Arguments can be made on either side about the likely war with
Iraq. However, it's regretful that the leadership of the
Metropolitan Community Churches - the world's largest gay and
lesbian Christian body - have issued a statement about Iraq that
suggests American aggression is the true villain. Titled A Call for
Peaceful Resolution to Conflict with Iraq,
the statement begins:
Today America and Britain stand poised to go to war against the nation of Iraq and its people. Over the past 12 years international policies toward the Iraqi government have vacillated between support for Iraq in its quest to suppress opposition forces to vilification of the Iraqi nation as the personification of evil.
We call upon all people of faith and people of goodwill everywhere, especially our sisters and brothers in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities who know first hand what it means to be vilified, labeled and violently attacked, and who also know how difficult it is to survive under such circumstances, to join with the friends and members of Metropolitan Community Churches to oppose any further acts of aggression against Iraq.
Well, excuuuse me. But even if the MCC elders don't believe Saddam Hussein's regime of mass murder and his attempts to stockpile weapons of mass destruction represent a threat to the world, do they really think it's the Iraqi people our government is vilifying so that they can be "violently attacked" in "further acts of aggression against Iraq"? I have seen nothing that seeks to degrade the long-suffering people of Iraq; it is clearly the totalitarian regime headed by Saddam Hussein that is being presented - with a good deal of hard evidence - as an ongoing threat. The goal is regime change, which would liberate the people of Iraq.
The left likes to claim that this will be a racist war because the
Iraqi army is non-white (if Arabs are non-white, are Jews?). While
MCC doesn't use that phrase, it lurks behind the charge that the
war will be an attack against the Iraqi people, with a strained
equivalence made to gay-bashing in the U.S. Give me a break.
MCC tells us the war will not "promote the equitable
distribution of resources" and instead will "divert international
attention and resources from more critical issues including world
poverty, a rapidly deteriorating ecological destruction, and
oppression of too many of the world's peoples." This is stale
leftist cant, implying that the war wouldn't make the Iraqi people
freer (and allow them to participate in the world's market economy,
making them richer), but instead would lead to more oppression and
poverty. "We must stand together unequivocally for peace," state
the MCC elders. But there are times when passivity in the face of
evil is not a righteous act.
--Stephen H. Miller