Sensitive experience of Dominykas Vaitiekūnas: It is sad and painful that we are considered a threat to a traditional family

Dominykas also shared this letter with the readers of Delfi.

“HOW TO LIVE WITH THE FEELING THAT OTHERS ARE A THREAT.

I will not convince. I will tell a story from the past and tell you how I feel.

I got the message that you want to be serious with me. Now. Waiting for it to arrive. I realized that it was not going to be the easiest conversation. With a small car and a pounding heartbeat on the streets of Vilnius, I entered the courtyards of one of the capital’s sleeping areas. I put the car between the two sides, I did not know how to leave, but that is not what mattered most to me then.

When I walked into the kitchen, she didn’t even look at me. He stared at the kitchen window, obviously thinking of something important. The mother of my beloved husband, who lived without cancer, standing in her small kitchen, sadly thought of me. After one of the longest pauses of my life, she was still staring out the window, offering to explain. I replied that I had nothing to explain.

Then he turned around and said that we would talk now. But looking at me from head to toe and saying it was disgusting to look at me, he turned his hateful face again and turned his eyes to me only to find a new disgusting word. I couldn’t call it a conversation I couldn’t. More like a monologue. I realized that he had called me to try to intimidate me. I am sensitive and emotional, but it is difficult to be intimidated.

I kept trying to step in and say that I understand that she is going through a difficult time right now and that she doesn’t understand what she is talking about herself. That night I learned that he was a pervert and that he had ruined his traditional family. And that I am horrified, and that I want to seize his property, and I heard a lot more news about myself before my patience ran out, and realizing that this conversation is pointless and pointless, I said I was leaving.

I started wearing shoes, but his cup of patience spilled out with a cry and he forcibly pushed me towards the apartment building staircase, finally tossing the rest of my shoe inside, and along with the shoe and the promise that it would make. anything to make me disappear from his family life and have his son have a traditional family instead of a pervert.

You probably suspect that I felt uncomfortable. Unpleasant because it was very snowy and I had no one to clean the snowy car with. Unpleasant because the car’s wheels got stuck in the courtyard of that Soviet apartment building, and I thought I’d be stuck there forever, but somehow I got out. It was uncomfortable to drive. Well, it’s a shame to see you as a threat.

It was also unpleasant when my Franciscan monk from Kretinga, my acquaintance, shouted at me in the street “Fuck you go away.”

And the most unpleasant thing I had to experience was trying to catch up on how to help a close friend who was lying in the room mixing a handful of sedatives with alcohol after her closest man, her mother, repeated her for a week. that “you either change or disappear from my life because it is abnormal because it is not in accordance with the Bible and we can no longer be a traditional family.”

It’s awkward to look another friend in the eye and hear that your mother-in-law, her boyfriend’s Catholic mother, ignored the existence of her son’s partner for ten years until she heard a different opinion from a Catholic priest. It is uncomfortable to hear your own mother cry on the other end of the phone and roll her eyes and think that she has “made up nonsense again”, and she is simply afraid of living in such a society.

Unpleasant and last week I got a message from an acquaintance that I had to turn off the soc. the media, as he has a strong desire to commit suicide this week. Disgusting last week, it was read that another teenager has to lock himself in the bathroom of an abusive father. All events and people are real. These are just a few situations from the abundance of what he has had to see around me or experience for himself.

More. We do not talk about it here, a funnier fact: the most lustful gay man she ever knew was, by the way, a Catholic priest. During the day he accompanied the believers from the church in the old city to greet me, and at night he sent me a lustful memorandum about how a woman paints a man’s testicles in St. On the occasion of Passover. I had once added a beautiful photograph of her genitals. These visual creations did not evoke my religious feelings. Realizing that our worldviews were different flooded me and ended our spiritual connection.

