Pro-Gay Billboards Cite Bible September 10, 2009

Pro-Gay Billboards Cite Bible

By Guest Contributor
September 10, 2009

There are some pro-gay billboards in Texas that are causing quite a stir… because they quote the Bible just as their opponents do:

gaybillboard1

gaybillboard2

gaybillboard3

It’s all part of a campaign called Would Jesus Discriminate.

Say what you will about the accuracy of the citations. It’s doing a great job of getting soundbytes from religious people:

The billboard angered [Christine] Lutz so much, that she fired off a stern e-mail. “I said how dare you take the scriptures and twist it to fit your needs,” she recalled.

My irony meter just exploded.

Pastor Sam Dennis, of Parkway Hills Baptist Church in Plano, says Christians shouldn’t hate gays. He disagrees however with the billboards’ use of scripture to back a pro-gay message. “I’m hard pressed to find that scripture advocates that it’s alright to live in a gay lifestyle. Just like I’m hard pressed to find that scripture advocates that’s it’s alright to live in an adulterous relationship or as a wife abuser or as a murderer.”

That’s ridiculous. I’m sure commenters can find plenty of examples of the Bible condoning awful things. I suggest starting at Skeptics Annotated Bible.

It’s nice to see Christians using their faith to defend homosexuality for once. These are the discussions they ought to be having in their churches — it’s relevant and it’s divisive. By just excluding gay people, churches are putting themselves in jeopardy by alienating younger Christians — not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But if change can happen within the church, it has to start from within. This is a novel, interesting way to get people thinking.

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  • Q-Squared

    Two words: FUCK YEA.

    …and I need a new irony meter.

  • DreamDevil

    If you’re Gay and Christian you must be a masochist.

  • mikespeir

    Things like this annoy me. I don’t buy into the Bible, either, and I’m certainly not anti-gay. But these verses don’t ostensibly promote what’s suggested here.

    Probably the closest is the II Samuel where, sure enough, Jonathan’s love for David is compared to a man’s love for women. But I love women I’ve never had sex with and never would. It’s fine to hold the opinion that maybe there was a homosexual relationship between David and Jonathan, It’s quite another to hold this verse up as proof that the Bible smiled on that kind of thing. It simply doesn’t say that.

  • I once tried to build an irony meter. Unfortunately it detected everything except irony.

    As to the question of “Would Jesus Discriminate?” I have to wonder. As a first century carpenter’s son and preacher he would have been culturally conditioned to think of some things as right or wrong. He would probably have discriminated on grounds of gender, sexuality and race as these seemed to have been acceptable things at the time.

    Who cares though? It is like asking “Would Frodo Discriminate?” or “Would Santa Discriminate?”.

  • Laura Lou

    This makes me think back to a guest speaker that came to my Religion & Philosophy class in high school.

    He was an Evangelical Christian, and claimed that “in the Bible, some of it is literal and some of it is not. When you become a biblical scholar, it’s pretty obvious which passages are literal.”

    It’s the perfect answer. Jesus said some are born gay? Figurative. Ruth love Naomi as Adam loved Eve? Figurative. Man shall not lie with man as he does with woman*? GOD’S LITERAL WORD. And if you don’t agree, then you must not fully understand the Bible because it’s just so obvious.

    *I don’t actually know if this is a real passage in the Bible. I just hear this phrase used a lot.

  • Although it’s nice to see the hypocrisy of those complaining of twisting scripture to suit their needs, it’s also hypocritical to actually do the scripture twisting. I firmly believe that if you don’t agree with a religious scripture, you should not agree with that religion.

    The commands in Leviticus are pretty plain and clear – God hates Gays and they should be stoned (to death, not stoned on drugs). It’s pretty obvious to any sane and rational person that such commands are utterly wrong. So, take the next step and remove yourself from that religion. If you still believe in a god go UU, or if that is wavering too, go agnostic until you figure things out. But don’t support the religion. That’s hypocrisy.

