Dear Mrs Court,
I’ll start by apologising. I’m not a sports fan so, until your recent spate of negative publicity regarding your comments about sexuality and marriage equality legislation, I had never heard of you. However, thanks to Wikipedia and a few tennis-minded friends, I have discovered since then that you were/are viewed as something of a big deal. Arguably the greatest female tennis player of all time – and I like to keep up on Aussie legends so I’m disappointed we had to meet under such poor circumstances.
I have read the interview you gave of late to The West Australian and the article you penned there-after in The Herald Sun. I am a homosexual male – and no doubt this makes you want to offer up a prayer or two. Well… possibly not! Despite your remarks that the Bible is a book of love and community, your views on homosexuals and their position on earth, let alone within polite society, verges on the violent.
Your grammar where the LGBTQI community is concerned is rather bleak – you have to admit. Nouns such as “minority” pop up an awful lot. And Lord knows in Australia we find minorities such a mealy-mouthed lot. Hecklers really, who exist to facilitate red tape in the face of the day-to-day work of good honest battlers. The folk who run the country and go off and win Grand Slam Titles and the like. If you’re down and out in Australia, be it in the face of basic logic, science 101, common decency, simple human compassion… well down and out in the face of anything beyond Western Christian Theology – we’re not terribly interested in hearing from you. You’re something of a blot on the lucky country.
But Mrs Court, your vehemence about the nature of the homosexual community I find rather astounding. We sound a very covert lot as you would have it. Underground meetings to plan conversions of school yards via nationalised hypnosis could be de rigueur. We are simultaneously victims of Australian moral decline but also at the root of the problem.
This leads me to a question that is simple, but in my moral decline I believe to be important.
Mrs Court, do you know any homosexual people?
I live in Sydney, within a block of Oxford Street. I’ve included a Wikipedia link if you’ve never heard of it. I am an active presence in the LGBTQI community and proud of who I am, outrageous colours and all. Before you offer up another prayer, the point of this is that I know many a homosexual, and I have never once attended an underground meeting.
Homosexuals are a weird mob, I will be the first to say it. We are a very diverse group. The International Right Wing Christian media paints us as paedophiles, rapists and moral degenerates. Well, Leviticus, when taken completely out of context, says so! The truth of the matter is that our greatest flaw is our own neurosis – and Mrs Court you try coming out to your National Party member Catholic family in country Queensland and see if it doesn’t mess you up a little!
Beyond our tendency to embrace hypochondria and melodrama, we are quite normal folk. Teenage couples fumbling and bumbling coltishly and discovering what it’s like to have another person be more important than you, kissing adorably in corners and breaking up over the phone with too many tears. We are people in our twenties, struggling to make the rent as we study and climb the corporate ladder and explore the social scene and begin to discover just who we are as people. We are lovers embarking on a journey of self-doubt as to our capacity to be there everyday for someone who our body tells us we cannot live without. We are inner-city retail snobs. We are baristas and train drivers and corporate executives and used car-salesmen and tour guides through the Daintree.
We are even elite athletes.
We are in our fifties, and having lived together through fights, and kids, and mortgage payments for the last thirty-odd years – we wouldn’t mind the other buying an engagement ring and having the laws of the land our taxes pay for recognising the right of it.
I personally am about to hit the ripe old age of twenty-seven. I am not at all representative of the LGBTQI community norm. Though, that said, I defy anyone to find such a thing! You, though Mrs Court, believe there is a standard and that we all fit the mold. We are morally bankrupt and not of the light of Christ.
I spoke once to an Anglican Minister who was openly gay. I was raised in the Catholic faith and struggled mightily when, as I arrived at puberty, I began to have feelings for people of the same-sex. To my body it was always the most natural and effortless thing. But I knew my Bible, and I knew my parents disapproved enormously of such things, and the pastor of the religious High School I attended prescribed me prayers and verse and instructed me to atone for my mortal soul and God would lead the way.
When I said this to the aforementioned Anglican Minister, he shook his head benevolently and said “what a lot of rubbish we do go on with!” He then went on to explain to me that God made my body in his image. They were words I had heard before but never in that context.
Mrs Court, I can only admire your description of the Bible as a document of love. I have studied the historiography of the Bible and the history of various Western religions and the development of them in our society to the extent that I can, sadly, only view Christianity as an organisation devoted to profit, prejudice and violence. In this sense I am not unlike yourself. I have very few Christians in my life these days – and that’s absolutely by choice. I am so horrified by the organisation they belong to that I actually don’t want them around. They make me uncomfortable.
You have done the same with homosexuals – this much seems clear.
I would like to suggest that we both change this.
My opinion of humanity is high in the sense that I believe we are a loving species. We prefer an attitude of tolerance and non-confrontational behaviour. A smile and a bit of hand holding is our thing.
Go out and meet some homosexual men trying to find the one, Mrs Court. Go out and meet a lesbian couple and let their children talk to you. Actually let them talk to you about their day-to-day lives and what family and what marriage means to them.
Your opinion may or may not be changed. As a former Catholic, I know just how deeply ingrained the bigotries of religion are.
My own Mother was out of my life for sometime because fifty years beforehand a nun had told her that who I was as a man was an abomination before God. And rather than embrace her son and feel him unchanged in her arms, hear him unchanged, see him go out and live proudly and happily – she listened to this nun who used to throw chalk and blackboard dusters at her, and, she believed her.
Today I cannot help but wonder how many lives you have similarly disrupted and harmed. Like I said at the start of my letter, though I was unaware of you, you are a sporting legend, and in Australia we respect that mightily.
Walk now into the households you have damaged, and for how many years?
Intentional or not Mrs Court, you have inspired a lot of fear these last few months in the minds of some very young and very frightened people – who only want to love as their bodies are telling them and to know that that is all right.
I won’t begin a debate with you about whether that is all right. I am happy to discuss that with you in any forum. But for now let’s agree to disagree.
I have loved as my body has told me and I feel right and proud about myself as a homosexual man. As a mother of four, I can guarantee you feel the same about life as I do now – as much as that idea may appall you.
In return for you meeting some run of the mill homosexual folk and letting them have a chat and a cuppa with you, I will be less judgmental of my Christian brethren. A friend of mine named Patrick, recently told me that he was both homosexual and a regular church-going Christian. I was flabbergasted! And yet he told me he had the best of two communities – they both wanted tolerance and understanding and love for all. “All” understood to be made in the image of something higher, something beautiful, and all working every day to achieve something greater for ourselves as a whole.
We’re not so very different Mrs Court. And that even horrifies me slightly. I view what you have said in your article as fear based and ignorant. As a religious scholar of university degrees past, I find your interpretation of the Bible to be religiously fundamentalist and lacking in a rounded understanding of the document. It wasn’t always available in hardcover at Angus and Robertson – it has come from somewhere!
Politically I find you to be a fascist and an utter elitist. And I have no doubt that like a leopard you will never change your spots. Still, the fact remains that there are apparently people to whom you mean something. I would suggest that for the sake of your own credulity, you add some good old-fashioned facts to your rhetoric. Propaganda is all well and good. But we are living in an age now that is mightily tired of fear based tactics and dog fighting and very, very eager to see through it.
I really have nothing else to say.
But God Bless and Keep you Mrs Court.
And go meet some real homosexuals.
David Jude Allen
Xoxox
P.s. It’s time.
