Explaining Away the Hate
By Terry Hong
Special to AsianWeek
I want to understand hate. This is not a rhetorical statement. I want someone to explain to me, patiently and logically, how people learn to hate with such blindness, vehemence and violence. I want to know how a child can be taught to hate based on such arbitrary factors as what a person looks like, what a person might believe in or who a person might love. I want to know how that child grows up to be a hateful adult. And I want to know how it becomes possible that it is God who supposedly teaches this hate.
Last weekend, as I was driving my two young children to a birthday party in the pouring rain, I saw a group of approximately a dozen men carrying large, fluorescent placards. They were posted at the entrance of the very church where I had spent most Sunday mornings growing up. So determined were the demonstrators to make sure their message was loud and clear that these hideous signs were untouched by the downpour — the demonstrators had the foresight to seemingly waterproof them.
“God Hates Fags!” the signs screamed in various permutations.
“Oh my God!” I shouted in response. My shocked 5-year-old, who is discouraged from using that phrase, asked with great concern, “What’s wrong, Mommy?” And somehow I had to explain that the people with the signs had written “not nice” and “mean” messages on their posters, that they thought that God didn’t like a certain group of people. Ironically, back at home visiting for the weekend was one of our closest friends, who just happened to be homosexual. I cringed, thinking our friend might drive this way.
“But Mommy,” my daughter said, “God loves everybody. That’s why he’s God.” And I thought to myself how grateful I am for the innocence of my children. And I silently prayed that my children would never lose that sense of God’s unconditional love.
I’m not a religious person. Disappointed with dogma, I left the Catholic Church years ago. My husband and children attend a non-denominational Christian church on a fairly regular basis. When our children get older, we plan to expose them to other religious choices, as my husband was so exposed. The son of a United Church of Christ/Congregational minister who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and Gloria Steinem, my husband and his siblings were taken to synagogues, Muslim temples, Buddhist services, as well as various Christian houses of worship. My father-in-law wanted his children to have a choice about other religions. In so doing, he taught them so much about tolerance.
How do we teach tolerance today in a world so filled with hate — hate that happens in the name of God?
The Palestine/Israel conflict is on the front page of every newspaper nearly every day. Two groups of people, who share a common ancestry that once included a common God, diverged in their beliefs some 5,000 years ago and continue to this day to kill each other in the name of their different gods.
In Gujarat, India, a report with information gathered in late March by a group of women activists is surfacing, documenting the hideous violence, especially the sexual torture and mass burning of Muslim girls and women by uncontrollable Hindu mobs. All in the name of God.
Take a worldwide poll, and the hate and violence seem endless. Look back just a decade — there’s the continuing violence in Northern Ireland, the Hutus and the Tutsis in Africa and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Serbia. And think back to the Matthew Shepard tragedy in Wyoming, with the same placards outside the Laramie courthouse eerily duplicating the “God hates fags” signs.
Which brings me back to last week. My daughter had the final word. After mulling over my dismay, she said with such amazing clarity, “But Mommy, God loves those hating people too.”
Terry Hong is a freelance writer based in the Washington D.C. area.
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