I have an online friend named Anne. She’s a hardcore Christian (though anyone who works for a Church would fall under that umbrella for me). She’s a newly published author. From reading her website over the past year, it’s obvious her heart is always in the right place and that we’d be really good friends if she didn’t live in the middle of nowhere (Nashville) 🙂
Since much of her working life takes place in and among churches, she deals with social hot-button issues quite a bit.
A topic she brought up recently really bothered me.
It’s not Anne’s fault. All she did was pose a question to her (I assume mostly Christian) readers: Why is being gay a sin?
Some backstory: Anne’s friend is Christian and she’s struggling with her sexual identity:
… About a year ago, I decided the gay lifestyle is not what God wants for me. My only reason in believing this, honestly, is because the Bible says God made marriage between a man and a woman. I can’t wiggle or justify my way around that. Believe me, I’ve tried. I wanted so badly for God to accept me as who I was (am? thought I was? there are still a lot of unanswered questions…) and let me love who I loved. Was there really any harm in it?…
So Anne posed her question. I don’t doubt her sincerity in asking it.
What bothers me are the responses from commenters. They’re nothing new… pretty much what you’d expect to hear. A lot of people saying being gay is a “choice,” and that it’s a sin because you can’t procreate, and that being gay may not be a sin but “doing gay things” is a sin..
Basically, they say all the things that atheists have ready-made responses for. I want to start a debate with damn near every commenter and tear apart their arguments. And I want to tell many of the gay commenters that they don’t need to be struggling at all. But I can’t. So I just scream silently in my head.
Occasionally, there are voices of reason (albeit within a Christian context).
It’s overwhelming what the Church does to our gay friends. It makes me want to reach out to them more than ever and tell them things will be ok, and that they don’t need a church in their life, and that all these homosexuality-is-a-sin people are making absurd arguments, and that they’ll probably find more love from atheists than they will from other Christians.
It’s not a problem that can be fixed anytime soon.
But let me pose another question:
How can you convince gay Christians that it’s ok to be gay?
By the way, if you choose to comment on Anne’s site, please be respectful. Save any rants for here.
(via FlowerDust)