Fighting against the tide of public opinion, unsuccessful court cases and well, history, the Christian right can't always trot out Westboro Baptist Church's "God Hates Fags" when framing their homophobia. Instead, they disguise it under the concept of "love the sinner, hate the sin" in order to create the image of love and tolerance. It's very much the opposite.
What I'm writing about isn't new. In fact, the very phrase and it's implications were the subject of a diary in Aug 2013. Such statements are all over the internet and normally I ignore them until this one:
http://salvasean.com/...
flew onto my radar screen. Why this one? I'm acquainted with a close friend of the author who linked to it in a Facebook post. Otherwise I doubt I'd have ever seen it. I hate to link to it because I don't want to drive traffic to the site. The obscure author deserves continued obscurity. However, the piece is instructive on the inherent homophobia behind the concept in how it conflates the things you do with things you are and how a seemingly gracious offer of acceptance is loaded with judgement.
I would like to acknowledge some of the C&J comment crew for their input when I originally broached this subject: mudslide, DrLori, gardnerhill, foresterbob, anon004, escapee, legendmn, and of course Bill in Portland Maine.
Let's jump below the clearly gay, sinful, squiggle, and examine the salient points.
Love and Judgement
From the piece:
"Loving someone doesn't mean you have to approve of any sins they may be committing. Nor does it mean that you need to be accepting of their sins. Doesn't loving someone mean in part that you should want to help them; that you should want the best for them?"
The presumption here is that homosexuality is a sin which is typically traced back to Levitican Old Testament quotes and later New Testament Paul admonishments. There's always a debate over the modern applicability of Iron Age goatherd traditions that may contain some echoes of older Bronze Age tribal religions combined with a Roman era apocalyptic death cult. However, it's safe to say that certain points in the Bible have become outdated in the 2000-2500 years since they were first written. The social context of such edicts no longer apply. It might have made sense from a tribal health perspective to prohibit certain activities. We're talking about eating shellfish, touching pigskin or wearing mixed fiber clothing, etc. Moreover, manpower was important for those goatherds doing daily tasks, or driving off rival tribes or needing bodies to till the fields. As such,
every sperm was sacred but with with 7 billion of us crowding the planet, even that claim to justify homosexuality as a sin is just as outdated.
If the author of the cited piece wants to ignore that social context, then he sins just as much the next time he wears a cotton-poly blend t-shirt while ordering sweet and sour pork carryout.
I mean we don't condone slavery and stone women for adultery anymore, do we?
The problem is that "you" remain the judge of what is sin and what is not, in this case cherry picking among the Biblical laundry list to justify the final judgement. Any conclusion based on that premise is misguided at best, patently bigoted at worst.
The quoted paragraph is all about conditional love, namely "I love you but I'll keep right on judging you". How that is sustained love escapes me. As Micah Murray states "It's a special sort of condescending love we've reserved for the gay community". It ignores the fact that being gay isn't an action, it's a state of being. While some denominations, for example Catholicism, makes a distinction between homosexual desires and homosexual acts (the former is not a sin, the latter is), it's uncertain if the Christian right makes that distinction and if so on a consistent basis. It matters not because in either case, it calls upon the person to deny their biology. Seeking love and happiness is the birthright of every human being. Last time I checked, we as a country embodied that sentiment in one of our founding documents.
So, in order to make the sinful happy since we can't allow them to follow their biological urges in that regard, let's
Pray Away The Gay
"...Doesn't loving someone mean in part that you should want to help them; that you should want the best for them? That might require that you talk about their sins and let God's Word speak to them. We should be doing what gives every person the best hope of drawing near to God...Perhaps that just means praying for them, that they may turn to God..."
I assume that "turning" to God here is a gay person waking up one morning, then decides to cast out those gay demons and sin no more. Okay, perhaps with a little help from friends who consider themselves compassionate who then intercede with something divine for that last nudge. People can chose to be celibate, Catholic priests are the obvious example of this, but that remains a choice, not a denial.
I think what bothers me the most is that the author is suggesting we pray away one of the most fundamental aspects of who a person is. How about you go up to an African-American friend and say "Tomorrow, I'm gonna start praying away your blackness" and see how well that goes over.
The love and compassion expressed in this piece isn't acceptance of the totality of the person, instead it's a love for what they want the person to become.
Murderer, Wife Beater, Alcoholic, Homosexuals: They're All The Same
"That boyfriend you broke up with because he abused you; you may not go out with him again, but can you forgive him and hope he changes his ways and turns to God? That father that was never there for you because he was getting drunk at a bar all the time; can you forgive him and pray that he overcomes his drunkenness and turns to God? The person that murdered someone in your family; you may hurt deeply, but can you forgive them and pray that they turn to God? The person in your class that came out as gay recently; can you treat them in a Godly way? Is there not a single sin that you have committed that you have regretted deeply and only hoped to gain forgiveness for (Romans 3:23)?"
Conflation. To quote
Bill In Portland Maine:
"Anytime someone compares homosexuality with wife beating is off their rocker." Why? The sinners listed by the author are people engaging in behavior that actually harms someone else.
The implication is that being gay, a state of being, is comparable to abuse, neglect and murder. The fact that these things are polar opposites obviously alludes the author and exposes the underlying hypocrisy of the piece.
By this token, the rest of us who haven't "found the lord" are also sinners and thus right down there with pedophiles and serial killers. I never knew that was in me.
Optics, Framing, Hateful
Call this a kindler, gentler form of homophobia. In April 2009, Jonathan Merritt laid out the template in a USA Today Op-Ed where he stated that evangelical Christians needed to change their rhetoric regarding homosexuality. As Candace Chellow-Hodge put it in a 2009 piece love the sinner, hate the sin is nothing more than a "love em until they see the error of their ways, with the ultimate goal of changing homosexuals into...non-homosexuals." Merritt's approach is all about optics and as societal movement toward equality has accelerated in the six years since he wrote that piece, it's no longer fashionable to wear your hate on your sleeve, so smile nice and purty when you tell the gays they're going to hell.
That's where the author of the piece is today: homophobia excused under the guise of love and tolerance. It shows an appalling ignorance of human nature, human desires and what defines human beings.
Folks really should focus on their own sins instead of the perceived sins of others. Perhaps that's what the author is intending to do, but the narcissistic condescension of the piece and the offensive comparison with abusers and alcoholics makes it hard to give him any benefit of the doubt regarding his purpose.
But, at the end he still loves me and Teh Gays and will pray for us, despite our errant ways. I hope he's telling his god that I want a Rome vacation this year.
Some days I prefer people who are openly hateful. At least they're not hypocrites.