Why I love gays.

NOTE: When I wrote this, I made a smart-alecky comment about my confusion on terminology. It should have probably just asked someone so that I could be more PC. I plead ignorance, and beg your forgiveness :)

I started to write this post on National Coming Out Day. That has been a while ago now, but it's still relevant since I have a confession to make.

One of the best things that ever happened to me is that gays started coming out. That's not the confession; that's simply a fact that precipitated an important change. Bear with me on this. I know my title is misleading, since the main point of this post is the confession itself and not the fact that I love gay people. That being said, I need to deal with the issue of the title:

I love gays because they are people, and I love people. Not only that, but I have some great friends who are gay, and I enjoy their friendship immensely. Even if the story I'm about to tell was not true, I could still not help but to love these people.

Also, when I use the word "gay" I mean any person of alternative sexual orientation or gender identity. I have lost track of the LGBT mix of alphabet soup - every time I look, someone has added new letters to it. I'm pretty sure most of you are OK with the term "gay". It has the added bonus of meaning happy or carefree - and I agree that you deserve to be "gay".  I do love you and hope you are happy with however you identify yourself. I know that this is not technically correct, but for shorthand "gay" is the best word I have. OK, so on with the post...

If I left you out I'm sorry. Here is a rainbow just for you.

Like many people in this part of the world, Christianity is a big part of my culture. I attended Sunday School as a child, went to a church youth group as a teen, and was fairly involved in my church as an adult. But this same religion that taught me "God is love" also seems to have it in for the gays. This was really not important to me for a lot of years. For the most part, I didn't really know anyone who was gay. Not openly, anyways. "Out of sight, out of mind," as it is said. Since I am not gay myself I was little affected by the fact that the Church considered these people to be sinners. I can be selfish, just like everyone else.

But in the last several years a couple of things happened to me. They probably happened to you too.

First is that I got to know people who were gay, or people that I already knew started to come out. I recognized pretty quickly that these people deserved more respect that what I was trained to give to "sinners".

Now she looks friendly, eh?

Secondly, this thing called the internet came along. Now I could see things that were happening all over the world instantly, and I could discuss these events with people who I had never met. People were gay, people were straight, and I could see all of their stories unfolding from the comfort of my own home. I noticed that the only people that seemed to be giving the gays a hard time were those who claimed that the Bible told them that they should do so. I tried to put it off for a while, but eventually I could not ignore the thought that was haunting me:

"If I believe the Bible, should I hate homosexuality too?"

A lot of people know that the Bible says something on the subject. They choose to deal with this information in one of three ways:

1. Hate gays;
2. Assume that the translation/interpretation/context of the biblical passages must be wrong; or
3. Study and find out how this stuff got into the Bible in the first place, and follow this where it leads.

Christians that choose path No. 1 are what we call "fundamentalists". They are unwilling to believe that the words in the Bible could be saying anything other than what they appear to say. If the Bible says it's a sin, then it must be a sin. They are big on using platitudes like "Love the sinner, hate the sin" - this way they can interact with those who don't agree with them while maintaining a level of superiority. This is a patronizing and passive-aggressive way of condemning someone. There is another maxim I know that says "Judge not lest you be judged". In the end, every piece of wisdom must be subjected to our interpretation and evaluation, whether one admits it or not. It seems to be more important for some people to condemn (or if they prefer "not condone") sin than to give another person the benefit of the doubt. (Fun exercise: one of these sayings is in the Bible; the other is not. Can you tell which is which without looking?)

How most Christians deal with homosexuality.

Most Christians I know choose path No. 2. I like to call this the "poly/cotton blend exemption". And it works for the most part, since the strongest passages against homosexuality are in the Old Testament, in the same section where the wearing of garments of mixed fabrics is forbidden. 

For me, though, both of these approaches caused me cognitive dissonance. The first one, because I knew in my heart that there was nothing gay people should be ashamed of (and I don't mean they should be tolerated - I mean nothing wrong). I could not believe that I had been given the ability to reason moral conclusions, and that this ability should not be used. But this second approach forced me to pick and choose passages from the Bible. Why would God give us laws when he does not want us to follow them? Why would He make things so difficult for us to understand? Why would God be fighting against common sense? I had ignored this contradiction long enough, I had to once and for all resolve it.

