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    The Case for Acceptance: An Open Letter to Humanity
    The Case for Acceptance: An Open Letter to Humanity
    The Case for Acceptance: An Open Letter to Humanity
    Ebook94 pages1 hour

    The Case for Acceptance: An Open Letter to Humanity

    By Robin Reardon

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    About this ebook

    Robin Reardon's second novel, Thinking Straight, is about a gay teen whose parents send him to a summer camp designed to straighten him out. The story is positive and inclusive, respecting religious belief while taking a step toward creating a safe place for people of different sexual orientations and identities within the religion called Christianity.

    The Case for Acceptance presents the rationale behind Thinking Straight. It demonstrates a process by which assumptions about sexual orientation can be examined in light of science and reason, and it presents a strategic approach to scripture that leaves it in tact while bringing it into contemporary life.

    Although some references are included, the tone of this work is not academic, and the writing style is conversational and accessible. The open letter's intent is to engender understanding and acceptance.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRobin Reardon
    Release dateApr 4, 2014
    ISBN9781310060038
    The Case for Acceptance: An Open Letter to Humanity
    Author

    Robin Reardon

    Robin Reardon is an inveterate observer of human nature and has been writing forever—childish songs, poems, little plays. More recent efforts include short stories, creative non-fiction, and novels for and about teenagers. By day Robin works as a communications manager for an international financial institution, writing, editing the work of others, and creating strategic communications approaches specializing in intranet delivery of internal communications. Interests outside of writing include singing, photography, and the study of comparative religions. Robin writes in a butter yellow study with a view of the Boston, Massachusetts, skyline.

    Read more from Robin Reardon

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      Book preview

      The Case for Acceptance - Robin Reardon

      THE CASE FOR ACCEPTANCE:

      AN OPEN LETTER TO HUMANITY

      Copyright 2008 by Robin Reardon

      Published in 2014 by IAM Books

      Smashwords Edition

      FOREWORD

      In 2008, my second novel was released. Thinking Straight is about a gay teen whose parents send him to a summer camp designed to straighten him out. You can read more about the book, including an excerpt from Chapter One, on my website (www.robinreardon.com). The story is positive and inclusive, respecting religious belief while taking a step toward creating a safe place for people of different sexual orientations and identities within the religion called Christianity.

      This open letter presents the rationale behind Thinking Straight. It’s addressed to anyone who will read it and consider its points. In it are references to facts and events as of March 2014; depending on when you read it, some of the specifics might be out of date (I hope because there has been even more progress toward equality), but the import of the letter itself remains. My intent is that it will engender understanding and acceptance.

      Contents

      From Me to You

      Expect Acceptance

      The Faggot-bag

      The only thing wrong with being gay…

      The Cards

      This section presents a method for systematic deconstruction of some major assumptions used by the ignorant and/or malicious to support the fallacious conclusion that gay equals bad.

      Unnatural

      Abnormal

      Promiscuous

      Pedophile

      There’s no need to think; I feel instinctively this is wrong

      Card Summary

      The I-beam Strategy

      This is an extremely high-level business/life model, underpinning all accepted project management methodologies and very useful in an awful lot of life situations. Think it sounds boring? Wait until you see how I apply it.

      Office Tower: Situation Changing Over Time

      Serengeti Plain: Different Situations, Same Slice of Time

      The Biggest Card

      While there are many assumptions used by the ignorant and/or malicious to condemn homosexuality, this section addresses the one that is most resistant to logic, to rational examination.

      The God Card

      Objective

      Situation

      Tactics

      Acceptance: A few suggestions

      Religion

      Marriage

      Civil Rights

      Choice

      Online References

      FROM ME TO YOU

      I am a writer. I am not a therapist or a scientist or a religious counselor, although I will draw on those and other disciplines and resources to prove my point, which is that the only thing wrong with being gay is how some people treat you when they find out. Presenting this conclusion is, in fact, the objective of this letter. And because my belief in this conclusion is so strong, I do what I can to support the acceptance by society of people who happen to have non-normative sexual and gender identities. While my fictional works as well as the focus of this letter are mostly about homosexuality, the approach applies equally to bisexual and transgender individuals. I support acceptance because tolerance is not enough. It's better than hatred, but who wants to be tolerated?

