coren had become a friend of the gays!
I was swamped with nasty messages and abuse and all for saying what were surely the most self-evident things: it’s wrong to kill people because of their sexuality and Jesus wasn’t a fan of mass slaughter. At this point, remember, I hadn’t said that I supported equal marriage and hadn’t really said very much at all other than that people should not be persecuted because of their sexuality.
But I began to realize just how raw and how over-sensitive and angry myriad opponents of the gay community genuinely were, and I understood that the opposition to marriage equality was frequently motivated not by a sense of duty to defend traditional wedlock but by a profound dislike of gays and lesbians. Of course, not every critic of marriage equality is like this but, goodness me, those who were expressed themselves loudly and in large numbers and my experience since then has not led me to change my estimation. Excerpted from Epiphany by Michael Coren. Copyright © 2016 Michael Coren. Published by Signal/McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
It was like watching a clash of ideas through the other side of the window, and what I saw revolted me and made me feel deeply ashamed