Donkey (photo by Antoine Moreau)

You’ve got to admire the creativity of the Jerusalem municipal official who tried to have a “donkey pride” run alongside Jerusalem’s gay pride parade this past week. He clearly loves the animals so much that he would honor them by inviting them to join Jerusalem’s much-beloved gay community in celebration. Oops, cancel that. He was attempting to put together a parallel donkey parade in order to illustrate the “bestial nature” of gays. And I thought it was a donkey-rights thing! (I guess if donkeys get rights, everyone will want them.)

Seriously, though, this homophobic action speaks volumes about at least one aspect of the nature of homophobia: the practice of reducing LGBT people to our bodies and denying us our souls. Calling someone a beast, after all, really says that all they have is brute physicality. No sensitivity. No yearnings. No pain. No God.

Reducing LGBT people to our bodies is morally wrong for many reasons, reasons that involve both justice and the spirit. I’ll stick with three such reasons in this post.

First, if sexual minorities are reducible to our bodies that must mean heterosexuals are reducible to their souls. Now many of my closest friends are heterosexual, and their souls shine through beautifully. But I am concerned for heterosexuals’ well-being if they get to have souls without really having bodies because queer folks have symbolically been embodied without really having souls. Bodies are good things. Sex is a good thing, if done within some parameters to make it sufficiently safe for all parties involved. The planet we live on is a wondrous riot of incarnation. (Indeed, any progressive politics worth its name must start with the essential goodness of fleshliness and carnality and build its platform from there.)

Oh, wait. Heterosexuals get to have both souls and bodies? That does not seem fair. In fact, that sounds a lot like heterosexual privilege to me. It also does not jibe with what I know of reality, which leads to point two.

Queer people may not all be people of faith or understand themselves as spiritual. But, having lived my own life and seen many other LGBT lives, I can attest to the fact that the process of coming out and living in a homophobic society, especially one where religion is the main meaning system that props up homophobia, gives LGBT people a pretty good crash course in spirituality. Most of us have to do quite a bit of work to either come to peace with a God we have been told “hates our sin” or find other ways to make sense of the universe. And over time, the work we do deepens our spirituality in a variety of ways, again whether or not we express this religiously. Which means, to paraphrase W.E.B. Du Bois, “the souls of gay folk” must be taken seriously, as seriously as the souls of straight folk. It is a matter of both justice and the honoring of the sacred spark in every single one of us.

Ultimately, the deepest problem underlying “donkey pride” is the implication that bodies and souls can be separated, that any of us do not have both a body and a soul by dint of our sexuality (or, as we might extend it, our race, our gender, our social class, our religion…) All forms of social inequality eventually deny the soul in its fullest glory to members of oppressed groups, whether through name-calling, economic disenfranchisement, physical violence, or even just “donkey pride.” Spiritual progressives would do well to find a variety of new ways to articulate the body-soul connection in order to most effectively show how dehumanization and devaluation are at the spiritual core of social inequality. But that is another blog post – next week’s, in fact.

In the end, the Jerusalem police offered the city official a compromise of sorts: no actual donkeys were allowed, but cardboard donkey cutouts could be set out along the pride parade route. That’s safer. No bodies, no souls. Still undoubtedly a lot of wounding, but at least the “rough beasts” get to stay out of the sun. Pity they don’t get the honor of marching alongside the queer people, though.