Intolerance and Deafening Silence

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I want to begin my letter with a short story, a story about my grandfather.

My granddad once told me that the luckiest day of his life was the day he met my grandmother. He just couldn't believe his eyes when he saw her, nor could he believe his luck when she agreed to go out with him. Imagine his joy when she agreed to marry him. It was a marriage that lasted more than 60 years.

But it was not easy. You see, my grandfather was Catholic and my grandmother was Baptist, and they lived in a time and a place when Catholics and Baptists hardly spoke to one another, let alone married each other.

One Sunday morning during mass, the priest began a sermon about marrying out of the faith and how it was counter to God's word. Well, my grandfather said he always knew baloney when he heard it and he knew who this particular baloney was aimed at.

So he stood up in the middle of the sermon, put on his hat (a particularly Catholic sign of disrespect) and walked out. it was a foolhardy act of him the wonderful person that he was.

But if there was one thing that bothered both my grandparents during those years, it was the silence they faced. Many people in town simply refused to speak with them. That they could deal with.

But what they couldn't understand was how people they considered friends would not speak out in their defense or on their behalf when others would condemn them. Fifty years after he first heard that silence, It was still ringing in his ears when he told me about it.

I thought of my grandfather's act and the silence he heard when I saw a group of young people protesting in front of Memorial Church the other day. They were demanding the removal of the Rev. Peter Gomes because he said that he is gay. These people would have no part of him in their world and now they wanted us to have no part of him in ours.

Well, they're wrong. And it's time people told them so.

As a straight, white, middle class male, I couldn't care one bit about Gomes' sexual preference. Nor is it really any of my business, or even my right, to judge it one way or the other. I don't believe it makes a bit of difference about how he does his job.

Until recently many of the people now protesting his presence probably supported it. Nothing has changed in that time except we now know Gomes is gay.

So?

That's like protesting because of his hair color, way his teeth might crook, or the presence of some unknown birthmark. Like his sexual preference, none of these things make any difference in Gomes' ability to do his job.

As to the claims of "biblical truth," well, it's hard for me not to remember what that priest said about my grandparents' marriage 70 years ago. We must always be wary whenever anyone proclaims "The Truth" as their ally, especially when that truth purports to be God's truth.

It would seem to me that in these very troubled times, Gomes is exactly the sort of person who should be leading religious community. A person of courage, of integrity, and more importantly, of honesty. These would seem to me to be far more important spiritual values than the narrow religious fundamentalism espoused by those opposed to Gomes' presence.

The people who disagree with Gomes' sexual preference have every right to their beliefs. But they have no right to tell me what mine or Gomes' should be. Or to judge. I seem to remember the Bible saying something about taking the log out of your own eye before trying to remove the mote in somebody else's.

A side note but not an important one. In this age of "political correctness," when a certain kind of conservatism has claimed the high ground of free speech, nothing better illustrates the "truth" behind this facade than the controversy surrounding Gomes.

This group claims that it is defending the right of people to speak their minds against the close-minded and hard-handed censorship of the politically correct left.

Yet, as we can see in this case, the real issue certainly is censorship--a censorship imposed by those who would tell us how to live our lives, what positions we can and cannot hold in society, and just exactly how we should toe the "real" politically correct line.

Which brings me to my last point--silence. Now is not the time for silence. This is a crucial issue not only for Gomes, but for the entire Harvard community. Those of us who support Gomes and his right to be who he truly is, cannot be silent.

We must speak out, regardless of the consequences. because when we speak out for Comes, we are also speaking out for ourselves and for our right to be who and what we are.

I would hate to think that when Gomes tells some loved one about what happened to him in the late winter of 1992 at Harvard, he will have to tell that story with the sound of our silence ringing in his ears. Tom Regan   Nieman Fellow '91-'92