Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Same- sex issues... Yawn

I'm so bored by this bickering over what is biblical and what isn't regarding same-sex long-term faithful commitments.

God doesn't care who sticks what where--as long as the two are consenting adults who think they are in a long-term, faithful relationship.  (And which of us heterosexuals knows that for sure?)

It's nice that World Vision tried to take a step forward and recognize the same-sex marriages of some of its 40,000 employees world-wide.  Not surprising that it capitulated to right-wing pressure.

It's also charming that Wheaton College students protested Rosaria Butterfield this past January when she spoke on their campus near Chicago.  That wouldn't have happened ten years ago, much less fifty years ago.

http://www.wheaton.edu/Students/The-Record/students-hold-demonstration-before-chapel-speaker

Thank you to Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott for letting me know about this event via the EEWC community group online, for members of EEWC-Christian Feminism Today. www.eewc.com  

In fact, thank you to them for enlightening me on these issues in 1978 with their book Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?

I also heard that Christians for Biblical Equality is being pressed by a few of its members to change its definition of marriage as only "between a man and a woman."  Right on!  CBE formed in 1986 as a splinter group leaving EEWC because of the commitment made to gay civil rights by EEWC members.  

Not to mention the PCUSA now ordaining pastors in committed same-sex relationships, the Episcopal Church in America having gay bishops and priests, the UCC... etc.  

The times, they are a-changin'.  Slowly.  Yawn.  

In Uganda, however, homosexuals can be given life imprisonment for a "third-time offense."  And in Kenya, homosexual acts carry a 14-year penalty that up until now has not been actually enforced.  

Plenty of drama regarding sexuality in Africa and other parts of the world, as in the Third Reich under Hitler.

But in the US, anyway, it's a done deal.  All that stuff about "respecting the authority of the Bible" on sexuality is a smoke screen.  

The Bible doesn't make any statements about faithful, long-term same-sex relationships, but it has a lot to say about divorced people who remarry--they are committing adultery (Matthew 5:32).  

So if anybody is really trying to do that "authority of the Bible" thing without making allowance for a few changes in social attitudes in the last two thousand years, that person is fooling him/herself and trying to fool you.

I don't have time for that.  Pope Francis doesn't either.  

Let's get on with the central issues:


  • "You shall love YHWH your God with all your heart, mind, and strength..." Deuteronomy 6:4
  • "Love one another, as I have loved you..." John 13:34
  • "Just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me." Matthew 25:45
  • "God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor... release to the captives... recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free..." Luke 4:18



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