HEADED TO HELL WITH THE HOMOSEXUALS

A nice Christian lady just told me I was going to hell, apparently accompanied by many of my friends. “What kind of person are you?” she squawked. (Even over the anonymous internet, I could tell she was squawking.)

What set her off was my saying that I love my gay friends and family just the way they are, and so does God.

I’m headed to hell, she says, for “condemning the homosexuals to eternal death by allowing them to live in their sin.” (I wonder how many she has “saved” from this fate with her loving and compassionate spirit?)

I told her I hoped that God would bless her with a gay loved one who would have the courage to withstand her scorn and perhaps help her to see the Divine in every single person.

She assured me that she never scorned anyone and followed that up by telling me I was a liar and a fraud and should be ashamed of myself. 

“Happy Housewife” (her online name) told me that I am directly contradicting the teachings of Christ, who repeatedly said that homosexuals will never see heaven. I pointed out to her several times that no, actually, Jesus never said word one about homosexuality. She said what about Leviticus, and I said that, um, Leviticus was written well before Christ’s birth, and anyway if she cared to look into the cultural context and etymology of the verse, it clearly refers to temple prostitutes and sex slaves, not to two gay people sharing a loving relationship.

She said she didn’t want to hear any of my “cultural crap,” that she had heard enough of my “homosexual lies.”

I blocked her, lest I be tempted to waste any more time.

The Bullying Pulpit

This was all in response to an article about yet another well-respected Christian leader and author being threatened by his publishing house and having all his speaking engagements canceled because he said in an interview that he would perform a same-sex marriage.

Here are the words of Reverend Eugene Peterson that shook the evangelical’s pulpits:

“I know a lot of people who are gay and lesbian and they seem to have as good a spiritual life as I do. I think that kind of debate about lesbians and gays might be over.”

Heresy! You will never publish or speak publicly again!

Within a day, Peterson had been bullied into retracting his words and repenting of his momentary slip into love. 

Here is a recent piece about the hub-bub by one of my favorite bloggers, John Pavlovitz, whom I got to hear speak at the Wild Goose Festival last week. He concludes:

“I can only keep working to make American Christianity a place of love for everyone. Meanwhile I’ll lament Eugene Peterson’s public change of heart because of what it says, perhaps not as much about him, as about my faith tradition’s sickness, about the way it has lost the plot, about the pain it causes.

Most of all I’ll grieve the damage still being done to beautiful people, simply trying to walk this planet without having to fear religious people.”

“Opinions may be mistaken. Love never is.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

 

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