  • Uhh… Yeah. That first one? That doesn’t talk about gay people. It talks about eunuchs.

  • ATL-Apostate

    One thing I agree with evangelicals and fundies on: The Bible is definitely, overall anti-gay. In a sea of contradictions, homosexuality is one of the few issues that god seems to have really taken a stand on in the bible. Paul even elaborated on it in Romans (somehwhere, I forget the verse, who cares?).

  • mikespeir

    But, Laura Lou, Jesus never said some people are born gay, did he? Have you actually read the verse?

    The Ruth passage doesn’t say Naomi loved Ruth the way Adam loved Eve. It just doesn’t say that. The whole thing hinges on the archaic word “cleave.” The Genesis verse says that a man will “cleave” unto his wife. The Ruth verse says that Ruth “clave” to Naomi. Now “cleave” only means “to hold onto.” Nothing sexual need be inferred from that.

    Likewise with David and Jonathan. I’ve had male friends whom I have definitely loved. Sometimes I preferred their company to that of women. But I would have revolted at any thought of having sex with them.

    PrimeNumbers is right. If the people pushing these ads don’t like what the Bible says, they should throw it out; quit pretending they believe it.

  • Becka

    Jesus Christ wants everyone to love everyone e.g. Love they neighbour. He is not against homosexuality. It’s his Dad who is homophobic.

    That is why there is an Old Testament and a New Testament. As a young boy Jesus questioned the rabbis in the temple.

    In the same way, it’s all our dads and mums and grandparents and elders who are often homophobics. We need to teach those oldies who still think that being gay is wrong that Jesus was right and his Dad was just a cranky, lonely old deity.

    We need to make sure that not too many young people lose their way to homophobia. If you are Christian you should always filter the teachings of the father through the teachings of the son. Jesus condensed the ten commandments in to two very succinct ones: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind. And love one another as I have loved you.

    Note. Jesus does not qualify those commandments in any way. Even God doesn’t make homosexuality an issue in his commandments.

  • Valdyr

    “I’m hard pressed to find that scripture advocates that it’s alright to live in a gay lifestyle. Just like I’m hard pressed to find that scripture advocates that’s it’s alright to live in an adulterous relationship or as a wife abuser or as a murderer.”

    Yes, being in a consensual, committed gay relationship is morally equivalent to the betraying the trust of your wife, beating the shit out of her, or KILLING ANOTHER HUMAN BEING. Gosh, I can totally see the light. Fuck you.

    What is “the gay lifestyle”, anyway? And how does it differ from the heterosexual lifestyle that every single straight person presumably lives? Can I get a chart? Maybe a Venn diagram? Anybody?

  • Laura Lou

    mikespeir,

    I haven’t read the verse (or virtually any of the Bible) and I never claimed that I had. I even added a note at the end of my post admitting that I was just going by what Christians had claimed to me was in the Bible.

    My post wasn’t at all about the accuracy of those verses in the ad. It was about an easy answer that Christians can give about reprehensible or contradictory statements in the Bible.

    Most of the Christians I know don’t pretend to believe most of what’s in the Bible. They just take it as “figurative language,” like I wrote about earlier. The big idea here I think — which you will hear repeated by many liberal pastors — is that, most of the time, you can get the Bible to say whatever you want.

  • Jen

    I like it, mostly because there is no way to read and live the Bible without some amount of twisting and picking and choosing. There is simply no way to make rules and stories written by some desert wanderers 2000-4000 years ago into the “21st Century lifestyle”* Plus it will upset Pat Robertson.

    Jesus would totally discriminate though. Hell, my great-grandparents probably would have discriminated. And I have seen way too much stuff portraying Obama as Muslim to ever believe that anyone can totally overcome cultural biases.

    *Living your life is now a lifestyle! I am living the female lifestyle, as well as the brown hair lifestyle.

