OP/ED
From Isolation to Justice:
A letter to the LGBT movement from the Next Generation
Voices from the Mountains:
Judge Not
Voices from the Mountain: Judge Not
The Rutland Herald, on May 6, 2000, printed a remarkable letter to the editor from Elisa Winter with the title “Better to refrain from judgment.” Although I’m an agnostic and Mrs. Winter a Christian, her last two paragraphs are so remarkable that I dialed for her phone number in Vergennes and left on her answering machine my grateful congratulations. Here are her paragraphs:
“If you think that gay folks are evil or sick or unnatural, I think you’re wrong, but you can believe whatever you want. But while you’re busy judging and despising and condemning, please try to remember once in a while that judging and despising and condemning are exactly the things the stone-throwers were doing. And Jesus asked the stone-throwers simply to look into their own hearts and see which one of them was completely without sin. Then and only then could a stone be thrown.
“Are you all so sure that you are so perfectly spiritually evolved that you should be usurping God’s judgment and throwing stones at the humans he loves and forgives just as much as he loves and forgives you?”
When I got her answering service and realized I could not talk in person to her, I left a message thanking her. I told her that I had a remarkable Sunday school teacher when I was a child and was especially moved to discover in her letter not only the profound love and forgiveness that is the heart of the New Testament, but that even in the Old Testament, her point is made. (The story of Job, for example, is the story of a man who became tested by God to find out if he was truly without pride and never rebelled against the will of his Maker.)
As I hung up the phone feeling clean and refreshed by even this indirect communication with Mrs. Winter, I had in front of me my clipped copy of her letter. Without thinking I printed across the top of it “Judge not that ye be not judged.”
Where had the words come from? I was repeating them from somewhere deep in my past. I came down stairs and took from a shelf three sourcebooks: Roget’s Thesaurus, a two-volume Everyman’s Library Dic-tionary of Quotations and the Crown Thesaurus of Quo-tations. No help there. Without hope, I turned to the 1941 Merriam Webster Unabridged Dictionary, and there, under the word judge, was what I was looking for in exactly the words I had written across the top of Mrs. Winter’s letter: “Judge not that ye be not judged. Matthew 7.1”
I went to the shelves and found my well-thumbed Holy Bible. Written on a blank page before the title page was this dedication: “From Mrs. C. K. Gilbert and the Sunday School.” There was no date, but I had been no more than nine years old – 80 years ago.
What a remarkable pair of books – the King James Bible and Noah Webster’s dictionary. And what a remarkable thing the computer stored in our brain! Years ago, I learned from an article in the Brown University Alumnus how a pathologist and a psychologist working together discovered the secret of memory – that in the brain are tiny wires or filaments and on those wires are bumps or follicles, infinitesimally small, recording experiences. I wrote to the scientists suggesting that they get in touch with a poet who benefits from Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling taking its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
Anyone who knows the New Testament is familiar with Jesus’s method of teaching by parable – the prodigal son, the loaves and fishes, the talents, the Good Samaritan.
My follow-up experience with Elisa Winter’s letter is a sort of nonsectarian parable, leading me to warn gays not to be self-righteous over their Vermont legislative triumph.
I am disturbed by what could be false piety now that gays and lesbians have been granted rights of civil union.
The May 1 Herald, in its front page article recording the Millennium March in Washington, placed on record the possibility that some gays and lesbians may be left out. Here we are celebrating gay and lesbian couples being awarded civil rights that formerly only hetero married couples enjoyed. Elisa Winter’s letter warns hetero couples not to grudge the rights that have been conferred against the will of many bluenose Christians.
I think we should also warn gays and lesbians not to be so proud as to overlook the fact that, besides the civil union couples, there are other gays who should not be left out of the celebration.
Mentioning a couple called to witness by the Millennium March reporter, the article recorded that they “criticized the media for using extreme images of the gay community – the flamboyant drag queens or the body piercing – when reporting on stories such as the gay rights march.”
“‘If you look around here, everyone here is pretty normal looking, but the media is going to jump on the people that are fringe elements…’”
I’m happy to say that one of the two grouchers was quick to include the “fringe elements” with faint damns: “I’m not saying they are necessarily bad, or right or wrong, but it’s the sensationalism of it.” This is a bit like the born-again Christian who condemns gays to Hell, then qualifies the damnation by claiming he himself loves them.
I think we should avoid judging gays or lesbians of whatever stripe, or we open the door to giving extremist hetero critic VT representative Sheltra and kissin’ cousin out-of-staters Randall Terry and presidential candidate Alan Keyes exactly the weapons they are seeking. Within the gay community, we ought to be charitable enough to include the whole kit and kaboodle of drag queens, bisexuals, and transvestites, along with the live-together couples. Let’s not become so pious that we leave out half the gay population in a self-conducted censorious census conducted by the “suddenly respectable” middle.
Lyle Glazier lives in Bennington, VT.