With Morality like this, who needs wickedness?

The Religious Right in America is often referred to as the “Moral Majority,” a label that implies that their sense of right and wrong should be the gold standard to which we all aspire. If you were to put it this way to a member of the Moral Majority, they would undoubtedly confirm that, yes, we should all aspire to be people of such high moral values.

These people are wrong. And I’ll tell you why.

The religious do not have a monopoly on morality. Morality is within each of us, independent, one would hope, of whatever books we may have read. To me, morality boils down to one key concept: Ideally, strive to enrich the lives of those you encounter but at the very least, ensure that your actions do no harm to others. What more do you need to be a moral person? If you live your life according to that single sentence, the world will be made a tiny bit better for your having existed. This sentence encompasses the tiniest action as well as the most grandiose. For example, to “enrich the lives of those you encounter” could mean holding a door open for an elderly woman or it could just as easily mean working tirelessly to cure cancer. Likewise, making sure “your actions do no harm to others” can be as small as not hurting someone’s feelings or as large as ending a war with diplomacy rather than nuclear weapons. These are principals that existed long before any Bible, Qur’an or Torah.

When the religious talk about immorality, it rarely has anything to do with the harming of others or with any sort of malice. To them, morals are set out not by common decency, but by God. Homosexuality is immoral. Stem cell research is immoral. Genetic engineering is immoral. Abortion is immoral. But let’s really think about these. Abortion, it could be argued, does harm to an individual if we consider the fetus to be an individual. So, for the sake of expedience, let’s concede that one. But what about the others?

Genetic engineering? Why is this immoral? Because we’re messing with God’s great design? To me, it is immoral to refrain from scientific advances that would, for example, allow wheat to grow in famine-torn areas that it otherwise would never survive in. Is preserving God’s perfect design more important than making sure that 100,000 children don’t starve to death?

Stem cell research? This has the possibility of replacing damaged or diseased organs. It has the possibility of curing cancer, Parkinson’s, ALS, Multiple Sclerosis. In short, it has the possibility of saving millions of lives every year. But it is immoral because it uses cells from embryos? These cells are not taken from embryos that have any chance of ever becoming a living creature. Nor are embryos kept from becoming living creatures so that we can use them for the research. We are simply making use of something that would otherwise be discarded to try to help millions of people. How in the world could that ever, ever be immoral?

Finally, a subject I have a lot to say about: Homosexuality. No one has ever been able to explain to me what makes this immoral, save for saying that God says so. A few relatively obscure bible verses condemn homosexuality as immoral, an abomination, even. Something so terrible must do harm to countless people, destroying lives across the world on a daily basis. Well, not so much. Remember that, ideally, living your life by morals would involve enriching the lives of others. Is there anything more enriching to someone’s life than being loved? It doesn’t matter if it’s a man loving a woman or a man loving a man. To be loved, especially reciprocally, is perhaps the most wonderful feeling in the world. Would the person doing the loving, then, not be doing a great and wonderful thing that leaves a small part of the world better for their having been there? How could that be immoral?

Ah, but what about the other aspect of morality, wherein no harm is done to others? That one is even easier. I have never in my life been adversely affected by any two people being in a relationship of any sort. I assume that the majority of the people I pass on the street have had sex with someone and, yet, it in no way affects my life at all. Nor, I’m sure, is anyone else they pass on the street affected in any way by who they may have had sex with in the past or to whom they are attracted. They live their lives and I live mine, each of us in our own way. Just as a heterosexual Christian couple’s relationship has no bearing on how my life is lived, nor does the relationship of a gay couple.

Make no mistake, though. True immorality is easily evident; harm is being done. Just not by who you think. For example, when a person is murdered, no logical person can say that the killers are moral people. But, too often, people are killed just because they are gay, killed for their “immorality.” Then their funerals are picketed, their grieving families guilty by association of the crime of homosexuality. The goal of these picketers is to let a mother in mourning know that her son deserved to be taken from her and, moreover, that he will reside in Hell for all eternity, never knowing peace, because of his “wickedness.” These people are the wicked. They are intentionally doing harm. The killers, of course, no one could disagree on that, but also the picketers. They actively seek to intentionally do harm to people who have never harmed them, who maybe have never harmed anyone.

To be fair, these are not common examples. Your average Christian does not picket the funerals of homosexuals and they certainly do not kill them. Rather, these are people who use their religion to justify their own bigotry. They stand as examples, though, that morals do not come from a book. Morals come from within yourself, from your experiences, from a basic understanding that people should live together as harmoniously as possible.

No, more often the “moral majority” perpetuates it’s wickedness in the voting booth. These self-proclaimed guardians of righteousness seek to do harm to the Gay community by depriving them of rights, just as their forebears deprived African-Americans of theirs for far too long. They seek to ban them from joining in legal marriage to one-another, to keep them from adopting children. They slander and defame all gays as immoral. They speak of a “gay agenda” that can only be the product of a paranoid insecurity. They warn us that gays getting married is a threat to the very concept of marriage, as if the only thing keeping most men with their wives is the fact that they cannot legally marry the mailman. They warn Americans that gays are trying to indoctrinate our children into their way of life, no doubt imagining big gay recruitment drives. THIS is what wickedness looks like. This, my friends, is intentionally doing harm to others. This is a widespread attempt to diminish the happiness of an entire people because their emotions are condemned by a book.

Homosexuality’s detractors claim that it is a choice, that a person would choose to live their life in such an inhospitable environment, in fear of being beaten or killed for that “choice” or of being cast out by their families, disenfranchised at every turn by a country run by the “moral majority.” I deny that there is a single gay person, man or woman, who has made that choice. But what if it were a choice? What if homosexuality were nothing more than a conscious decision on the part of it’s participants? It would not in any way change the fact that they are people, living their lives as they see fit, and not affecting anyone else with that decision, that’s what.

For those of you who assume that I, myself, am gay: I am afraid that you’ve missed the point. I am not. I don’t have to be gay to see that there is nothing immoral about that aspect of their lives. Nor do I need a book to tell me how to live my life morally. I am an atheist and I have never raped, murdered or intentionally harmed anyone.

I have no God, I have only my judgement and, yes, my morals.




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