Gay Is Okay

Gay is Okay!

Should gays be treated with the same respect as all other people? Conservative Christians and gay people are going at it again. They never seem to tire of this war. Only few Christians have the guts to admit that they believe that all gays should be treated with the same respect as any other people! It seems that only a person with a number of gay and lesbian friends and acquaintances can realize the importance of getting to know the people behind the labels and images society makes; and their experience of building connections with people of many different backgrounds and personal differences has been both challenging and tremendously rewarding.

Why do some Christians seem to need a stereotypical enemy, bogeyman, or group caricature that represents all that is wrong with the world? Perhaps some Christians are, seeing themselves, as the representatives of Christ on earth, need some group to target as the representatives of Satan. Perhaps they also secretly fear that they themselves are not good enough for God, which they themselves deserve to be punished in hell, that God does not really love them, or that they cannot rely on such love since they most likely do not deserve it. This fear may lead them to project this view of themselves as evil and undeserving outward onto some group of demonized others. Such people do not seem to believe that Divine Love is unconditional, that there is no need for anyone to earn it, that Divine Grace, like the rain, falls on the just and the unjust alike--and so they cannot trust in the surety of Divine Love nearly so much as they rely on the certainty of Divine Judgment.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990's and the nuclear arms race has effectively stalled, new enemies are taking the place of the communist demons, including feminists, Muslims, Pagans and gays. And so, unfortunately drama is being rewritten, including impressive flourishes describing earthquakes and hurricanes as expressions of God's wrath at the presence of gay people in U.S. society. In reference to supposed Biblical proscriptions against homosexuality, any Bible-reader knows that stealing is also condemned in the Bible; but you never see militant religious believers carrying signs that read god hates looters, however, you do see them with signs that god hates gays...

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...n merely by being born human (as if any of us had any say in that matter). Today’s society needs to realize that it cannot earn Divine Love and Grace because there is no NEED to earn such things; and certainly cannot win Divine Love or approval by hurting others. Divine Grace and Love are not transactions that need to be paid for. Society also need to understand how it has hurt people by projecting its own insecurities and inner demons onto them, to stop behaving thus, and get to know as people the very people society is told are "undesirables." Many are also in deep need of spiritual healing. Some need to spend more time observing the life of the natural world, and to accept that we have been created with a joy in living and that these can take many forms that were not understood by people who wrote religious texts several thousand years ago. Change and variety are among the few constants in our universe, and humans are made to express infinite variety in every aspect of our personalities, including our sexuality. This is how it should be, if the human species is to survive and flourish. How else is anyone supposed to love, if not the way they already do as individuals?