      Expect Acceptance

      What does it mean to expect acceptance? For a gay person, it means having a tremendous amount of intestinal fortitude and a determination that would put a Pit Bull to shame. Here’s an example.

      Say I’m a gay man in a conference room at the company where I work, sitting at a table with maybe five other people. It’s a few minutes before our meeting is due to start, and there’s general chit-chat going on while we wait for a few stragglers to show up. The fellow directly across from me, who doesn’t know me, addresses the table in general.

      He says, My wife has talked me into taking our vacation in Hawai’i this year, but I can’t tell one of those islands from another. Has anyone here been there, and do you have any advice?

      So this guy has put his question squarely on a personal platform, and he’s mentioned his life partner. He says he’s confused about something specific, and he asks for help.

      So I say, Actually, yes. My husband and I were there a couple of years ago. We went to three islands. I can tell you what we discovered about each of them. What do you and your wife like to do?

      He blinks at me. Your… husband?

      Yes, I say. So, what kind of tourists are you? Do you enjoy hiking, shopping, beachcombing…

      Now, if anyone at the table has a big enough problem with the fact that (as a man in this scenario) I have a husband that they create any kind of disturbance, they’ll need to be willing to stick their neck out and risk looking like an intolerant bigot. But if they’re willing to do that, I’ll have to have a very thick skin to get through it without lobbing some nasty comeback at the bigot. In fact, I’ll need a thick skin just to smile at the faces around me, even if no one says anything. Because I don't know what they're thinking. Or maybe I do. It takes guts to expect acceptance.

      The hardest situations might be those in which no one says anything directly to a gay person, but what they say is derogatory. More than once I've heard someone wonder aloud why it is that gay men are so sarcastic, as though it’s something that comes with the territory, the way female secretaries are supposed to be genetically predisposed to operating copying machines. While I would never agree that gay men are sarcastic any more than I would agree that heterosexuals are blind and stupid, I do have a theory for why sarcasm becomes the weapon of choice for many gays. If someone in a gay man's hearing, perhaps even very near him, says something about him that they consider to be uncomplimentary, but they never say it to him, that’s an indirect assault. While this is preferable to being hit about the head and kidneys with a baseball bat, it’s still very nasty treatment. It inspires either a total withdrawal or a response that can’t be any more direct than the assault. I mean, how can he respond directly when all he hears is someone saying to someone else, Yeah, you were right. He is one of them, isn’t he? [snigger]

      Since indirect is a principal characteristic of sarcasm, it’s the nearest weapon. It takes guts to use it, but it takes perhaps even more guts to say, I’m sorry, I missed that. What did you say? and then wait patiently in apparent innocence. Especially since it's not entirely clear what will happen next.

      Did I say this took guts? But back to expecting acceptance.

      The first step is eliminating cards—those nasty, virtual flash cards that homophobic bigots will flip up at anyone whose sexual identities don't match their own. You know the cards I'm talking about. You know a lot of them. I’m going to show you how I destroy them by deconstructing five of them, and then you can use the same process to destroy all the rest of them that you’re carrying around in your faggot-bag.

      Faggot-bag

      What’s a faggot-bag, you ask? Oh, come on; everyone has one. Every one of us grew up hearing insult after insult, smear after smear about how dreadful it is to be gay. I have one. And all the time gay people are growing up, they heard those nasty things. Young gay people tend to hide them in their faggot-bags so they wouldn't have to claim them. The rest of us, including gay people who hadn't yet realized they were gay, tossed them into our faggot-bags because we didn't know what else to do with them.

      When a gay man reaches the point where

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