  • I’m all for these billboards. I’m for anything that gets the religious to actually think. Unfortunately, they’ll just ignore them and retreat even further into their bigotry.

  • Erik

    I don’t mind if they twisted the actual language in the bible to suit their needs. The more people twist the language in opposite directions, the more people will start seeing it all as a bunch of BS and realize that none of it is literal and it’s all human interpretation and maybe they should start thinking of it critically for once instead of just assuming everything they’ve been told about the bible is 100% accurate and valid.

  • gribblethemunchkin

    I like these billboards because they are really going to piss off the fundies. Yup, i’m petty, but hey, its funny.

    As for biblical scholarship though, these are pretty weak. The OT is quite clearly anti-gay. Trying to take odd passages and presenting them and positives doesn’t take away from the general “smite them til they glow, then stone them in the dark” attitude of the rest of the book.

    As for the gay lifestyle, at a guess, the closest most of these fundies come to a gay person (except for the closet case at church) is watching videos of pride marches in San Francisco. They probably believe that coming out comes with a free pair of leather chaps and a handle-bar moustache.

    Like the saying goes, “You can’t reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into”.

    The only thing this may do is promote a few bible thumpers to actually read their bible and see some wacky passages they haven’t seen before, maybe set them on the road to disbelief. But thats a scant hope.

  • According to Christian believers, Jesus is the ultimate discriminator with deciding who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. That’s why believers spend their lives praying, worshipping, graveling, pleading, second-guessing, and trying to win favor all the time (just like someone would do with a human tyrant).

    I think the gay-friendly verses point out that it is really “open season” on reading meaning into the bible. Why only let the fundamentalists do it? If everybody did it, it would be obvious that the bible is really irrelevant to how we lead our lives now. The bible is an important literary and historical set of letters and stories, but that is all.

  • mikespeir

    Laura Lou,

    Probably I was a little too hasty in jumping on you. I apologize.

    I guess it just irks me about things like these billboards is that if we back them we’re opening ourselves up to being rightly accused of making stuff up. Fundamentalists will point to things like this to show we’re desperate; we’re reading things into the Bible that obviously aren’t there, and we’re doing it with the transparent intent of finding fault with it. They reason–and I can’t blame them–that if we have to resort to such shenanigans, we must be having trouble finding reals flaws in it. All that beside the obvious problem that, as I said, it simply says no such thing. Do we really care about the facts as much as we claim?

  • Back in the day, folks used to say Martin Luther King was twisting the bible to support his views.

    Let’s face it, folks. The Bible is a pretty shitty moral guide, written in a time when other races, foreigners, slaves, women and livestock had roughly the same legal rights.

  • The last one is the only verse I’d say is accurately reference here. The first one wasn’t talking about gayness it was talking about castration.

  • False Prophet

    @Laura Lou,

    He was an Evangelical Christian, and claimed that “in the Bible, some of it is literal and some of it is not. When you become a biblical scholar, it’s pretty obvious which passages are literal.”

    Thank you for giving additional support to my contention that there’s no such thing as a biblical literalist. I’ve long held that no one takes the whole Bible literally, they just pick and choose the passages that reinforce their prejudices.

    @mikespeir,

    How about we instead bring up the fact that the Bible condemns the greedy and the corrupt and stresses helping the poor in hundreds of passages throughout, while homosexuality is condemned in at most, half a dozen passages, half of which are ambiguous. Then we can suggest to gay-hating Christians that they work to eliminate greed, corruption and poverty. Once they’ve eliminated poverty and corruption, then they can talk about the evil gays.

  • The first one wasn’t talking about gayness it was talking about castration.

    C’mon, you just aren’t taking Christian anti-homosexual policies to their logical conclusion.

    I think Jesus is expressing what kind of gay most right-wing Christians would accept. The celibate for life.

    You know, if your eye offends thee….

  • Once they’ve eliminated poverty and corruption, then they can talk about the evil gays.

