Milk Murdered, Not Martyred

(9/17/09 - My Catholic column for Newman University newspaper The Vantage)

Martyrdom, Morality, and Authentic Freedom

As Will Farrell’s character Ron Burgundy had once said, “Milk was a bad choice!”

The other night I decided to rent the latest Sean Penn movie Milk; the cover promoting it as “An American Classic.” I had heard a little about it from the previews: Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to win a public service office in nineteen-seventy eight.

I usually enjoy historical films and I am all for civil rights. For what it was worth as a historical piece the writer and director did a decent job. However, there are certain moral sensitivities in the majority of humans that would rather not see certain actions. You can figure out what I’m talking about. A hand-full of scenes could have been left out.

Sorry for the spoiler if you decide to watch it after my warning, but the movie opens with the announcement by a woman that both mayor Moscone and supervisor Milk were murdered. Throughout the film it then covers the political campaigns and rise of Harvey Milk as known through his tape recorded dictation before his death. The film opens in the beginning of the seventies where he moves to San Francisco, opens a camera store, rallies the gay community to defend themselves and to activism, and by the mid-seventies he begins annual campaigns for his Castro neighborhood as district supervisor. It wasn’t until 1978 that he finally won. Near the end of the same year he was murdered.

Beyond the cultural desensitization and promotion of sin, what really agitated me to preaching (my poor wife!) was how the end of the movie portrayed his death. After a successful year of fighting a proposed law called Proposition 6 seeking to mandate the firing of any gay teachers or even those who supported gay rights Milk was sadly murdered by a fellow city supervisor. Immediately I perceived the film makers attempting to portray Milk as a martyr. Sure enough, after watching the special feature afterward one of his supporters, fellow supervisor Carol Silver referred to him as a “martyr.”

The term “martyr” has become greatly distorted in the minds of many who today misperceive the word to merely mean being killed for what one believes in. In other parts of the world some believe that they can kill themselves for their beliefs if they do so killing “infidels” – what we would classify suicide and manslaughter. The original meaning of martyr, however, meant to be a “witness” and was not intended to lead to death. Yet, in ancient times witnesses, usually of the lower class, were often tortured for the truth and even put to death for it.

This dying for truth became focalized in the person of Jesus Christ, who died for the sake of righteousness. As a Jew and follower of the Mosaic Law, in which were revealed moral laws, Christ lived perfectly and He taught that their essence was the Law of Love. At the same time, as the Redeemer of the human nature, Christ revealed the truth of His divinity so that He could reconcile humanity to God. In other words, being both human and divine, Christ became our link to God. It was primarily His witnessing to this truth that lead to Christ’s pre-ordained death, that He may become the atoning sacrifice for sin while conquering sin’s curse of death by His resurrection.

Christian martyrdom thus became an imitation of Christ for many of those united to Him ever since, dying for truth, especially in the twentieth century around the world. However, there have also arisen many imitators or distortions of martyrdom, like suicide bombers and those murdered for their beliefs and practices. Those murdered for unrighteous beliefs and practices clearly opposed to the Moral Law cannot be called martyrs.

A man like Harvey Milk is an odd case. In one respect he fought for civil rights, against job and housing discrimination against the LGBT community. It is right that they should not be denied employment and housing as long as their private lives do not interfere with their professional lives, as should be the case of anyone, as everyone needs to support themselves no matter where they are in their spiritual lives. In the complexity of the “gay rights” movement we find a mix of a fight for legitimate rights while also a desensitization of the culture to a lifestyle of sin. This movement is not equivalent to the various Women’s Suffrage movements (to vote, against domestic violence, equal pay, etc.) or African American Civil Rights, neither of which typically involve the promotion or desensitization to inherently evil actions.

Many philosophers will point out that the term “freedom” has also become greatly distorted in the minds of many as though meaning the ability to do whatever one pleases, so long as it doesn’t “hurt” someone else. That definition, many will point out, more accurately fits the term “license,” which also implies a lack of personal control in various aspects of one’s life. This confusion in terminology is due, in large part, to the moral decline of society with a modern democratic notion of rights as conflated with licentiousness. Thus many people lack control in their sexual lives, and this is not just concerning those same-sex desires, but also those involved in pornography, fornication, adultery, incest, pedophilia, rape, etc. The greater one loses control and the worse sins become when one allows themselves to lose control in the first place. When people do whatever they desires they are no longer “free” but become “slaves” to sin.

Authentic freedom, many philosophers call attention to, is being free “to do what is right.” However, due to the human problem or Original Sin and our tendency not to do what is objectively right, we need a quality “moral formation.” For example, a child will take the toy of another child as his own if he can get away with it. The parent must form the child to understand the concept of personal property. For without such moral formation, whether through parents or society, that child will grow up to become a thief. One’s social moral formation involves self, casual, and sexual interactions. In being properly morally formed one finds authentic freedom in being fully human, where we act according to how we were designed.

We were not designed to eat certain things that are poisonous for us, and thus we are not free to eat them. We were not made to murder people and thus we are not free to murder. We were not made to have sex with any or every person we please, and thus we are not free to do fornicate, rape, or commit incest, etc. We are to respect the design of our physical selves, our social selves, and our sexual selves. Still, some of us in this life are racked with various temptations, such as homosexual temptation, which is hard to understand when one has not had a good moral formation. Yet, some people are spiritually conflicted, desiring God but attached to sin, and the confusing voices of anti-God cultures do not help when they claim that certain sins are “okay.”
It is one thing to be tempted; the Church teaches us that that is not a sin. The sin comes when one knows something is evil and acts upon the temptation anyway. We were not told of Harvey Milk’s moral formation, but still, the film Milk is a bad rental choice as it condones sexual immorality and magnifies it by representing Harvey Milk as a martyr. He was not a martyr. Sadly, he was murdered.