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Can gays and lesbians go to heaven? | page 1, 2
Communism? "Communism." The middle-aged women near me were nodding their heads and taking notes. In fact, everyone there seemed to be in total agreement with this seriously wrong definition. I taught English at the University of Virginia in 1997-98, and the teacher in me wanted to stand up and clarify our terms, explain that communism, as defined by Karl Marx in the 19th century and even by your basic "Webster's Collegiate Dictionary," was actually an ideology positing that the goods in a society should be "owned by all and equally distributed," essentially the opposite of the wealth and power consolidation Mavrakos was speaking of, which Marx himself warned about. He seemed to be using the word "communism" for no better reason than that it connoted all kinds of bad stuff to conservative Americans. He spit the word with the same harsh tone that he used for "homosexual," "liberal" and "Falwell." But then he got away from the liberal coverage of the Matthew Shepard case and back to Matthew Shepard, the "pervert." "What those two boys [Russell A. Henderson and Aaron J. McKinney] did was awful," he said, lowering his voice. "They deserve everything they get. No question about that." Silence from the small crowd. He then went on to explain that God indeed works in mysterious ways. "Matthew Shepard was a practicing ... an open ... an admitted homosexual. Does that lifestyle go without consequence? Can you openly defy God and escape all punishment?" A lot of head-shaking, more sighs. "He sees all things," said Mavrakos. "His knowledge is infinite, and it is arrogant of us to assume his forgiving nature. The God in this book," he said, standing in the middle of the stage, tapping the cover of his Bible, was capable of great anger over sin. More nodding from the crowd. An elderly woman who sang a long, a cappella version of "Jesus Is Love" while we waited for Mavrakos to arrive shouted, "Amen!" He went from Matthew Shepard's taunting God on to the predictable -- and I thought all but extinct -- argument that AIDS was a scourge upon sinners, a righting of a human wrong through divine destruction and suffering, somehow ignoring the fact that a large number of AIDS sufferers were heterosexual, living in the Third world, hemophiliacs, recovering drug addicts, people who contracted the disease from transfusions during surgeries, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children, infants, Christians, even Seventh-Day Adventists, I imagine. "I don't hate gays," Mavrakos said in regard to this. "I pray for them, and I pray every night for the sick. I've even had a few homosexuals in my house. I'm trying to save them, that's what I'm here to do tonight. Maybe some of you out there are struggling with this issue, with your animalistic impulses. But I can't defy God. I can't save anyone, including myself, from the judgment of God. You must repent." He tapped the Bible again. Sweat was beginning to ring the armpits of his jacket. "You reap what you sow." He shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, It's not me; it's God. Sorry, AIDS sufferers; sorry, Matthew Shepard. Even the military had decided to be "tolerant" toward the "perverts and reprobates." "The Bible doesn't teach tolerance," Mavrakos said. "Please point out to me where it says anything about tolerance, where it says, Do what you want, live how you want. Point it out to me!" Laughs from the ladies in front of me. "Now Bill and Hillary Clinton have this ... what is it? Don't say, don't know? Don't ask, don't speak? Anyway, they have a policy about ignoring gays in the service, saying it's a private matter. It makes me sick," he said, his spittle heading for the empty first row. The Tiger ended the evening with a close look at what scripture says about homosexuality, which was so confusing I'm still trying to make sense of it. He showed passages on an approximately 10-by-10-foot screen using an overhead projector that he controlled with a remote. At the top of each sheet was written "X-treme Spiritual Awareness." His method was to pull up biblical passages, most of which, in Romans and Corinthians, were written by the apostle Paul, the punitive voice of the New Testament. However, of the eight or so passages he brought to our attention, only one passage in Romans actually mentioned men being with men, and that one somewhat cryptically. All the others simply mentioned sin or lust or debauchery, but in no way were they explicitly about homosexuality, and frankly I was confused as to how exactly he was arriving at this conclusion. But maybe it was me, because the rest of the place, again, was doing that grand, unified head-nodding thing. They were in a darn good mood. We ended with a booming song of hope and praise, love and forgiveness, a triumphal dedication to the everlasting compassion of Jesus, our Savior. Mavrakos stood at the podium, bloated and red, beaming in delight at his hard-won knowledge of God's mind. I looked at the singers standing around the room: men and women, young and old, about 80 percent white and 20 percent black. There was the group of professional-looking women near me, a well-dressed elderly couple in front of them. The NASCAR guy and his wife were hugging each other and swaying. Behind me, leaning against the concrete wall, were two little girls, maybe 7 or 8, in bell-bottoms and thick-soled skater shoes with fake tattoos of crosses on their forearms. They were smiling at one another, each one missing a couple of baby teeth, singing about the Truth and the Light at the top of their lungs.
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