#254-Not Gay Marriage (Partial Repost)

First let me tell you about Logan Miles. He is an online friend that I've never met. He has an opinion I admire. He wrote a piece about the whole Chic-Fil-A fiasco of yesterday with some interesting perspective. You should read it here.

Secondly, two days ago Chady had his own post here about Chic-Fil-A.... and he was taking prisoners. That said, he had some brilliant monologue towards the end that addressed common claims that some Christians use as a defense against gay marriage. He said it wasn't good enough to merit it's own post. But I thought it deserved it's own spotlight. Plus I have added a bit of commentary below that...

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Odds and Ends: Here are a few untimely meditations that aren’t ARE DEFINITELY substantial enough to merit their own post,  (editor’s revisions noted by lines-through-words and any word that is in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS BECAUSE HIS WORDS ARE more IMPORTANT than the article’s author).


1. Pathetic Critiques of Gay Marriage: In the interest of full disclosure, I support the right of the GLBT community to get married and start families. My rationale is pretty simple, I’m not convinced enough by biblical evidence that homosexuality is any more a “sin” than interracial marriage/relations were one time sins according to widespread readings of the text (hey, wow, some Christians still can’t handle it, apparently! ), or that slavery and servitude were just fine, as long as you were nice (Ephesians 6:5-9).

2. Realistically, why would non-Christians and former Christians care what the Bible says about homosexuality? Do you care what the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Analects, or the numerous writings of Buddha have to say? Jesus used the scripture because He was speaking to an audience that believed in its cogency. Paul, on the other hand, became all things to all men, including, for example, engaging in Platonic discourse with Greeks and Romans who would have summarily dismissed a Judean subject ranting about their one God.

3. The more personal complaints about homosexuality strike me as objectively paradoxical, particularly in light of the political inclinations of the people who launch them. The pro-family lot is generally politically conservative, favoring a smaller, less intrusive government, American values (whatever that means), and policies in support of the “free market.” Well and good; so you basically want the government to stay out of your business, but not other people’s business. This emerges in some weird and predictably stupid ways:

Predictable Q₁: “But what about my children/grandchildren? How am I supposed to explain two men kissing?!?”

A₁. Why am I supposed to raise your kids? Do it yourself, that’s what ‘Murrica is about. Seriously, these are the same people who flip out about schools giving their children shots because of intrusive federal policy, but when it comes to homosexuality, it’s someone else's job to handle it or, better yet, make it go away. If your child/grandchild can’t handle the idea that adults can fall in love with someone of the same sex, but can learn on their own about the centuries of horrific torture and murder falsely committed in the name God or learn to subtly look over Brother Smith at church, who dresses flamboyantly, regularly quotes Barbara Streisand movies, found his "calling" in the music ministry, and has remained a bachelor because God just hasn't sent him the "right one" yet, then you’re a patently terrible parent/grandparent.

The anti-Gay marriage folks being the same people who picket and attend political rallies for Tea Partiers who threaten to slash funds for government programs that do some of the following for children: Food Stamps, low income area schools, education loans and after school programs for the at-risk, and medical insurance programs. Why should they have to pay for other people’s children to have basic services? I don’t know, because it makes you a decent person and a baseline Gospel living Christian? This is what people mean when they say Christians are hypocrites.



Predictable baseless statement₁ : Gay homes are bad homes.

Truth₁: It would be one thing if this has been proved sociologically, but it hasn’t and won’t be. I’ve never seen someone come out and say, “My parents were gay, it just ruined my life.” What I do see is, “My parents are gay. I had a childhood pretty much like everybody else. In fact, it was probably better, since unlike many a straight family, it wasn’t a forced marriage because they were too stupid not to use protection. They actually wanted me and were prepared for it.” (Paraphrasing, of course.)

       i. Even if the “Liberal Media” were doing a really great job at covering up these counter-narratives, there are how many Christian channels that these children of    broken gay homes could run to? Certainly enough to make millions of dollars in tithing and gift giving drives. Enough to keep Kirk Cameron in a job, making      terrible movies about bananas as God’s ultimate weapon or something.


       ii. Why does it blow people’s minds to imagine a gay couple as a family? Especially because families are already so problematic in the first place. Think about how weird it is to talk about your family life with others. I don’t mean just   the sort of genial stuff that normally pops up in chit-chat, like, “Yeah, my dad     always steals from everybody’s plate at dinner” or “I hate/love the appointed time  my family gets up on Christmas morning.” It’s the type of stuff that fuels bland conversation, while also humanizing you enough so that the other person thinks   you’re probably safe and well-adjusted. What I’m actually talking about is the private stuff, the things you’d never ever talk about with the majority of the people you meet for fear of ridicule or the chance that you’d never make meaningful friendships. 

       iii. As a child, your own family is really the only referent for what constitutes a “normal” family. It isn’t until you get older and start visiting other peoples’ families that you realize, to your eternal shame and mortifying embarrassment, that it’s only your dad that lounges around the house all day in his underwear,     scratching himself freely. Other families keep their ketchup in the refrigerator to keep it cold (disgusting), keep aside an hour per day for family prayer, don’t get   into semi-violent debates over the logical paradoxes of time travel (and its overall  merit as a plot device) in the Back to the Future franchise, or don’t have relatives  that maintain multiple virtual marriages over the Everquest Online servers. You     found yourself defensive, offering weak, “but, in our family we…”apologetics and coming to secretly loathe your friends and cousins for saying the  same. In other words, part of becoming an adult is understanding that everyone’s family is different and, in the process, learning to accept your own dysfunctional home.

