As morality disintegrates, culture becomes ever more preoccupied with sex, especially ‘kinky’ sex. One natural consequence of this development is an increased hostility to those who stand in the way of such aberrations. In North America today, this hostility manifests itself in progressively cruder attacks on Christianity.
The most malicious attack on our traditional cultural and moral standards perhaps comes from militant homosexualism.
Television, film and theatre have opened their doors to ‘gay’ productions and media commentators feel that they must give these special attention.
”This was the season TV discovered gays,” editorialized the Toronto Star early in May.
The paper went on to applaud the fact that television had come out of the closet and presented characters who were unequivocally ‘gay’. Describing half a dozen drama series featuring homosexuals who were not freaky, weird, or dying of AIDS, the paper concluded, “it has begun to reflect the real world.”
Theatre
This ‘real world’ became virtually the only world to be depicted on the Toronto stage in April of this year.
Colin Thomas’s Flesh and Blood, a story of two brothers, one ‘straight’, the other ‘gay’, managed, according to one reviewer, “to make the humble condom a potent…dramatic symbol”; 2-2 Tango documented the ‘gay’ mating ritual. Nocturnal Emissions the lesbian. The last play seemed to ask the question, “What would the Swedish dramatist Strindberg have been like had he been a smart contemporary Canadian lesbian?” According to Jay Scott of the Globe.
In the theatre program, author and director Marcy Rogers praised strange gods; she expressed gratitude to Isis “for being such a benevolent goddess.”
In April as well, Jay Scott, himself a homosexual who has ‘come out of the closet’, reviewed a startling film, Paris is Burning, which is not about Paris at all but about Harlem, New York’s world of ‘gay’ houses.
The characters in it are mostly black or Hispanic and all of them are ‘gay’; they included transsexuals, drag queens, and a number of other curious categories of individuals, including ‘masculine lesbians’. The people filmed, said the director, could have been spiteful or angry, but their response to homophobia and racism was full of optimism and spirit. A homosexual culture can thrive, this movie implied.
Amateur performers
Then there was the dance/theatre presentation Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/the Promised Land, which opened on April 23.
For this author Bill T. Jones needed an improbable combination of extras – clergymen, and amateur performers willing to appear nude. In an interview with the Toronto Star, Jones said his mother had thought he would become a preacher because he was a loner and introspective, but “instead I became a homosexual artist who preaches through my art.” After a seventeen-year relationship, he lost his lover Arnie Zane to AIDS. He also lost his set designer, his costume designer, and one of his dancers – and he himself has tested HIV positive. As he put it, he was moved to ask whether he could believe in a God who allowed the decimation of the gay community.
Promised Land, he said, represents his vision of an ideal world “The human body is our common denominator and by having 52 nudes on stage, I’m asking people to see this commonality, yet accept our differences.”
Brent Hawkes
It was much easier for him to find the nudes than the clergy, but several did oblige., including, predictably, Brent Hawkes, pastor of Toronto’s Metropolitan ‘Church’ in Toronto which caters to homosexuals. Commented Hawkes, “I was raised a fundamentalist and told that homosexuality is a sin…I want to get the good news out there that it’s okay to be a gay and a Christian. I want everyone in the audience to hear it.”
Rober Everett-Green, reviewing the resulting performance in the Globe, called it “sprawling inquisition of the nature of grace, the price of freedom and the wages of bondage.” One of Jones’ own comments made it clear that his supposedly earth-shattering magnum opus was not free from banality: “Standing naked before your community is a life-changing experience. No one will ever look at you in the same way again.” But what more can be expected from a pseudo-artist who has reduced Dante’s vision of paradise to 52 nude bodies on a stage? Meanwhile, what should be noted is all the space this man gets in the Arts columns of the media.
Native Canadians
Mr. Jones’ presentation is tame stuff compared to a Canadian play, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. This featured a virtuoso performance by the Indian actor Graham Greene, recently acclaimed for his depiction of a noble savage in the Oscar-winning film Dancing with Wolves.
Female reviewers of the play found the contempt for women in it hard to take; Bronwyn Drainie of the Globe thought that its central theme – the destructiveness of patriarchal Christianity and the need for human regeneration through female spirituality – was confusingly presented.
Still, she praised the producer for bringing the play to a Toronto audience and commended rather than condemned scenes involving blasphemy and sacrilege. Wrote Drainie: “When a character calls bitterly on God to come down from his/her throne to view the suicide of an idealistic young native boy, we next see God in her burlesque spangles slowly revolving on a toilet. That takes guts.”
Just as bad as its presentation of a parody God was the play’ use of a crucifix for a revolting act, a deliberate desecration of one of Christianity’s central symbols.
