My God Cares About Hearts, Not Crotches

John, why do you write so much about gays? With all the issues we have in the world, why do you spend so much time obsessing on that one?

That was part of an email I just read.

It’s not the first time I’ve been asked that question (especially lately). So, here’s le scam on that particular skinny:

Of the 865 posts I’ve written for this blog in the last three and a half years, maybe 15 are about the relationship between gays and Christianity. If that’s an obsession, I’m a meat-adorned Lady Gaga. (Mmmm … delicious gaga-bacon … .)

Does Fred Phelps Work for Al-Qaeda?

If you're bin Laden, what's not to like?

I found myself wondering (because that’s how bored I get folding laundry) who funds Fred Phelps. It’s known that its traveling picket show costs Westboro Baptist at least $250,000 a year. That’s a lot of scratch for a small family church to choke up every year.

There’s no way those people have that kind of money.

So who, I wondered, is bankrolling Westboro?

I expected a simple Google search to answer that question. It didn’t. If the source of Westboro’s considerable funding is to be found anywhere online, I don’t know where.

Whomever is funding Phelps and his family is definitely keeping it secret.

Why Do Women Stay in Abusive Relationships?

Here on my blog I have a page called, “7 Reasons Women Stay in Abusive Relationships.” Its text comprises a series of my posts—there run together as one whole piece—in which I delineate and explore those seven reasons.

Yesterday I was pleased to learn that the entire “7 Reasons” essay was cut and pasted into a members forum on Our Place, a

How Is Being Gay Like Gluing Wings on a Pig?

Not.

These days, every Christian who is “against homosexuality” (whatever in the name of Monstro’s blowhole that actually means) presents the same argument. That argument is … well, this, taken directly from an email sent me this morning:

Would you support a serial adulterer who loves his wife, but is just attracted to other women because that’s who he is and how he was born?  How about an alcoholic who just can’t help himself? Would you support him as he leaves his wife for alcohol? A glutton? A man of extreme pride? Why does homosexuality get a pass, and not any other sin? A person with homosexual desires who resists temptation is exactly the same as a married man who resists temptation to carry on affairs with other women—which is to say, a human being battling the temptation to sin. The most compassionate thing that we could tell someone struggling with homosexuality (or any other sin for that matter) is to keep resisting temptation. Keep battling. Don’t give in. This is your badge as a Christian, that you fight temptation.

Married Christian Struggling With Gay Desires Responds to Comments

Today I received an email from the man who wrote the letter featured in yesterday’s “Letter From a Married Christian Man Privately Struggling with Homosexual Desires.” He asked if I would share it, and of course I agreed to. Here it is:

Letter From a Married Christian Man Privately Struggling with Homosexual Desires

Yesterday I got an email from Jeremy “JB” Burgess, the nighttime deejay for Air1 Radio. Prompted by the link to a Relevant Magazine article called “Christian and Gay?” that JB has placed on his Facebook fan page, a married Christian man had written to JB about his secret struggles with his homosexual desires.

My Writings on Christians/Christianity and Gays

Hey, team. For a while now I’ve been getting inquiries from people wondering what (else, usually) I’ve written on the relationship between Christians/Christianity and LGBTerites. This is just to let you know that at the top of my blog there is now a tab to a page, Christians/Christianity and Gays, whereon I’ve listed links to most all of my posts along those lines. Thangya. Thangyaverymuch.

A Talk About Gay Teen Suicides With a Man Who Would Know

Charles Robbins is the executive director and CEO of The Trevor Project, the leading national organization focused on crisis and suicide prevention efforts among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) youth.

After publishing my recent post, The Gay Teen Suicide Rate and the Christian Condemnation of Gays, I contacted Mr. Robbins, figuring he if anyone would know about gay teen suicide. My interview with him follows.

Want to Know About Religion? Talk to an Atheist.

From this article in today’s Los Angeles Times:

If you want to know about God, you might want to talk to an atheist.

Heresy? Perhaps. But a survey that measured Americans’ knowledge of religion found that atheists and agnostics knew more, on average, than followers of most major faiths. In fact, the gaps in knowledge among some of the faithful may give new meaning to the term “blind faith.”

The Gay Teen Suicide Rate and the Christian Condemnation of Gays

Relative to some of the conversations that have been recently taking place in the comment threads here on my blog (in My Blog vs. The Silly Putty People and The Curse of the Crappy Christians):

It’s a fact that gay teenagers are about thirty percent more likely than straight teenagers to take their own lives.

It’s a fact that the vast majority of Christians believe that being gay is a profound moral failing, a foul aberration, a repelling, unnatural offense against God that fully warrants as punishment an eternity spent in hell.

Asserting that those two facts have no relationship cannot possibly be anything but intellectually dishonest. It’s like someone who sews robes for the Klan asserting that they personally don’t contribute to the harming of blacks.

I love being Christian; I am forever humbled by what God as Christ did for humankind on the cross; I understand and experience the Bible as divinely inspirational. I pray every morning. Contemplating the majesty and mercy of God is part of my everyday life.

So what? That has zero to do with the fact that gay teens are thirty percent more likely than straight teens to shoot themselves in the head, to let their blood flow out until they’re white, to hang themselves from their neck until they stop twitching. Nor has it anything to do with the fact that the vast majority of my brothers and sister in Christ passionately hold that living as a gay person is a contemptible disgrace to God, and a blatant, willful offense against everything that’s decent and honorable.

We Christians can say that we’re only trying to follow God. We can say that we personally would never do anything to hurt a gay person. We can say that we love the sinner, but hate their sin. We can say anything.

But let’s not insult ourselves and anyone listening to us by saying that we don’t understand the relationship between the gay teen suicide rate, and the common, absolute Christian condemnation of gays. We deserve better than that.

God knows LGBT folk do.

Please see my “How Is Being Gay Like Gluing Wings on a Pig?“

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