My family is not typical. My dad left us when I was thirteen, it sucked, a lot. Before he left, he was an angry, abusive monster. After he left, my mother struggled to make ends meet and raise three kids. If you don’t think that it messes with your head that your family doesn’t look like other people’s normal families, then you’re wrong, it does. When you get older, when you can move past the hold that images and representations of families have on our minds and understand that a real family is much more than what it looks like, it becomes fairly obvious that if two men or two women can love and protect a child, it constitutes a good family.

(End Chady's Comments.... Please Applause)

My (Joel) Thoughts:

If you haven't heard... we here at SAL are committing emergent suicide these days.  The truth is we've been driving Left for a while now. As of now we're 106 miles outside of Chicago, have a full-tank of gas, a half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses. For some reason Glen keeps telling us to "hit it" even though we're already moving pretty fast.1 We drove past the Emergent train about two years ago and waved and smiled and then hit the pedal even harder.... 

But we aren't doing this just because we do what we want and can't handle people telling us no. We aren't doing it because it's easy. But at some point you stop looking at yourself in the mirror on Sundays and you begin to look around at those you can see but have never heard from. You see your neighbor. Not just the neighbors that live down the block from you and certainly not the neighbor at the end of your pew.

The Neighbors I'm talking about are the hideously deformed neighbors. The malnourished. The malfunctioning. The weird neighbors. The one's your mother told you to watch out for growing up. I'm talking about the neighbors you only see on television who live in sad houses in crappy neighborhoods, who seem to be around a murder almost nightly. Sure you live only twenty minutes from those neighbors, but you only know them from TV. I'm talking about the sick neighbors whose smell is more of a stench. 

I'm talking about  the neighbor lady with the tired eyes who buses up 15 miles from the ghetto, leaving her two toddler kids behind for 16 hours a day just to put your groceries into a brown paper bag. Yes she's always cold and smells like cigarettes and doesn't say anything. But if you had to grow up watching your mother get beat half to death by your alcoholic father on a nightly basis and also find yourself having "playtime" with your auntie alone in a dark room on holidays, then maybe you'd be a little cold to the world too. 

When you start focusing on the people you never focused on, and start asking them about their story, be very careful. You'll hear your neighbor speaking and find out there's monstrous human beings out there way worse than backsliders or demons. Some of these monsters are hiding in your church too....just hope you don't hear about it for your own clean conscience.  But they're out there man and the worse part is that they may be evil in part because someone was evil to them when they themselves were children. 

What you see when you start paying attention to your neighbor and not those who you're comfortable around is a lot of fear. You see a lot of scared people. I'm scared myself. You realize quickly that the difference between an alcoholic, a workaholic, and an apostolic shopaholic is the way you fend off fear. And when you start paying attention, you begin to face a dark truth that you may have suspected was true your whole life, but you've been trying very hard to avoid ever sense:

"That God — unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both — speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings."²

And this means it's up to us. God isn't picking up the tab for those neighbors you just didn't have the time to get around to helping and loving. This means stepping in when you aren't obligated to and speaking up when it's in your best personal interest not to speak up.... like addressing stuff like this video from an Apostolic preacher's church (non-Upc)....

And I saw many Christians say that this homophobic church is in the wrong here....and talk about a middle ground about being nice to gay people and to hate the sin, not the sinner, and that we should just not think being Gay is okay with God.... And my question to those people: You do realize a middle ground in such instances allows that "homophobic" Apostolic church to represent us to the rest of the world in all the media circuits? No one's listening to you speaking to yourself about everyone else being slightly right and also slightly wrong and therefore the middle is the right answer. 

Not to mention that when you say homosexuality is a sin but also think the church in the video was wrong it is received by everyone else as you saying: 

We are okay with the church's message. We just aren't okay with how loud the church said it's message. Nor the attitude the message was delivered in.

 The middle ground doesn't do us any good. Balance is for bad people too lazy to think about what may be actually right & wrong.

I said all of the above to say this: I'm truly sorry that I haven't spoken on the issue of gay marriage before any of this. Gay people are our neighbor. Anyone who knows me personally will tell you that I care like nobody else's business about this issue. I do think it's important. I don't think most gay people "have a choice" whether they want to be gay or not. I think some people are born gay. I think some others have terrible things happen to them growing up that kind of force the trajectory of their sexuality the rest of their life. I think gay people can go to heaven. I don't think the only solution is to tell a gay person to spend the rest of their life celibate like Paul. I think gay marriage should be legalized. And I have no problem with saying that most of my opinion about homosexuals and marriage is informed by Jesus on the cross. If I'm misrepresenting the cross when I say that, I pray by the love of God that he would strike me down as soon as possible. 

Goodnight all of you. And if you don't mind, I'm heading to the land of the weird, the hideously deformed, and the broken souls who have stories that'll make your jaw just about drop off....

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1: http://youtu.be/3HUyG-1T2Ck

2: From David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.