Fighting against the tide of public opinion, unsuccessful court cases and well, history,
the Christian right can't always trot out Westboro Baptist Church's "God Hates Fags" when framing their homophobia. Instead, they disguise it under the concept of "love the sinner, hate the sin" in order to create the image of love and tolerance. It's very much the opposite.
What I'm writing about isn't new. In fact, the very phrase and it's implications were the subject of a diary in Aug 2013. Such statements are all over the internet and normally I ignore them until this one:
True Christians Love Gay People
flew onto my radar screen. Why this one? I'm acquainted with a close friend of the author who linked to it in a Facebook post. Otherwise I doubt I'd have ever seen it. I hate to link to it because I don't want to drive traffic to the site. The obscure author deserves continued obscurity. However, the piece is instructive on the inherent homophobia behind the concept in how it conflates the things you do with things you are and how a seemingly gracious offer of acceptance is loaded with judgement.
I would like to acknowledge some of the C&J comment crew for their input when I originally broached this subject: mudslide, DrLori, gardnerhill, foresterbob, anon004, escapee, legendmn, and of course Bill in Portland Maine.
Let's jump below the clearly gay, sinful, squiggle, and examine the salient points.
Love and Judgement
From the piece:
"Loving someone doesn't mean you have to approve of any sins they may be committing. Nor does it mean that you need to be accepting of their sins. Doesn't loving someone mean in part that you should want to help them; that you should want the best for them?"
The presumption here is that homosexuality is a sin which is typically traced back to Levitican Old Testament quotes and later New Testament Paul admonishments. There's always a debate over the modern applicability of Iron Age goatherd traditions that may contain some echoes of older Bronze Age tribal religions combined with a Roman era apocalyptic death cult.
However, it's safe to say that certain points in the Bible have become outdated in the 2000-2500 years since they were first written. The social context of such edicts no longer apply. It might have made sense from a tribal health perspective to prohibit certain activities. We're talking about eating shellfish, touching pigskin or wearing mixed fiber clothing, etc. Moreover, manpower was important for those goatherds doing daily tasks, or driving off rival tribes or needing bodies to till the fields.
As such, every sperm was sacred but with with 7 billion of us crowding the planet, even that claim to justify homosexuality as a sin is just as outdated.
If the author of the cited piece wants to ignore that social context, then he sins just as much the next time he wears a cotton-poly blend t-shirt while ordering sweet and sour pork carryout.
I mean we don't condone slavery and stone women for adultery anymore, do we?
The problem is that "you" remain the judge of what is sin and what is not, in this case cherry picking among the Biblical laundry list to justify the final judgement. Any conclusion based on that premise is misguided at best, patently bigoted at worst.
The quoted paragraph is all about conditional love, namely "I love you but I'll keep right on judging you". How that is sustained love escapes me. As Micah Murray states "It's a special sort of condescending love we've reserved for the gay community". It ignores the fact that being gay isn't an action, it's a state of being. While some denominations, for example Catholicism, makes a distinction between homosexual desires and homosexual acts (the former is not a sin, the latter is), it's uncertain if the Christian right makes that distinction and if so on a consistent basis. It matters not because in either case, it calls upon the person to deny their biology.
Seeking love and happiness is the birthright of every human being. Last time I checked, we as a country embodied that sentiment in one of our founding documents.
? Or is that your professional opinion?
