Can I Be Both? One Christian's Struggle with the Gay Rights Campaign

Let me begin this post with two disclaimers.  First, I am not an authority on the gay rights campaign.  I have been following the news with at best half an ear, moderately interested and supportive but not fully invested.  I do not fall under any of the LGBTQ categories, and frankly I'm not worth that much as an ally, except to my immediate friends who are involved, maybe.  Second, I am not a Christian authority.  I flatter myself that I'm fairly well educated with the historical background of my faith, but I just finished my first read-through of the Bible last week, and it took me three years, so that might tell you how much time I devote to it.  My own personal faith is all the strength I have to offer in that respect.  That all being said, I am feeling convicted by that faith to figure out what I've been feeling in regards to the recent Supreme Court decision, and I thought perhaps there might be others who are going through the same things I have.

It seems that there are two stark sides to this fight.  Either you approve of the decision and have added a rainbow filter to your facebook profile pic, or you don't and are under obligation to defriend all of those rainbows.  (A friend of mine related a comment the other day that his feed looked like a mass of Christians having a fight with a Skittles factory.)  But there is a middle ground, and I find myself standing square in no mans' land, which is a very uncomfortable place to be.  As a person, a member of homo sapiens, I have to say that I support gay marriage.  I see no reason why people cannot love whom they wish to love.  But as a Christian, it gets a bit more complicated.  When I bought into this faith, when I said, "Okay, yeah, I can go with this" to Jesus, I made an agreement to follow the values of his lifestyle, his people and his history.

Now, one thing I know is that Jesus himself did not say anything about homosexuality.  So there you go, my rainbow-tinted friends are saying, done deal, right?  Well, maybe not.  See, Jesus is a package deal.  He said himself that he wasn't wiping out all that had come before him.  "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets," he said (this is Matthew 5.17 and following, from the NRSV).  "I have come not to abolish, but to fulfill.  For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished."  So all of that crazy stuff in the Old Testament still applies.  It was, after all, the guidebook for the Israelites, God's "How To Build a Culture That Will Lead the World to Me".  And part of that culture was a certain passage which has become the evangelicals' favorite.  You know the one, come on, say it with me: "You shall not lie with a man as with a woman: it is an abomination."  Good ol' Leviticus 18.22.  You'll be seeing a lot of that one in the next few weeks.  And according to Jesus, who is, by the way, the highest Christian authority, that is still relevant.  I know that, and I think it's very dangerous to question the Bible.

So the two friends of mine who just started dating after years of will she, won't she?  Abominations, apparently.  And yet my immediate reaction when they told me they'd gotten together was joy.  I've seen the love they share, and I cannot see anything wrong in something so bright.  But my faith, my spiritual history, says that it's wrong.

How do I deal with this?  Well, you can't dismiss the Bible.  The Word of God is not something that can be just tossed out when we don't like what it says.  Maybe Leviticus is right.  I have to point out, however, that Leviticus was written over three thousand years ago.  That was the culture that was needed back then, but the world has changed, and the world needs something else.  Also, since Moses's day, the OT has been through--hmm, let's see.  Hebrew to Greek to Latin to German to English, and then back and forth a few times, I'm sure--at least ten different translations?  And the human hand and the human mind is fallible, and corruptible.  It may be that one of those scribes or copyists had someone leaning on his shoulder, someone authoritative who had an agenda, or a vendetta.  There's so much we will never know in the past, and I think Satan would be very, very pleased to have placed a trap in the very text of God's word.

Some of my Christian friends will be tempted to stop reading at that last--doubting the Bible in this way runs close to blasphemy.  That is where the "I'm not a Christian authority" comes in.  Stay with me, I'm still thinking out loud.  Besides, faith would be pretty flimsy if you didn't confess to some doubts, right?

So what does this uncertainty mean?  Can we just ignore the Old Testament?  No, I think not--remember Jesus?  "Not one letter, not one stroke of a letter."  The words may be in question, but God's intent remains, and cultures may change, but morals don't or shouldn't.  So how do we know what the true intent was?  How do we know what morals God wanted us to show the world?  (See what I mean about not being comfortable?  I'm a rope in a tug-of-war.)

The funny thing is, I've already given you the answer, or at least the one that I find the most comfort in.  Look back earlier in that same verse I just quoted, Matthew 5.17, specifically the second half of the verse.  "I have come not to abolish, but to fulfill."  The one thing I know about the Old Testament, without one single doubt, is that it points to Jesus.  Everything in it, the law, the history, the prophets, was always leading to him.  Jesus is the one authority for me on how to be a good human being, and he is the one I'm going to be following.  But Jesus didn't say anything about homosexuality! you're thinking.  True.  But his teachings can still be applied to this issue.

