Gavin Fernando and his lovely dad.
PEOPLE often ask me how I reconcile my faith with my sexual orientation.
On the surface, I’m a walking contradiction. I give up junk food for Lent, but secretly hope eligible bachelors will notice the difference after 40 days. I carry rosary beads in my pocket at church — and to the doctor’s office during STI tests.
I once went straight from the Arq dance floor to Sunday morning mass with a bottle of Jungle Juice still down my pants. You get the idea.
As the rhetoric surrounding Australia’s postal vote on same-sex marriage intensifies, you’ll be forgiven for thinking there’s no middle ground here. Those God-fearing folks detest the degenerate gays, don’t they?
Fortunately, one religious expert continually reassures me that such views are actually out of step with the Bible. That expert is my father, who — surprise! — used to be a Catholic priest.
Dad spent most of his young life training in the seminary before graduating to the church stage (yep, he out-Catholiced Tony Abbott). While he eventually left to get married and have children, religion has remained an integral part of his life.
I came out publicly in Year 7, but I never told him. Maybe I thought he was too old-fashioned, or that he’d waterboard me in holy water or something. I had no idea what his position on LGBT rights was, rendering the whole thing too unpredictable to deal with at age 12.
But far from filling me with a lifetime supply of daddy issues, his response to my coming out became one of the main reasons I still identify as a person of faith.
One evening, Dad was dropping me off at a party when — completely casually, as if asking the day of the week — he said: “Hey, just something I was wondering. Are you gay?”
I matched his tone — indifferent for indifferent — and said yes. That was that. We were good. It was more anticlimactic than a Buckingham Palace announcement, and I couldn’t have asked for anything more.
Both of us, of course, are voting “yes” on the postal vote. More than a decade after my coming out, Dad has remained one of the biggest champions of marriage equality I know.
When the Lyles and Tonys of the world appear on television, he goes into these loud, adorable rants about why their so-called “Christian” beliefs are an embarrassment to the age we’re living in.
“Jesus said everybody needs to love and be loved,” he says. “Everyone is equal before God. What part of that are these people missing?”
Before you counter with that word document of Bible verses you’ve pasted from the internet, an important point: Religion directly inspired my father’s acceptance of my sexual orientation.
He was in no way homophobic before I came out, but homosexuality was a foreign concept. Growing up in conservative 1950s Sri Lanka, he said the subject was never discussed, therefore it never registered in his mind.
How, then, did he process his youngest son suddenly sauntering out of the closet? His first instinct was to look to his faith, which was always a natural go-to path for him. He basically — forgive the cringe-worthy cliche — asked “What would Jesus do?”
And, at least according to Dad’s understanding of the Bible, Jesus would buy some celebratory new sandals and take a front-row seat at my wedding.
Major religious texts like the Bible are rife with contradictions. Consciously or not, these contradictions force us to cherrypick the rules and orders we’ll choose to champion and dismiss.
But I’m writing this to acknowledge that faith isn’t always synonymous with bigotry — despite the faux-piety-driven crusades we’re currently seeing in the media.
Select religious adherents may use God’s name in vain to justify their views, but as far as my father’s concerned, God is perfectly happy for me to settle down in suburbia with a nice boy who’ll put up with my bad 80s music for eternity.
Evidently he’s not alone. A recent Equality Campaign poll found that two thirds of Catholics will vote in favour of marriage equality — a figure approximately on par with the national average.
If you oppose same-sex marriage and want to make your voice heard, I won’t make fruitless attempts to stop you. But don’t pretend you’re dutifully representing a particular faith, a higher power or a specific body of people in doing so. Because you don’t. You only speak for yourself, your own views and your own personal prejudices, whatever they may be.
Regardless of the vote results, I take comfort in knowing I will get married in Australia one day, and God will be cool with it. Dad told me so.
Source: www.news.com.au
