Reply #55: Sorry, it sounds as if you belong to a church that

[Lydia Leftcoast]

harps on just a couple of passages to the exclusion of all others.

The Old Testament passage in Leviticus about homosexuality considers it a ritual impurity (mistranslated as "abomination"), along with all sorts of other things that we don't pay attention to today, such as believing that a man who has a wet dream is "unclean" till evening.

The men in Sodom and Gomorrah are not "gay" in the way that we understand, any more than your average prison rapist is. It's about humiliating the rape victim, not about having homosexual tendencies. Incidentally, Lot offers the would-be rapists his virgin daughters. (Is that any way for a father to act, to offer up his daughters to be gang-raped?)

In Paul's condemnations of homosexuality, he is evidently referring to temple prostitution, and in any case, he lists homosexual behavior as just one of a list of "sins," including anger.

If you've been around gay and lesbian people, you must have noticed that their identity is not something that they DO, but something that they ARE. Ask the next gay/lesbian person you meet when they first knew that they were different from the majority. (You'll find that it's usually before they even knew there was such a thing as sex.)

Some have tried heterosexual marriage, and have ended up making two people miserable, themselves for living a lie, and their straight spouses, who wonder why the closeted gay spouse seems to find sex with them so distasteful.

And as often as not, gays and lesbians are very fine people--loving, responsible, concerned about the larger world, devoted to their parents and siblings' families, and ready to help someone in need. I have seen gay/lesbian couples at every stage, falling in love, setting up housekeeping together, being "an old married couple," in bitter breakups, and even being "widowed." At each of these stages, the emotions are EXACTLY the same as straight couples experience.

Have you ever seen a gay man sobbing in church and asking for prayers after learning that his partner of over 20 years has terminal cancer? I have. See that, and you know that their relationship wasn't about "unnatural lusts" or any of that crap.

Gays and lesbians are part of God's creation, and while some individuals may be unpleasant or hateful, I will not let anyone condemn them as a group.

It's pathetic that certain fundamentalist preachers are preying on the insecurities and hang-ups of (mostly) their male parishioners and are raving on and on as if being gay is the worst thing in the world.

You know all those idiots who natter on about "Sexual orientation is a conscious choice"? You know what I think of them? I think that they're closet bisexuals who actually HAVE chosen to suppress their homosexual side, and it drives them loony.

If having a homosexual orientation is a sin (and I don't believe that it is), it's God's problem, not yours.

If you have to obsess about something, obsess about how too many fundamentalist preachers are filling their parishioners' heads full of hatred for gays and lesbians and at the same time drumming up support for politicians who wage unprovoked war and promote policies that harm the poor, the disabled, the elderly, and chlidren.

I hate the way so many fundamentalists have reduced Christianity to a set of rules about sex.