Just because I take my spirituality from nature rather than from religion doesn’t mean I don’t have every respect for those who find their spirituality elsewhere. While I may not believe in a personified God…what’s in a name?
My argument is not with religion but with a predilection for sheer hypocrisy that many of its followers frequently demonstrate by denying gay people the right to not only live in peace but also within the parameters of whatever religion they choose to follow. As I have said many times…take the humanity out of religion and all you have is a dogma and ritual that are precious little more than ornamental.
In a Channel 4 Despatches program about the persecution of gay people in many parts of Africa, one interviewee made the important point that it was not homosexuality but homophobia the West brought to Africa. I agree. In particular, Christian fundamentalism has a lot to answer for.
A reader of African origin (he doesn’t say where) sent in a tragic tale on which I have based this poem, written for those gay people across the world still persecuted by socio-cultural-religious bigots who claim to speak with this ‘higher authority’ or that.
Tragically, many followers of religion put their leaders on a pedestal, accepting their bigotry as gospel. Thankfully, though, there are many others with open hearts and minds that know better.
MORE SINNED AGAINST THAN SINNING
We kept our secret for years;
no one guessed we were lovers
till one day someone
walked in on us, discovered us
making love, as people do;
hours later, someone set fire
to our home, thinking
we cowered fearfully inside
but already we had found
a place to hide, yet knew we’d be
tracked down, only a matter
of time before human decency lost
and religious bigotry won
Why should we be on the run,
who had done no harm to anyone,
lovers who just happen
to be two men, forced to live
on borrowed time in a community
corrupted by religious bigotry?
Spawn of the Devil they call us,
so-called Christians who, in their turn,
can but call on Leviticus,
conveniently forgetting how Jesus
came to bring Light,
to the world, not Terror serving
some darker power
No hungrier for power than those
who see themselves as better than us
who simply get on with our lives,
discovering in our love for each other
a dream that lasts forever;
no lonelier, in reality, than the teacher
tortured by self-delusion,
hell bent upon turning even the stuff
of religious conviction
into tragic illusion for having chosen
to side with its destruction…
until a sleeplessness that lasts forever
in the grip of Earth Mother
Copyright R. N. Taber 2012; 2016
[Note: This poem first appears under the title 'No Case to Answer' in Tracking the Torchbearer
by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2012]
by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2012]
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