I am a christian. This doesn't make me evil.

[galadriel1010]

"Sorry, you're wrong. The Christians have set this agenda – they want to maintain their ‘ancient’ right to discriminate against gay people.

They also want to get their hands on as many impressionable and vulnerable young people as they can to pervert them with their corrupt ideologies.

When they renounce their discrimination and stop indoctinating our young with their hurtful oppression we can all be friends again. Simple."

If you know me, you're probably aware that I'm a gay christian. The full deal is gay christian, pro-choice up to a point (if it's started kicking and responding to your voice, then I think that that point has been reached), pro-science, believe in intelligent (and sometimes unintelligent) design, and think that God has very little impact on my daily life. My relationship with God is a little bit like the one I have with my brother - he's just there, and I don't neccessarily like him all the time, but he's still there.

The comment I opened with, directed at me, by the way, was hurtful enough as it was. What made it worse was the fact that it was a reply to me saying, in reply to someone else, that some liberal christians don't feel that they can stand up for gay rights because they feel like they're not welcome. My actual quote was:

"We’re doing what we can, and you’ll probably find christians in the counter protests, but there’s a horrible wave within the gay rights movement that thinks that gay rights have to be gained at the expense of religious rights; I don’t just mean in the B&B and fostering cases, either, but from people who think that christians shouldn’t be allowed to foster children full stop, even if they’re the most tolerant, brilliant parents in the world. It can be quite threatening at times."

And the reply I got was "christians are just determined to discriminate and to bring children up to do the same".

So why don't liberal christians speak up more often? Would you speak up for someone else's rights if they thought that they could only get their rights at the expense of yours, and you knew they were going to give you verbal abuse for being you?

And yet some do, because that's what christianity is, at the end of the day. There's churches doing their best to welcome gay people in (which is hard, because they don't want to come), there's christians showing up to gay pride marches to apologise for the batshit parts of our faith family and to add their support, there's christians working in shelters and as counsellors, as MPs voting in support of gay rights amendments, and as foster parents who give their full support to gay children.

But they don't count, of course, because they believe in the "sky pixie" and so their actions and views are invalidated.

So if you think that I'm worth less because I'm a christian, in the words of Woopie Goldberg as Sister Mary Clarence, "bless you".

Comments

[hauntingblood.livejournal.com]

Hoorah to you!
I hate that people think that just because I'm an active Catholic that I am all Gay-Bash, Shove-It-Down-Your-Throat, Our-Way-or-the-Highway type of of person.
People put a label on Christianity because all the people see is the bad. People only see the harsh single minded people. Christian guides say that homosexuality is nothing different than having your hair a different colour; that it is not a sin. People however twist the words to say that.
One of the first things of Christianity is Agape (Greek for universal love). This means loving everybody no matter what. Some people who call themselves Christian need to learn this.
I just wrote a paper on this for my faith class too =)

[fiwen1010.livejournal.com]

I love the fact that so many christian churches preach that it's so wrong and that two men or two women should never love each other, and yet the first known gay marriage, I believe, was performed by the Roman Catholic church because Roman law wouldn't recognise a civil wedding, but would accept a church marriage as legal and that would save them from inheritance problems between their families should one of them die.

Unfortunately, the church then went on, a few centuries later, to seriously edit the bible, removing a lot of the pro-women bits and retranslating terms in stories like that of Sodom, where what they were originally condemned for was a breach of hospitality laws (and threatening to rape their guests. Who were angels).

And when I say 'I love it', I mean that the irony and blind cruelty that sometimes goes with it makes me want to cry sometimes.