    Unless, of course, it’s the gay-hating that’s really the draw. It’s like asking them to take Megan Fox out of the Transformer movie so that they can give more screen time to the robots.

  • Steven Mading

    Would Jesus Discriminate?
    YES!
    (At least the character called Jesus in the Bible does. The actual historical small-time cult leader on which he’s based might not have, but we’re talking in the context of the mythical Jesus the bible talks about, not the historical one the liars who wrote the New Testament loosely based their stories on.) Bible Jesus discriminates a lot.

    It’s wonderful that some more moderate Christians are coming down on the side of Gay marriage, but I really wish they’d stop doing what moderate liberal Christians always end up doing, and that is outright lying about their religion in order to make it sound like their nicer, friendlier views are coming from Christianity when they’re actually directly opposed to what their own religion’s scriptures say.

    Its that kind of garbage that allows the fundies to try to claim the victories of past liberal mildly psuedo-christians as their own victories and thus gloss over the dangers inherent in their own belief system.

    To the liberal christian who supports gay marriage I would say “Good. We have some common ground there then and we can work together on that issue. But now would you please stop lying about where you got that viewpoint from? It’s a modern view that is not espoused by the Bible.”

  • llewelly

    What is “the gay lifestyle”, anyway?

    Partying all night, interior decorating all day, and plotting the destruction of humanity on weekends. At least, that’s what I hear from the pulpit.

  • Delphine

    Christians bend and twist the Bible to suit whatever message they feel like pushing that day, then they ignore the rest.

    I’m glad they’re getting a dose of their own medicine.

  • mikespeir

    How about we instead bring up the fact that the Bible condemns the greedy and the corrupt and stresses helping the poor in hundreds of passages throughout, while homosexuality is condemned in at most, half a dozen passages, half of which are ambiguous.

    When that’s the subject I’ll do just that.

  • Reginald Selkirk

    Jesus Christ wants everyone to love everyone e.g. Love they neighbour. He is not against homosexuality. It’s his Dad who is homophobic.

    No dice. Remember the weird bit about Jesus being His own dad; i.e. ‘sure we have three persons, but they’re only one God, because after all we’re monotheists.’

  • Laura Lou

    Partying all night, interior decorating all day, and plotting the destruction of humanity on weekends.

    I fail to find fault in this behavior.

  • Erp

    All sides do ‘interpretation’ and have to since the Bible (a) contradicts itself in places and (b) was written for different times and places (plural deliberate as it was written over the course of hundreds of years). The most obvious level of interpretation is of the words of the Bible such as the ‘cleave’ bit. It is notable that one word ‘arsenokoitai’ appears in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy and we really don’t know what Paul (and the writer of Timothy who probably wasn’t Paul) meant by it. One popular interpretation favored now by the conservatives is homosexual but in centuries past it was often thought to be masturbators. ReligiousTolerance.org has some short essays on it and the other passages in the Bible used to condemn gays and lesbians.

  • Miko

    No, this is not the kind of discussion they should be having on churches. Anyone who says “Should I discriminate against a large class of people, and possibly consider stoning them to death? Well, let’s see what the Bible says about it” is already wrong, no matter what conclusion they pull out from the Bible.

    Here’s what the entire discussion on gay rights should look like:

    PERSON 1: Hey, do you think we should deny people their natural rights based on their sexual orientation?
    PERSON 2: Why, no. As a matter of fact, I don’t.
    PERSON 1: For that matter, I don’t either. Good day to you.
    PERSON 2: And you.

    It doesn’t matter what some book (any book) says on the matter. It doesn’t matter what your preacher says. It doesn’t matter if scientists say that being gay is a choice or not. It doesn’t matter how the majority votes. It’s a natural right, implied by the fundamental nature of being a social creature living in a social society.

  • I’ve noticed that when Christians say that a passage is taken out of context it means that they want to ignore the passage completely.

  • I’m pretty sure we’ll be talking about this on Sunday’s show…but there’s only one position that I can really take:

    Look – even the Christians can’t agree on what this book says.

