Editor,
I commend you for printing David Martinez's letter last Tuesday. The letter is particularly apt in revealing how important it is to protect our legal protection against dangerous mind-sets of
intolerance.
It is instructive to know that, even in institutions of higher learning such as UNM, a substantial number of people operate with opinions that are relics of a darker past. Blaming different groups of people for natural disasters, human misfortunes and political blunders was once a fanatic sport, but continues to be adopted up to this day for the convenient extermination of religious, ethnic and political opposition.
In the past six years, we have witnessed many catastrophes such a mind-set can breed when let loose, for example, in the White House. Martinez blames homosexuality for the evils in this world such as earthquakes, hurricanes, AIDS, terrorism and wars, which he claims are God's tools of punishment. People who draw such arbitrary connections pretend to be living in pre-scientific times of a myopic mythological age, even though their practice suggests
otherwise.
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Martinez does not say what exactly he deems wrong with homosexuality. It suffices to blame one's homophobia on a homophobic God as a justification for one's hatred and to make the desired point. To proclaim natural disasters and man-made catastrophes as acts of God - as collective punishment by God - declares God a war criminal. George W. Bush is known to have done the same when he blamed God for his war crimes of invading Afghanistan and Iraq.
The commander-in-chief claims to be simply following direct orders from God. What sounds permissible for the religiously blind is an utter fallacy for those enlightened by reason's common sense. Martinez speaks as if people such as Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jesus never lived. From beginning to end, the letter is riddled with fallacies, the most popular of which are equating homosexuality with bestiality and the authority argument whose sole force rests in a flawed appeal to God and the Bible.
If one replaced "heterosexuality" wherever Martinez wrote "homosexuality," the letter would have the same validity - namely none. Is Martinez aware that his allies flourish in places such as Saudi Arabia where his discriminatory mind-set is free to seek its dire consequences - to round up and decapitate homosexuals? When zealots are blinded by the beam in their own eye, they get high on splinters in others. They sow strife and conflict where there need not be ill feelings at all. Thus, they do exactly what Jesus is accusing his critics of doing, telling lies and slander that lead to murder, a device which has given the devil his very name - diabolos, diaballein.
In the highest position of authority, the Bible labels such zealots "pseudo-prophets" and "antichrists." People of lesser but still dangerous importance Jesus calls "disciples of the devil." The more common cases, such as the one that authored the letter mentioned above, receive a more common description, which most of us earn at least once in our lives. Jesus simply calls them "hypocrites."
Joachim L. Oberst
UNM faculty
