Simply Put

On Thanksgiving, something happened that was so shocking and left such a strong impression on me, that I cannot avoid tackling it. I was on Facebook, “doing homework,” when I saw a certain status pop up on my news feed. This status was the single most hateful, homophobic thing I have seen in my entire life. I would reproduce it here but it contains language so offensive and so vulgar that I would not be allowed to do so.

Now it’s rare that something I see on Facebook leaves such an impact with me. But once I saw this, it was all I could think about. I realized that I had only really been exposed to progressive people in my life, people who support things like gay marriage. This represented such a severe form of culture shock that I could not turn away, so I tracked this status for about 20 minutes.

There were quite a few responses, at least 20 of them. I expected that people would be jumping to shut this kid up and defend the gay community, but I was sorely mistaken. In fact, there was only one negative response to this status — the rest were overwhelmingly positive. To me, it seemed especially ridiculous to see high school students commenting on this. After the Tyler Clementi tragedy last year, I thought that sensitivity regarding gay rights was at an all-time high at our school. Clearly though, that is not the case for everyone here.

When I see people getting so passionate about suppressing groups like homosexuals, I am always overwhelmed by how pointless it is. When it comes down to it, it will not affect anybody besides the people getting married. You are not achieving some sort of spiritual victory by doing this. All you are doing is ruining someone else’s day, to put it lightly. With all the problems in the world and all the issues out there, why would anybody prioritize ruining someone else’s day?

The other main thing that bothered me about this situation was the information these people were using to back up their ridiculous claims. Since there is basically no logical way to support gay bashing, these people responded with what seems to be the most effective method of political hate-mongering — religion. The people who commented posted about Islam’s feelings toward homosexuality and posted a video with an Islamic preacher talking about how evil homosexuals are.

As someone who views Islam as a largely peaceful religion, this especially shocked me. I don’t think these fanatics’ views are at all representative of what the vast majority of Muslims believe. However, there were quite a few people, students at this University, who were ready to use the Quran to back up claims — like how it calls for homosexuals to be stoned to death as punishment.

Like I said, I do not see this as being representative of the greater Muslim population, but there are many people who would look at this and just see a rationale for Islamophobia. It is very obvious that there is a prevailing sense of Islamophobia within this country. A 2010 Gallup poll showed that a remarkable 43 percent of all Americans admit to feeling at least a little prejudiced toward Muslims. Knowing this, the Islamic population should try to show the world that Islam is a peaceful religion. The last thing that Muslims should be doing is talking about how much they hate gay people.

This does not only affect the Muslim population, but this affects religion as a whole in the United States. Right now, there are a lot of people that do not have any use for religion. This is because of beliefs that religion goes side by side with reactionary socially conservative policies.

There is only one way to remedy it, and it is a seemingly easy way. Religious groups should focus on social issues that matter and actually contribute to people suffering. Most importantly, these fringe elements have to stop doing things like protesting in front of abortion clinics and making horrible homophobic Facebook statuses for no reason.

I know this isn't the usual stuff I write about but it's important to me. Thanks for reading. !STAY BEAUTIFUL!