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The radio blared as I drove, rants and cynicism, truths, half truths, lies and exaggerations: i t was fascinating and disturbing. Talk show hosts moaned or screamed about the decay of our culture and they attributed much of it to the "homosexual agenda"; that being, to be accepted within a society that is host to an extreme hostility and blinding fear. The radio pundits hold fast to the common belief that homosexuality is contagious and that if the homosexuals are accepted, nobody will ever produce another baby. These people believe that because of homosexuality, America will wither and die for a lack of offspring (anyone with a hormonal teenager can bear testimony that this is not imminent). The fallacy driving the hostility and fear is the Christian projection that homosexuals seek converts. Many Chrisitans interpret the homosexual push for equal rights to mean that homosexuals want heterosexuals to choose to be gay. Homosexuals understand the absolute absurdity of the "choice" argument: conversion is an ignorant heterosexual myth.
One particularly vitriolic radio host named Michael Savage proclaims that all homosexuals are perverts and that anyone who doesn't share this view is in a similar category. He began his show on Monday with a fowl example. He described watching two ducks, male and female, swimming together. He exclaimed that the ducks are smarter than the humans because they know that males and females should be together. At the end of three hours of verbal brutality, Savage shared another story about a mating pair of ducks walking on a highway when the female was run over. Even after the female's body was taken away the heartbroken male duck persisted in returning to the spot where his beloved died on the roadway. Sad story about duckies to be sure. Savage again used the sad duck story to berate mankind. He thought that he had cleverly tied both end of his show together in a flock of duck stories. Savage asserted that his ducks were models of appropriate pairing behavior for humans to follow. He did not mention that nature also includes homosexuality in abundance. He did not use as an example male penguins that also pair up for life. The "gay penguin agenda" was absent from the debate. Interesting how male penguin pairs are not shunned by the flock: perhaps we can learn from nature if we aren't afraid to look at the full diversity of the universe that God created.
Savage begged money for his legal defense fund. He explained that someone not named wants him off the air. I imagine that the malignant liberties he takes on his radio show have spawned lawsuits. His verbal violence is only a short step away from calling for internment or extermination of people (and probably penguins) he deems inadequate. His damning rhetoric is is bone-chilling and I can see why his hate-speech could be challenged in the courts as dangerous. Dehumanizing those you would persecute is a necessary step before participating in atrocities: judgement is a necessary precursor to persecution and weak minds can be easily coerced into hateful acts.
It seems that judgment similar to that of Michael Savage though less overt - rules many people's thinking about God and Jesus Christ. Christians have coined a popular phrase, "Hate the sin, but love the sinner". In my opinion, that phrase is a Christian mis-application of Jesus' commandment to "Love your neighbor". The phrase may provide some Christians permission to sit in judgement of the sins of others. A judgment must be made in order to hate. Christ never taught us to hate; He taught the opposite, that we should not to point out specks in the eyes of others while ignoring the logs in our own. How can a Christian who espouses "Hate the sin and love the sinner" love a homosexual? I'd argue that they can't because a homosexual person is the sin.
To argue that a homosexual chooses to be homosexual is similar to arguing that a person with color blindness could see colors if they'd only choose to. If sexual attraction to the opposite sex could be thought of as a color, then a homosexual would be similarly blind. It isn't that color blind people don't wish to see colors, or that homosexual people don't wish to see the sexual attractiveness of the opposite sex, they simply can't. Labelling homosexual people as sinful isn't going to force them to see what they cannot see, it will only force them to hide.
It is vital to know what people are struggling with in order to help them. Many people destructively struggle with their problems in silence and isolation. This can lead to depression, mental problems, aberrant or anti-social behavior, and sometimes suicide. By vociferously stumping against homosexuality Christians force people who struggle with it to hide in the closet, to deal with it alone or to seek others who similarly struggle. I would argue that the public oppression of homosexuals created the homosexual agenda. I argue that the homosexual lobby was created as an equal and opposite reaction to the harsh stoning homosexuals have endured throughout history. It is as if Christians decided that with respect to homosexuality, every "professed" heterosexual has a right to cast the first, second and third stone.
Jesus wrote in the sand with His finger as He challenged the mob waiting to stone the adultress. Nobody threw a stone when He directed them to examine themselves. One interesting interpretaion of Jesus' doodling in the sand was that He was writing down the sins of those in the mob; perhaps, He was simply writing, "She is your neighbor".
The most striking thing about the story is that the mob brought her to Jesus. Jesus saved her life and directed her to sin no more. Can't Christians see that the important thing that happened there was that in bringing the woman to Jesus they inadvertantly saved her. She was saved not through their judgement but through His grace and through His demonstration that they had no right to judge (i.e., hate) her sins. He instead told them to judge their own sins, to examine the logs in their own eyes.
Jesus commanded, "Love your neighbor". He did not command, "Hate the sin and love the sinner". Why then do Christians feel the need to amend His commandment? Doesn't "Love your neighbor" say it all? Or is it that Christians, like the mob in the story, feel they have a divine right to judge the sins of others? Jesus knew that we each are and always will be sinners and therefore loving your neighbor without exception means we are required to love sinners. I argue that Christians are incapable of loving homosexuals unless they can lovingly call them neighbors, not sinners. Christians must have the courage to live the commandment of Jesus if the hatred and bigotry that drives homosexuals away from the church is ever going to stop. Loving all our neighbors is a commandment, we are not empowered to judge sin and thereby require sinners to be clean before we love them. Please drop your stones!
Addendum:
A dear friend pointed out that I was hurling some big stones myself in this post. I admit that I was pretty angry after listening to many hours of talk radio. Her criticism made me stop and think about the line between observation and judgement and whether I had crossed over blinded by my anger, but I will leave that for a later post. For the record, I am a Christian and I think Christians in general are the cat's pajamas. I love God and I try to live in peaceful knowledge of Abba's embrace.
I do think that Christians are missing the boat and are losing souls because of it. No amount of minimization can justify the damage done by the singular public judgement of homosexuality. It hasn't brought people to the cross. I do not hear anything resembling the homosexual rhetoric about the more common sins of pornography, male/female adultery, alcoholism, drug use, cheating on taxes, lying, etc. Perhaps it is because the gay issue is considered a safe moral high ground compared to pounding away at more commonly committed sins. It could be that doing so would leave the pews empty.
I repeat myself from an earlier post - All sins are equal, but yours are worse, for I have not committed them. Too often this seems to be how we judge the sins of our neighbors.
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