Christians and Gays

Recently there have been some high-profile suicides of gay students, all the direct result of bullying.

Where were the Christians in all this? Were we there to offer love, understanding, and support? Did we stand up for the rights of these people? Did we just silently sit back and let it happen? Did we contribute to the bullying, helping along the notion that being gay makes you sub-human? Were we the very bullies?

Christianity has a very poor track record when it comes to loving our neighbor, less so when it involves gays. Let's be honest. We hate them. This isn't "love the sinner, hate the sin" we just hate them. We see gays as unworthy of love and see any suffering they endure as exactly what they deserve. It's one of the most dispicable practices of modern Christianity and I hope, in years to come, its something we are as ashamed of as we are the Crusades, Inquisition, Slavery, Witch Burnings, and the persecution of Gallileo. To name a few.

Why do we hate gays? Because it's easy. We've got Bible verses to back us up, and since we're not the ones who are gay, we have a smug sense of superiority about it. We like feeling better than others, and if we can point to you and declare you subhuman, we will. Loving people is hard, we'd much rather just kill them or drive them to suicide.

It also helps us not look at ourselves. We like to ignore Jesus' teaching in Matthew 7:3-5 where he tells us to not focus on a speck in our brother's eye until we deal with the plank in our own. We look at gays and point out their faults, their sexual sins, but we don't look at our own. This is the height of hypocrisy.

Here's something to think about. Christians love to sin sexually. We love pornography. We love adultary. We love rape and pedophelia. We love just about every sexual sin there is, but we don't see anything wrong with it because at least we aren't gay. Apparently, as long as we aren't gay, those other sins don't matter.

Our attitude becomes even more hypocritical with the issue of gay marriage. Christians preach about the sanctity of marriage, but only when we're talking about gays. We don't hold heterosexual marriage to the same standards. I have yet to see Christians marching against gay marriage to also march against adultary and divorce. In fact, many of the so-called Christians who protest gay marriage are themselves shamelessly divorced and have committed adultary many times. (I'm looking at you, Newt.) Why don't Christians protest adultary and divorce? Because then it would affect us.

Show me a pastor who preaches against divorce and I'll show you a pastor with meager returns in the collection plate. If someone proposed a ballot initiative that outlawed remarriage after a divorce, Christians would vote it down, the very Christians who scream about sanctity of marriage.

We Christians need to take a good long look at ourselves. We need to stop persecuting gays, we need to fight FOR them, not against them. Jesus DIED for the very gay people we persecute. Our treatment of gays, and our sanctimonious, hypocritical behavior is appalling. We are doing the Devil's work when we act this way, and it's time to stop.