And no, I don’t think the entire community of believers is my enemy, and in the church, it’s only two-sided. I’m sure not everyone. I have met many great religious people. Among them are the clergy. It’s just not easy for me to trust people who profess the Catholic faith, because I’ve never heard of the homosexual nature of man “going against the faith.” For a long time the name of the church has been ridiculed by my community and the Bible is trying to show that it is a perversion. For a long time there has been an attempt to justify hatred, to oppose the faithful and LGBT communities. I am sad because of that.

And every time I hear that asserting my rights is a “threat to the traditional family”, or as the priest Tolyat wrote “just a non-traditional family account” on his Facebook account last week, I get angry because I feel like I’m in my skin and around me as The concept of “threat to the traditional family” for my community means outbursts of violence in the kitchen, punches in the hallways of the house, or silence of passive aggression in the home and fear of being treated as a threat.

I got mad when a religion teacher shared a video with me in a big gym. That “theological education” encourages people to be treated for homosexuality. By the way, these religious healing practices have existed across America, and their developers have finally acknowledged that the practice has failed, is traumatic, and the show’s developers have publicly apologized for the harm they have done to the LGBT community.

I am angry because I had to say goodbye to a good friend who went to live outside the Atlantic because “I am not going to change in my time.” When it is unpleasant to hear a Lithuanian in the world reassure his mother in Taurage on the phone that “gays will not take over the world yet”, it is unpleasant to feel that he does not know how to tell his parents that he is gay. because it will affect them so much, and even more unpleasant to hear, that it will never return to Lithuania. Because nobody expects it here.

And it makes me angry that Tomas Vytautas Raskevičius is being attacked for trying to legally protect members of the community. I am angry because you receive such messages. It makes me angry that my girlfriend has to unfollow him on Facebook because she no longer wants to see what hate speech is surrounded by the citizens of her state every day. And I wonder at least three times a day how he will feel when he is threatened or offered to be destroyed every morning. I am still angry that my community is still being asked to “wait calmly until the society is ready.”

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to wait calmly, especially when the surrounding people are being hurt, hurting, emigrating, or being afraid to speak openly about their orientation, as part of society will start to be seen as a threat. Therefore, after all these experiences, it is probably no wonder that hearing the rhetoric being propagated in the name of religion about the fact that we are a threat to the traditional family saddens, hurts and angers me.

At the same time, I understand that anger is not a good companion and is not the most direct route of communication. One of my favorite psychotherapists has said that anger, like all emotions, is like a child in a car: they cannot be locked in there, but they cannot be allowed to drive because they will cause an accident. Therefore, I apologize if I have ever captured people’s religious feelings with my reckless and scathing joke or speech. And I am sorry if members of my LGBT community attack someone or use hatred as a weapon in this fight. No one deserved to hate. Not Tom, not the priest Tolyat, not others.

On Friday, I called my deeply believing friend. Know the scriptures, know the church from within. We have known each other for a long time when I was still a priest. We have had many conversations, we may have discussed it somewhere, but the feeling has always been the same: that our values ​​are the same. And in terms of worldview, we certainly have more similarities than differences.

And his deep faith was never what would oppose us. I called and asked him how he was feeling. He said he was very surprised and angry. Jog, the efforts of the global community of believers to modernize the church and the attempt to reconcile with the LGBT community in Lithuania remain unheard and unrealized.

I asked him to explain something to me that I did not understand. I don’t understand how my civil rights enforcement threatens the traditional family from the church’s perspective? What can happen to a traditional family if the society is legalized? Even with a degree in theology, my friend replied: I don’t know, I don’t understand either.

I am sitting very sincerely now and I do not understand anything without anger. If the members of my community and I can live with dignity in this country, if they can sign a partnership agreement or even get married, please tell me, what exactly will those couples of different genders lose? What will be taken from them?

The snow has melted, and the feeling today is that I’m trying to dig in the snow with my old car like seven years ago and the wheels are spinning. And then you want a home. Where it is safe.

I will end by saying that when you lean on a loved one who is intoxicated with drugs and alcohol because it is too difficult for them to think that they are a threat to their own traditional family, the least they think about is freedom of expression. Rather, you are thinking of abusing him, “wrote D. Vaitiekūnas on Facebook.