    That said, these folks are simply incorrect and this is a prime example of the damage religion does to a mind. Any straight-forward assessment of the Bible should lead one to conclude that it is simply wrong on some issues. Instead, they begin with the presupposition that it must be right and that they’re also right…and they seek a harmony that doesn’t exist.

  • mikespeir

    I’ve noticed that when Christians say that a passage is taken out of context it means that they want to ignore the passage completely.

    I never thought of it that way. It’s true!

  • medussa

    I’m loving the ad campaign, and frankly, I couldn’t care less about it’s accuracy. Relying on the Bible for any kind of moral authority is about as useful as praying (in fact less so, if you define praying as a form of meditation and reflection, quite useful in most people’s lives).

    But it does bring the whole discussion of whether or not homosexuality is sinful or immoral right back to where the discussion belongs: within the church. I don’t care how that discussion ends, discriminate against gays all you want, but KEEP IT WITHIN THE CHURCH. This BS doesn’t belong in the discourse of the real world. And if they want to spend their hard won (read tithed) money on ad campaigns, I guess the billboard industry will be thankful, although I can think of better ways to spend it.
    I’m a huge Tolkien fan, and love participating in endless debates about the the relative merits of hobbits and elves, and whether Gandalf would have been able to withstand the power of the One Ring, but how could I insist that anyone outside of that little cult care about such things? And why would I insist that my government help me discriminate against those who view this differently?

    By all means, christians, start debating each other, and leave the rest of us alone.

  • The billboard angered [Christine] Lutz so much, that she fired off a stern e-mail. “I said how dare you take the scriptures and twist it to fit your needs,” she recalled.
    Well, how dare YOU try to control others because of your delusions.

  • CatBallou

    What Miko said.
    I never respond to the “choice or not” argument by citing scientific research—I simply say that it’s irrelevant.
    Same with Bible passages. Do we really want to go down the same “interpreting the Bible” path that the thousand sects of Christianity are still embroiled in? Aren’t we thus suggesting that the Bible is a legitimate source of authority?
    I doubt very much that Christians are going to look at these signs and realize that, because the Bible is so open to interpretation, it isn’t a reliable moral guide.

  • CatBallou wrote

    I never respond to the “choice or not” argument by citing scientific research—I simply say that it’s irrelevant.

    I have to agree. The issue of saying that homosexuality is something a person is born as is to raise the stakes. If you find evidence that it is genetic then some bigots will talk of a “cure”. If you find evidence that it is not genetic then some bigots will claim that it is a choice and so must be changed.

    Better by far to stick to the principle that what free adults do to one another in their private lives is their business alone. It need not be vindicated and must not be condemned by claiming a genetic cause.

  • Tony

    Just in case anybody is confused over how the bible is interpreted the kind folks at the Landover Baptist Church have produced the following handy bible interpretation guide.

  • Neon Genesis

    Weren’t Ruth and Naomi related?

  • Staceyjw

    “I guess it just irks me about things like these billboards is that if we back them we’re opening ourselves up to being rightly accused of making stuff up. Fundamentalists will point to things like this to show we’re desperate; we’re reading things into the Bible that obviously aren’t there, and we’re doing it with the transparent intent of finding fault with it. They reason–and I can’t blame them–that if we have to resort to such shenanigans, we must be having trouble finding reals flaws in it. All that beside the obvious problem that, as I said, it simply says no such thing. Do we really care about the facts as much as we claim?” (Mikespeir)

    SO WHAT if fundies complain? They will point out that we’re desperate (and degenerate, liars and of the devil) no matter what we do. There is no way to have a rational, reasonable, fact based conversation with people that take the bible literally anyway!

    The bible is interpreted to fit the needs/culture/worldview of the reader- there is nothing factual about it. Why not let these people interpret as they wish? Why are they not allowed to read it as they wish, but fundies are? Its not like there is ONE unchanging way to interpret the bible- isn’t this the reason atheists think its nonsense???????

