Posted on 10/19/2001 6:29:17 AM PDT by FormerLib
Our War over Homosexuality
Better than newspaper headlines or sound bites on my radio or television, the best way for me to gauge the ebb and flow of battle in the societal war over homosexuality has been to open my daily mail.
Over the last nine years of my quixotic life as a former gay activist turned Christian it seems as if every group directly involved in sparring over the issue, from militantly gay and lesbian to conservative Christian, has written to ask for my money to use against the other. On days when missives from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority shared the same small cubbyhole, I marveled that my mailbox did not explode from having such haranguing prose confined so closely together.
Thus from my left hand a gay and lesbian group pleads for my cash to save the country from power-hungry and already powerful fundamentalist ministers who would criminalize same-sex attraction and whose hate-filled rhetoric encourages the murders of gays. While, from the right hand, a conservative Christian ministry pleads for my money to help them save the country from immoral gay activists out to pervert the country’s youth and force Christians to be silent about homosexuality and hire homosexual people to teach in their schools.
I do not mean to trivialize the struggle over how we view homosexuality or same-sex acts, or to dismiss the work of those who speak for marriage in the public square. As a Roman Catholic, I accept completely the church’s teaching and I fully accept, as one who has buried 18 associates to AIDS over the years, that departing from these ideas brings consequences.
The Monsters
But the way we speak of them brings consequences as well. In their mailings, each side faces a monster. Each side uses many exclamation points in their letters. Both sides seek to protect my life or my values against enormous evil. Reading them together can leave me feeling a bit like one of the unfortunate Northerners who married into Southern families (or vice versa) before the Civil War, and I am struck at how wide the gulf is between these icons and the actual people they are meant to represent.
According to my most trusted statistics, and I admit I try to limit my errors to the side of under-counting, approximately three million Americans have a predominant sexual and romantic attraction to their own sex. Accounting for their parents, a reasonable number of siblings, other family members and friends, it is sensible to suppose for at least 12 million people living in the United States, every sound bite and headline, every charge and countercharge, reminds them of the battle swirling around someone they know and love.
Most of the three million, in my experience, are not gay or lesbian activists and do not publicly identify themselves as gay or lesbian. Most of their family and friends do not identify themselves as someone with gay or lesbian friends or family members. Many of them are Christians, or have been Christians, or have family and friends who are Christians. They constitute a unique pastoral challenge and, if they are not Christian already or if they have left the faith, a significant mission field as well.
But in both these realities, as people in need of both pastoral care and the gospel, Christians have badly failed them. In that failure we risk contributing to the loss of their souls and of discovering one day that it would have indeed been better for us to have been cast into the sea wearing millstones around our necks than to have acted as we have towards them.
Click here for the rest of the article.
Christians who wink at or approve of same-sex acts, or refuse to call men and women living with same-sex attraction to live the gospel more deeply and truly, need to repent for their unfaithfulness. Loving someone does not mean we love and accept his sins. The easy claim that love justifies all, for example in a same-sex relationship, cannot be countenanced.
Followed by this one:
Christians need to keep in mind that our struggle is not as much with the people espousing the bad ideas of the gay rights movement as with the ideas themselves.
This last one is particularly easy to forget when dealing with defenders of the radical homosexual agenda.
Perhaps you could point them to this link as needed?
Agreed, the so-called “Christian” defenders of perversion need to ask themselves how is turning a blind eye to base behavior somehow compassionate? Standing mute while watching someone lose their soul is simply being an enabler. Reparation is real and true because it’s not “who you are”, it’s “what you do”.
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