Dinner and a Show

Apologies in advance for any offense I cause here. Let me state at the outset that I have no conscious bias against or even dislike of non-heterosexuals. I just had a friend out himself to me and nothing has changed between us. My concern is purely about the consistency of Wiccan cosmology and theology. I haven't written about this topic anywhere before and realize that I might come off as callous or worse.

The other night I went to dinner with some friends. One person at a table not far from us dropped a plate, and someone at another table began making comments, getting louder with "kids these days are worthless." A woman at the same table where the plate was dropped took umbrage, and an argument ensued. At one point I thought it might get violent. The guy who started it went into a strange tirade featuring the usual social conservative talking points about how "no one teaches kids morals these days," etc. He and his companions eventually left in a huff.

Anyway, that was the "show," since it was briefly entertaining before it got ugly.

Afterwards it took us a little while to figure out what had really happened, since dropping a plate hardly seems to be evidence of the moral decay of society. At first we thought it was a woman defending her children. We saw that she was with another woman, who had a "butch" haircut and, well... so we decided it was a same-sex couple and their kids. Eventually we realized that it was an "LGBT club" or something.

Anyway, we finally figured out that the guy who started the whole mess was a homophobe (he had a seat facing the group and had figured things out before us), and that his real beef was seeing a bunch of gay people congregating. One of my friends who had not been facing this guy had thought he was a woman with a raspy voice, and that made me ponder the idea that homophobes are often repressed homosexuals, a claim backed up by one study from 1996. That's obviously not enough evidence by itself, but it certainly explains this case. Of course who knows if it's true, but the homophobia we're sure about.

We wondered at the time why the woman didn't pick up on the homophobia, but later we realized she did. She must have dealt with this kind of thing before, which explains her immediate and strong reaction as well.

Although homophobia is certainly rampant in conservative Christianity, I find it interesting that Gardner's Wicca also considered homosexuality a deviant form of behavior at first, in keeping with the times in which it developed. And it seems to make sense as well, since Wiccan cosmology and myth deals in polarities, in fact with the coupling of a male and a female deity. But things have changed, and now most or all Wiccans seem to accept that same-sex couples can instantiate the cosmic polarity of the God and Goddess just as well as straight couples.

Given the God-Goddess polarity, this is a little puzzling to me if we assume that there weren't political motivations to this change of heart. I mean, I wonder how Wiccans would handle this separation of the physical (male-female) from the spiritual and theological (polarities) were it not for the progressive movement pushing them to do so. Suppose the movement for greater tolerance of LGBT people had never taken off. Would Wicca have become a gay-friendly religion? I just have to doubt that. Am I wrong?