Cyanide & Happiness - Read more at http://www.explosm.net/comics/2834/#TXyYHvDpbCrfHljF.99

The only answer for me was to look at the Bible honestly to find out why it said what it did. I knew I had the skills as a scholar, since I had studied in university. I had just never had an issue that pressed me into study before. What I thought would be a simple study of a couple passages turned into a much bigger project. But I was dedicated to understanding.

I have never been to seminary. If I had, maybe I would have reached this point a lot earlier in my life. I wondered things for a long time, like how the Old Testament could look so different from the New Testament - but now the first item I had to settle was where these books actually came from. The answer I had always lived with was that God was the author, using men as his scribes. But it seemed obvious to me that if different places in the Bible were saying things at cross purposes, then the "scribes" must have influenced the writing more than I had always believed.

What happened to me over the next while was like the breaking of a spell. The closer I looked at the Bible, the less certain I became that anything the Bible had to say could be divine. The Bible is a mass of contradictions. The question of the appropriateness of homosexuality was no longer the only struggle I was having with the meaning of the books. I was roadblocked by all kinds of problems just figuring out what the Bible was saying about elemental things. This was before I could even begin to judge the content and what it might be telling me about right and wrong.

Wait, what did you say? (Click to see what I mean).

Secondly, when I did feel I could understand what the meaning might be, it often disagreed with common sense or modern knowledge (or both). It's all well and good to prohibit the consumption of pork when people don't have safe methods to prepare it, but as a society we've gotten past that. Yet the Bible has not been updated, and never will be.

I had spent years thinking that my difficulties with the Bible were caused by my lack of effort to find the true meaning. Yet, when I removed the "sheen" of divine inspiration and looked honestly at what it was saying, it looked less and less like it was something a God would have written, and more like a book written by men. Often very mistaken men. This book was no longer helping, it was only causing harm. As a moral handbook, the Bible is an utter failure.

I was stunned.

The Good Book: not so good.

Why did nobody tell me this? Pastors study the Bible - don't they see this? The use it as a source, and omit everything that is objectionable. Of course, the lay people in the church would not recognize this, because it is not what they are really looking for it. They are reading Christian books by Christian authors written to reinforce the things that they already believe. They are reading small passages, and reading with preconceptions about what the passage says. They are listening to preachers who have already worked things out for them, and hearing sermons that omit anything that might be difficult to explain. I know this because this is the zone I was stuck in for years. I'll admit I was naive; it's not like I didn't know about any of this, but I had just never let it sink in. But I was now looking at things differently, and I could not turn back.

This was a painful realization for me. I had believed for years that the Bible was God's way of communicating with me. Seeing that it was so ineffective at that task made me very disappointed.

At first.

I realized that in my years of lackadaisical Bible study, I had really figured these things out on my own. I never really bothered looking to the Bible for answers, because I could come up with them on my own more easily. And my answers were good and worked well. I assumed that if I took the time to inspect them they would match scripture, although I know now that not necessarily true nor relevant. They were certainly better answers than those of the people who did seem to look to the Bible for everything. Once I recognized that I did not need to give the words of the Bible that kind of reverence, a sense of freedom started to grow in me. I shouldn't even be giving it lip service - that's confusing people like I myself had been confused.

Things that I puzzled over for years all made so much sense to me. Why would God ask Abraham to kill Isaac? It doesn't matter - that's just a story. Why would God say such awful things about how we should treat women? He didn't - but the men writing this down thought those rules would be useful. Why does Jesus curse a fig tree simply for being in his path at the wrong time of year? Who cares? He's Jesus and he kicked a fig tree's ass!

BAM! How'd ya like me now, Fig Tree!

So then, why would God make people gay and then condemn them for being so? He doesn't. They should be loved, and there is nothing wrong with them. It is no surprise that they are becoming more and more accepted by our society at the same time that our trust in the Bible is waning. Christians are not doing themselves any favors by pretending that they are standing on some moral high ground When the public stands up against Christian attempts to treat these people unfairly, they are not persecuting the Christians. It didn't work for slavery, and it can't work now.

So it took a lot to get here, but I did it. I love gays because they are great people, and knowing this fact is what lead me to learn the most important lesson in my life - that I can decide what is right and wrong, that my morality need not be at odds with my reason, and that no one with any book will ever make me feel wrong about that.

Comments are open - let me have it. Or send me private messages if you prefer.