    And I think it will cause an uproar, which is worthwhile in and of itself.

    Staceyjw

  • Erp

    Naomi and Ruth were mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, both widows with no near male relatives to take them in (Ruth might have had some but she chose to go with Naomi).

  • Tony Says:
    …the kind folks at the Landover Baptist Church have produced the following handy bible interpretation guide

    🙂 Like

  • mikespeir

    SO WHAT if fundies complain?

    You seem to miss my point. That fundies complain is irrelevant. It makes us look stupid to them when we say stupid things. They’ll dismiss everything we say thereafter because it’s then clear to them we’re just sniping, not being reasonable. Why, we can’t even read! It’s not just a matter of interpretation, by the way. You actually have to read into these passages to get what the billboards say. Defenders of the Bible are absolutely correct to point that out.

  • ChameleonDave

    These ads are stupid and harmful.

    As it is, we have to cope with religious people saying we twist the words of the Bible when we quote horrible things from it. This just makes them right: these ads deliberately take lines out of context and present them as meaning something other than what they actually mean.

  • Gimpness

    Yea I think there has been some slight interpretation for some of these passages especially 2 Samuel 1
    “17 David took up this lament concerning Saul and his son Jonathan”

    It seems that Jonathan is his son

    Regardless it is good to see this issue being raised. I think that the tag “Would Jesus Discriminate” would have more of an impact then believers (non literalist ones anyway) then actual bible verses.

  • Connor

    I agree with the above posters that the Bible isn’t a good place to go to looking to justify anything, but as long as we’re descending to their level. . .

    Jonathan was Saul’s son, not David’s. And there was the whole issue of the two of them kissing and weeping in a field and David “becoming great.” The Hebrew word used seems to be something translators don’t really know how to deal with without extensive interpretation. Everything they come up with, of course, skirts the possibility of David having a hard-on for Jonathan. But as long as we’re being literal. . . (I don’t remember the verse, because growing up Catholic I never had to remember that stuff, but it is true that citing Bible verses is taken as a valid form of argumentation by an unfortunate number of Christians.)

  • Matt Gubser

    This is a terrible idea. None of those verses say anything close to what the WJD folks want to pretend they do. They’re not fostering thought or promoting tolerance by misinterpreting scripture. What they are doing is reinforcing the widespread belief among evangelicals that Satan has, can, and will use this very tactic to draw them away from God. This whole campaign is unbelievably naive.

  • AxeGrrl

    Matt Dillahunty wrote:

    I’m pretty sure we’ll be talking about this on Sunday’s show…but there’s only one position that I can really take:

    Look – even the Christians can’t agree on what this book says.

    Hey Matt, nice to see your presence here 🙂 (and I completely agree with the essential point expressed in your last sentence above)

    And great to hear that you’ll be discussing it on this Sunday’s show ~ with this, the UU World magazine FFRF ad controversy and the Kentucky football team-mass baptism thing, you could probably dedicate the entire show to news items this week! 🙂

  • mikespeir

    Quite a stretch, Connor. Here’s what the NASB says:

    1Sa 20:41 When the lad was gone, David rose from the south side and fell on his face to the ground, and bowed three times. And they kissed each other and wept together, but David wept the more.

    BTW, don’t interpret the kissing according to what it would mean in our culture. Judas is said to have betrayed Jesus with a kiss. There’s nothing to suggest anything sexual there. It was a greeting. In Romans 16:16 Paul tells the Christians at Rome to greet each other with a kiss.

    Then, of course, if the meaning of the word (ga?dal) is uncertain, what would cause us to make it something sexual, other than a desire to have it so?

    When I interpret, I get what the text likely means.

    When I embellish, I get what I’d like the text to mean.