With that in mind, I have two points to offer in favor of my support, both straight from the Savior's mouth.  The first is one of my favorite passages, one on which I base my faith.  Matthew 7 begins with this commandment: "Do not judge, so that you may not be judged."  Judgment is God's job.  Only He and His Son can be truly unbiased, truly just.  I have no right to condemn or point out anyone's sins; I've got enough trouble picking out my own.  Maybe homosexuality is a sin, but that's none of my business.  Is it any worse a sin than pride, or sloth, or vanity, all of which I'm guilty of pretty much every day of the week?  Only God can say, and I am not going to try and speak for Him.

The second point is the deciding factor for me.  At one time in his ministry, the Pharisees, trying to test Jesus, asked him to pick one of the commandments as the most important.  Jesus didn't flinch (he never did).  He recited, not one of the ten, but one that stood above and encompassed all of them: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind."  (This is all from Matthew 22.34-40, btw.)  Then he added one like it: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."  To me, these two commandments are the Christian faith in a nutshell, and if you read nothing else of scripture, read and remember those verses.  Listen to what Jesus said right after that: "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Boiled down to its bones, Christianity is love.  We have the scriptures to tell us how to be God's children, but no one, not one person on the planet, can or will ever keep the law perfectly.  That's why we need a Savior.  All we can do is love our God, love each other, and try.

So in this particular battle, I'm choosing to err on the side of love.  I am putting my arms around my brothers and sisters who have won this cultural battle, and I am opening my heart to them.  I hope my Christian brethren will do the same, and I hope they know that I do the same to them, that I have compassion for their defeat and hope they will find peace again with themselves.  Whether or not this is wrong, I leave to my God, and I have perfect faith and trust that He has everything well in hand.

I'm Not Insulted

The top news item lately has been Bruce Jenner’s transition to Caitlyn.  The drastic transformation of such a public figure has brought widespread attention, approval, outrage, and speculation for weeks.  Now that the process is complete, there has been a positive storm of response, and for the most part, I mean that literally.  My feed and my wall have been covered with people lauding Caitlyn’s choice and her courage, which may tell you a bit about who my friends are, if not about who I am. 

But it is still a storm, and there are flashes of negativity out there.  I recently read an article speaking to the opposite side, mostly because a friend of mine shared it and I wanted to see where she stood.  The article was written by Matt Walsh and is titled, “Calling Bruce Jenner a Woman is an Insult to Women”.  Not mincing words at all, is he?  As you might expect, the tone is vicious and cruelly one-sided, and I hesitate to defend such a vicious piece in any way, but there are one or two nuggets in all the vitriol.

I think that to transgenders, the choice is a very personal one, and society has made it a very public battle. That this process has been so visible may be part of what made Caitlyn struggle with the decision. We have assigned conditions to our love and acceptance of people—they have to fit into our ideas of who they should be before we will give them any respect or concern. That's what makes this fight so difficult for them. But the writer, in making that point, embodies the cruelty he is describing.  He has missed the fact that disagreement and love are not mutually exclusive. (Remember that friend I mentioned, the one who shared this article?  If she does agree with it, as implied, well, I disagree with her, but she is still a good friend of mine.)

As for "unveiling a new self", I agree that that's poorly worded. We have only one "self", but that self is only partly seen by other people. For Caitlyn and other transgenders, their true self is more obscured than for most others, and it is brave of them to choose true self-expression over easy acceptance from others. This form of bravery, while very different from that of someone who gives up his life for others, is just as valid and should not be dismissed.

Finally, the point on Photoshop and plastic surgery being used to make an "authentic" woman intrigues me. It is an interesting dichotomy, that transgenders can use these methods to make themselves a "real" woman, but women are discouraged from doing so. I think it comes down to self-acceptance, and the point that we OURSELVES should decide whether we can accept who and what we are, as we are, or if we need to make some changes. If I retain anything from this article, it's that I should not criticize a woman for deciding, for her own sake and not the sake of society, to make changes to her appearance.

What it comes down to, I believe, is that we need to stop looking at the world in terms of black and white, because it simply isn’t.  I’ve come to this conclusion again and again—gender is a spectrum, sexuality is a spectrum, autism is a spectrum, the rainbow is a spectrum.  We humans are many things all in one, and there is never one thing in all of us.  That’s part of the glory of being human.  When we learn to first accept, and then cherish, that diversity, we will be making real progress.