Someday You'll Thank Me For All This Scary Love

We like to say our thoughts on sex, or more accurately our rules regulating sexual behaviors, are rooted squarely and surely in scripture. I think, as Christians of a certain type anyway, we like to say that about everything, but these days, sex especially.

I don't happen to think Christianity is about regulating behaviors, but let's say for a moment it is, and let's then say that the Bible is the source for those regulations.

We know what to do and not do based on what the Bible says (not what we say the Bible says), and there are things that the Bible says we ought to do or not do and those things are tied to whether one gets to be a Christian and from that whether one gets to go to heaven. This is important to remember.

It's easy to make those opposed to THE GAY into a God Hates Fags caricature. Of course it's made all that much easier because of a tendency to see the complexities of desire and attraction as an absurd simplification called gay or straight, but let's resist the tendency to both caricaturizations. Could that be any less clear? Point being, it's easy to forget that those who imagine there is some thing called GAY and oppose it however it is manifest may do so out of a sincere desire to offer what is best for the one who is gay.

If I supremely care for the condition of your soul- read "I don't want you to go to hell", then I would want to make sure you are not being or doing something that may send you to hell. Forget for a moment that that set up depends on a way of knowing the world at odds with a Gospel narrative, but if I say being and doing gay, whatever that may be, is something that will send you to hell, then the idea of putting up barriers around the possibility of gayness makes sense. Good sense.

It's not hate, at least not the kind of hate that rolls up to campus with a Confederate Nazi flag (seriously- what was up with that guy?). It's a kind of love- a kind of distorted, crazy, self-serving love, but a try at love. That's something, no? And to my more delicate readers I apologize for putting the words but and love so close together.

So it's not hate, not always anyway. But being a distorted, crazy, self-serving love doesn't make it good. Maybe sympathetic, to a degree, maybe understandable, but not good. It is something that ought to be exposed to light, overcome, and redeemed, at least if one buys into being a Christian.

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