Well Well Well

Well well well, people.

Another week, another act of mass violence directed against some marginalized group here in the good ol’ U. S. of A.

Last week a mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs left 5 dead and over 25 injured. Club Q is a bar/nightclub frequented by the gay and trans community of Colorado Springs. The shooting occurred just minutes before midnight on Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual observance in honor of victims of anti-trans violence.

This comes on the heels of another mass shooting on the campus of UVA in Charlottesville, VA, also last week, and other mass shootings earlier this year in Buffalo and Uvalde, TX. And let us not forget the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016.

Those of you who still support easy access to assault weapons: You long ago lost every argument you ever had in favor of your position. Shut the fuck up and go the fuck home.

White evangelicals: You are, at a minimum, excruciatingly complicit in this and it is way past time for a reckoning. On the basis of a few select verses of Scripture, you have constructed a whole theology of anti-gayness and made it an essential part of our Christian faith and message, on a level with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This, together with your outsize cultural and political influence which you have cultivated for decades and which has reached its culmination in your ongoing support for a political leader whose life and message are the exact opposite of anything even remotely connected with Jesus Christ, has created a climate in which violence against the LGBT community is rampant and the perpetrators of such violence are emboldened.

It is up for debate whether or not the verses you cling to as support for your anti-gay theology and practice actually say what you say they do. But I would rather not have that debate today. Even if we stipulate that those verses say exactly what you say they do, it should be as obvious as the nose on your face that they make up a very minuscule percentage of the text as a whole, and in proportion to the percentage of verses that speak to other issues. Your emphasis on homosexuality is out of all possible proportion to the emphasis Scripture places on it, and especially in comparison to other matters of faith and even basic human decency. That is the Russia-sized elephant chillaxing in the middle of this room.

You claim to have chapter and verse to back up everything you say on this issue. But some things, you don’t need chapter and verse for because you already know. You know that some things are right and some things are just wrong. You know what it looks like to be a decent human being and show basic human decency to others. Yet you suppress that knowledge because it goes against those verses that you cling to for support of your anti-gay position that you have pre-decided upon in the hardness of your hearts. You have concocted a theological fiction called “total depravity” which disqualifies all human knowledge, feeling, and understanding, and used it to justify yourselves in setting aside what you know to be right when it conflicts with what you have already decided regarding a group whom you have long, and unjustly, despised.

By the way: I heard about the incident at Focus On The Family headquarters, and I can’t say I am surprised. But I will not make the mistake of Donald Trump who refused at any point in his campaign or presidency to distance from himself from the neo-Nazi elements of his base. I am sympathetic, on a certain level at least, with the ultimate aims of the perpetrators, but there are better ways of fighting this fight. I share the perpetrators’ antipathy toward what James Dobson was all about. Under Dobson’s leadership, Focus On The Family did much to drive the current evangelical hostility toward gays and the so-called “gay agenda”. But Focus On The Family is under new leadership these days which is attempting to take the organization in a (somewhat) more tolerant direction, and this sort of thing is not helping anyone. Also, there are certain lines that you just don’t cross if you are a decent human being.

I will close with a passage that should be very familiar to those of you who are familiar with the writings of Paul. White evangelicals have long used this passage in their discussions around gays and their allies/supporters. I will confess that at first blush this passage appears to support much of what white evangelicals have said about gays. But the larger issue here is the lack of care and sympathy, and even outright hostility, toward gays that runs rampant in much of the evangelical universe. You know what basic humanity and human decency looks like, and when you set that knowledge aside and choose the way of hatred for a group that your faith community has long despised, your thinking becomes futile and your heart becomes darkened and God gives you over to it. So I would invite you to read and reflect that maybe Paul is not talking about who you thought he was.

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and serves created things rather than the Creator, who is forever praised. Amen.

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.

Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they knew God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

–Romans 1:18-32