An essay donated by Anthony Ashford
Part 2: Six biblical reasons why Christians should
embrace same-sex Relationships.
Better Believe It...
The Bible Shows Us SIX Reasons!
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Reason four: Bigots Unfortunately Have Used the Bible to Oppress Other Minority Groups
People don’t always have the best intentions when using things that can influence the masses. The Christian Church wasn’t always the benevolent, do-gooder, “come-as-you-are” church that most people know it as today. Back in the (Medieval and even colonial) day, the Church kinda acted like the mob. If you didn’t sing the same song as the Church and play by all their rules, you’d be sleeping with the fishes … literally. Some Christian communities would toss women into the water to see if they were witches.
Pretty much until the Women’s Rights Movement of the 20th Century, evangelical Christian leaders used the Bible as their foundation and support for their “No Girls Allowed” policies when it came to church leadership. In some religious societies today, women are forced to keep themselves sexually timid, because of a wrongful interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve.
All during the 19th Century, strong Christian supporters of slavery of African Americans used the Bible (specifically the Curse of Ham in Genesis 9) to speak ridiculous volumes about dark-skinned people and their “accursed” role in white society.
What am I trying to say: the Bible is a great and wonderful tool to understand Jesus Christ and just how to be a good person, but perhaps Bibles should come with a label that says “Warning: Crazy people have used this book to subjugate women, support slavery, and spread homophobia. Read with caution and criticism.”
Reason three: Denouncing a child's love interests can ruin his or her life:
It’s good to have an opinion and give a damn about what people do with their lives, because there are just some people out there who really need a kick in the rear to stop acting like freaking idiots, and be told what’s what.
Jesus Christ loved telling people what’s what, because He saw that what people were doing was harming other people. In somewhat ironic way, Jesus repeatedly told people NOT to judge each other. I feel that the most powerful, and oft quoted, commandments against judging is in Matthew 7: 1-5. This is the famous “Judge not, or you too will be judged” commandment, which Jesus continues on by saying “Remove the plank in your own eye, then you can worried about the speck in someone’s else.”
Now, wait a minute, some of you are thinking, first you say, Jesus doesn’t want us to judge people, and now you’re saying that we can if we remove the ‘plank.’ Jesus explains the difference between good teaching and bad teachings in a later part of Matthew 7, saying that (another visual example) a good “tree” bears good “fruit” and a bad “tree” bears bad “fruit.”
So, knowing that “teachings” and “judgments” are completely different, let’s say for all intents and purposes that you’re trying to “teach” a young lesbian girl that she’s currently not fit for the Kingdom of Heaven, because of “choosing the gay lifestyle.” What sort of “fruit” will that bear in that child?
While some many Christian in the world believe that this sort of “teaching” will bear good “fruit,” as a gay man, myself, as a witness for so many more gay and lesbian Christians who’ve been hurt by other Christians, I’m here to say that this does not produce good fruit. Telling someone that their innate love for another human being is sinful or inferior to another person’s innate love for another human being can be the most detrimental news to a young gay person’s life.
Put yourself in the shoes of a young gay person. You imagine yourself with a wife (if you’re a lesbian) or a husband (if you’re gay) in the future, doing all the things that straight couples do (having kids, holding hands, growing old together). Then comes an elder Christian person in your life who you look up to and want to honor who tells you that you can NOT have that sort of future, because, for some reason, it’s wrong.
While that elder may think that he or she has saved you from a life of sexual failures and tragic relationships, their words alone could force you into a life of sexual failures and tragic relationships. If anti-gay Christian leaders only knew this fact, their bad teachings would cease in a heartbeat and they could possibly save the life of another at-risk gay youth.
Jesus tells us to remove the plank from our own eye. I believe that the plank is our own biases and lack of information about who people really are. The plank blocks us from knowing why a person feels the way that she or he feels. If we remove these stereotypes and biases and start trying to understand other human beings like we should, we could truly help people through the real trial and tribulations of their lives, instead of trying to treat peoples’ innate sexual orientations as their problems.
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