  • Neon Genesis

    This is a terrible idea. None of those verses say anything close to what the WJD folks want to pretend they do. They’re not fostering thought or promoting tolerance by misinterpreting scripture. What they are doing is reinforcing the widespread belief among evangelicals that Satan has, can, and will use this very tactic to draw them away from God. This whole campaign is unbelievably naive.

    And even some liberal Christians like the biblical scholar Marcus Borg admit that the bible does condemn homosexuality, they just choose to ignore it, so I don’t get why they feel the need to pretend that the bible says something it doesn’t. If they still have a need to have faith in Jesus, then they can just ignore them like all Christians do to some extent.

  • I have to agree with Mike the Infidel; the first one has nothing to do with homosexuality. Having said that, I love the concept.

  • Scott Turner

    Well, uhm, ok.

    Jesus also said that people who do not accept him will spend eternity in agonizing hellfire, according to the Gospel. That means most of humanity will smolder in hell due to the geographical accident of their birthplace. So, is Jesus really a source for moral recourse?

  • Pbear

    Ummm… Guys? Gals?

    None of this is actually in the Bible, remember? It wasn’t written in English. Therefore – at BEST – you’re reading a person’s translation of GOD’S WORD. When you can quote the aramaic, give me a call… Then we can determine whether this or that is what the Bible says.

  • Call of the wild

    I’m of the opinion that this whole thing is being WAY over-thought. If a guy doesn’t want to be gay, he shouldn’t suck dicks. If a woman doesn’t want to be gay, she shouldn’t use a strap on with another woman or eat pussy. I’m a Christian raised southern Baptist and I think what two consenting adults do with one another physically should be their business alone. Would Jesus Discriminate? No, I don’t believe he would. That’s why I’ve removed myself from organized religion. I can’t stand the church, but I’ll never turn my back on my personal beliefs. Y’all have a nice day.

  • Hannah Happiness

    hey.
    I am a lesbian, and I love it. My dad is a huge homophobe and it totally ruins our relationship, even though he dosen’t know I’m gay! He’s also a religous zelot and it kills me because when I can stand to be around him he’s ussually talking about how he hates Jews, Gays/lesbian’s, and anyone that dosn’t go to his curch.
    Sometimes I get down because he says these hurtful things and I can’t tell him what I feel, because he gets violent when contradicted. These quotes from the bible were funny. When I found the cite I got out the bible that I never use, that my dad bought me and I highlighted all the passages that I found relevant from the site.
    Thanks!!

  • Hannah, I’ve heard tales of homophobic parents who have lost or reduced their bigoted ways when a child has come out to them. When it is made personal for them they are faced with a choice to lose their child or to change their views. I’m not suggesting that coming out to your dad is going to have a positive impact on his or your life because I don’t know you. Maybe one day when you are safe it might be worth it.

  • tkdcoach

    Hate to break up the overall dismissive attitude about these billboards here, but as a gay Christian I’d like to say that those here attacking the supposed revisionist biblical interpretation here should back off a wee bit. For example, in Matthew 19, after hearing his disciples lament that they cannot divorce their wives “for any cause” (an abhorrent type of divorce permitted under Mosaic law that was nothing more than abandonment) Jesus says let those who can accept the teaching, accept it (e.g. heterosexuals). Verse 19:12 then lays out three exceptions…all of which are for types of “eunuchs” to which the marriage paradigm doesn’t apply: those who are born that way (e.g. under Roman law, men who have a sexual revulsion to women), those who are made that way by others (e.g. the castrated whom we moderns think of as the only kind of ‘eunuchs’), and those who seek to be ‘eunuchs’ to ‘enter the Kingdom…” (e.g. voluntarily abstinent types). It’s not ridiculous to assume that the first type of eunuch is a gay man and many scholars on both sides have asserted so outside the confines of the narrower argument. It seems that a lack of belief would result in different attitudes than the ones I see here, but perhaps I have a higher opinion of doubt (whether confirmedly atheist or ambivalently agnostic) and perplexity than I should.