After Star columnist Gary Lautens had proved that not all newspapermen have lost their sense of decency by criticizing the play for its violent language and vulgarity, its author, Tomson Highway, responded that Lautens’ attitude to human sexuality: “perpetrates…the legacy left us by the Christian clergy in their teachings that the human sexual organs are ‘instruments of the devil,’ that the human sexual act is an act of evil, an act of filth.”
As anyone who has ever attended a Christian wedding knows very well, this is the merest twaddle; bride and groom are exhorted to cleave to each other and become one flesh. It is a good example of a familiar technique employed by second- and third-rate satirists: create a caricature of the object you wish to attack, and then ridicule the object for possessing the qualities which you yourself have falsely assigned to it.
Any old lie will do to attack Christianity, and blasphemy, apparently is its own defence.
Anti-Christian vulgarity
Still worse, if possible, appeared in a display at the Nickle Arts Museum at the University of Calgary.
The exhibit under discussion, entitled “The Castration of St. Paul,” consisted of thirty photocopied snapshots of penises. Underneath each was the name of Noah, Moses, Job, various Christian saints, and even Christ Himself and God the Father. The group of twelve art students responsible for the show said it was meant to funny; art historian David Bershad replied, “It’s not poking fun; it’s throwing excrement on what many people cherish. I’m sorry to say that I work at an institution that promotes and encourages it. It sickens me.”
In his Westview column in the April 15 Western Report, Ted Byfield called the display obscene, blasphemous, juvenile – and the worst example of ‘politically correct’ sermonizing. Why could you attack the Christian religion with impunity, he asked, while jokes about homosexuality (say) are considered hatred”?
Professor Eric Cameron, head of the university’s art department, provided an answer: “We cannot accept attacks on Jews, women or other identifiable groups,” he explained. “Those people have no control over who they are. People do, however, have control over beliefs, so attacks on religion are permissible.”
As Mr. Byfield pointed out, this excuse was stupid beyond belief . The Cameron doctrine would allow one to ridicule the culture and customs of native Indians, since they had the option of rejecting such things. Similarly, it would silence the entire feminist movement, whose central target is the behaviour of men – who clearly do not choose to be males but simply are born as such.
A society at war
In his letter from the publisher on April 1, the Western Report’s Link Byfield had said, “You may not have noticed, but we are a society at war.” It is an ugly war, he declared because it is a religious one – between those who worship God and those who worship Self. The most militant propagators of selfism are politically extreme homosexuals, “who worship their genitals,” and extreme lesbian-feminists, “who (I gather from their incoherent writing) worship their ovaries.”
Unless people go back to real churches and worship the real God, Link Byfield concluded, the plight of our nation is going to get worse. His father Ted added his own ironic comment.
Those who protested against this absurd exhibition were not all Christians. A Calgary rabbi discerned it in an attack on all religions. Whether it is a fire bomb hurled into a Jewish funeral chapel (as happened while the exhibition was on) or sophomoric ridicule hurled at God through an art gallery, he said, the common denominator is hatred of religion. A Muslim protested as well.
Pluralism and Christianity
We are constantly being told, Mr. Byfield continued, that Canada is no longer a Christian society but a pluralistic one, and therefore Christian valued cannot prevail; our public schools, for example, can no longer teach a common morality.
Yet 95 per cent of our new arrivals, in whose name we have abandoned morality, are disturbed by its absence.
Their arrival has been fraudulently used by our makers of public opinion to justify a shift into liberal relativism which is as offensive to Muslims, Sikhs and observant Jews as it is to Christians.
All religions were under attack in Calgary, just as they are in most Canadian schools.
Perhaps the minister, the priest, the rabbi, and the imam can begin to act together, in order to point out the moral and intellectual corruption in our schools, universities, and other cultural institutions.
Comment
Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.” Christ made a distinction between our obligations to society and the state on the one hand and to our church and to God on the other: the aims of civil society are not the same as those of religion.
But the Christian (to take him as example) does not lead a double life; he takes his inspiration from Christian doctrine, which has a view of man’s intrinsic dignity and eternal destiny and of what constitutes a just society. If he remains passive or indifferent when others are propagating anti-religious and anti-human doctrines, he fails in justice and charity.
War against decency
The real source of Canada’s problems today is not a difference of opinion over linguistic rights or provincial versus federal powers. It is our moral failure as a nation.
Our universities and daily papers, as the above evidence shows, are rejoicing over the prevalence of sin; they are at war with decency. The war in the Gulf was a tame thing in comparison with our war, which in the form of abortion claims at least a hundred thousand victims a year in Canada alone. And that is only a symptom, a terrible symptom of our national decay.
“Bend every effort,” John Paul II has said, “so that your laws and customs do not turn their back on the transcendent meaning of man or on the moral aspects of life.” This is a call to action – a call to which )as Ted Byfield has indicated above) Jew and Muslim and Sikh as well as Christian can respond. Only through a firm and persevering commitment to the common good can we maintain a society in which humane values have a legitimate place, instead of being consistently undermined.
