The forbidden third

Here comes June: the rainbow flags, the parades, the anthems of Pride Month, certain it was all born yesterday. It was not. Strip away the hashtags and underneath sits one of our oldest stories: how the hunted learn to hunt.

How the hunted learn to hunt

History keeps an unflattering ledger. The freed slave who, the key barely in his fist, buys a slave of his own. The Christians thrown to Rome’s lions who, once at home in Rome’s palaces, lit fires of their own. I do not exempt my house; the pattern belongs to no creed. Nietzsche called it ressentiment; history calls it routine. The newly unchained forget, the instant they are loosed, how the chain felt. The persecuted becomes the persecutor. It is the oldest plot twist we know.

And conquest is not always by sword. There is a quieter war for the inside of your head, fought with curated feelings and half-quoted verses, until disagreement is re-filed as sickness and the argument is won before it is held. The sword takes your body. This war comes for your assent.

The present tense

Which brings us to now. The LGBTQ movement once asked, with every right in the world, simply to be left in peace: not jailed, not beaten, not blackmailed. Its loudest quarters now demand more, upgraded with no vote taken: from tolerate me, to celebrate me, to agree with me, out loud, or be my enemy. To hesitate is to hate. The sentence “I love you, and I see this differently” is no longer allowed to reach its period. You are with us, or against us. There is no third choice.

There is the tell: with us or against us is not an argument; it is a fence built around the absence of one. Every power that ever feared a question has used it, because the surest way to stop people thinking is to convince them thinking is treason.

Ask what happens to whoever refuses. For ten years, a florist named Barronelle Stutzman served a gay customer, Rob Ingersoll. She knew him. She liked him. She arranged flowers for him and the man he loved. Then he asked her to design his wedding, and she said the one word the new creed does not forgive: no. Not no to him, for anything in her shop was his, but no to the ceremony her faith could not bless. The state sued her personally, home and savings at stake, until the grandmother closed her shop. Her crime was never hatred. Her crime was the middle.

And the movement devours even its own. Martina Navratilova came out in 1981, when it cost her millions, and spent forty years championing gay rights. In 2019 she asked one question, whether it was fair for trans women to compete against women, and the LGBT charity on whose board she sat expelled her and pronounced her a bigot. It was never about who you are. It is about what you affirm.

The refrain completes itself. Yesterday, the gay man blackmailed out of his livelihood; today, the florist sued out of hers, the pioneer expelled from her own parade. The persecuted have become the persecutors. The whip changed hands. It never left the room.

So when a movement forbids the middle, walk straight toward it. What lies buried there is usually the truth.

The man who refused both chairs

There was once a man who refused both chairs. Hunted to death while holding all the power in the world, he declined to use a particle of it to hunt back. The cross is the one place where the persecuted refused to become the persecutor. So let me stand in the place I am told does not exist.

What if Jesus met a gay man today?

Both camps script the scene: a Jesus who blesses on cue, or one who thunders on command. Both are forgeries. Reason instead from the encounters we have, and the pattern never breaks: closeness before correction. He ate with people the respectable would not touch; the shared table was mercy spoken before a word. He met the Samaritan woman at her well, a woman of five husbands and a sixth man who was not, and opened by asking her for water. Her guest before her judge. Grace arrived first. Always. The truth came from inside the love, never as the ticket price for entering it.

So the answer is neither he would affirm nor he would condemn. He would approach. He would sit and eat. He would give the man a dignity so total he would never doubt he was loved, and speak whatever truth he had from inside that dignity.

The loneliest choice

That is the third choice, and it is the loneliest, which is how you know it is real. No parade marches for it. Here in Lebanon, my state chose the stone: Article 534 still threatens a year in a cell and men are still blackmailed through their phones; when deputies moved to strike the law, the answer was a chorus of clergy. I refuse that stone as completely as I refuse the megaphone. A faith that keeps the commandment and discards the person does to the gospel what the slogan does to the verse: keeps the half that flatters it and cuts away the rest.

He stood between the woman and the stones before he said “go and sin no more.” He never reversed the order.

Neither, God help us, may we.