Two millennia of discrimination against LGBTQ community is enough
The latest attack on gay and lesbian Americans — this time in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the home of a number of high profile, so-called evangelical Christian national organizations — is one bridge too far, causing sensitive persons to conclude that two millennia of discrimination against the LGBTQ community is enough. More than enough.
"Conservative Christians" have given cover for 2,000 years to those who have attacked gay and transgender persons — our brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors today — by using the purported authority of the Bible to justify Christian church's long history of discrimination against them. That then gave "permission" to the haters among us to attack them verbally and physically — permission once enshrined in state and federal law and policy, which has only recently caught up with the changed attitudes of our country.
Such discrimination was never justified, Biblically or otherwise, unless one believes, unreasonably, in my judgment, that scripture was literally dictated by God to men of old. If so, it can't be defended even then as inerrant, for there are so many demonstrable errors in it. The very few verses in the Christian and Hebrew bibles purportedly "damning" LGBTQ-identified men and women can be explained away. The verses are cultural artifacts, garbled by textual ambiguities, reflecting their times and places rather than moral universalities. (That's why we ignore so much of the Old Testament and some of the New Testament such as "Revelation," today.)
During the on-going debate over these matters in my own Protestant denomination, the United Methodist Church — one of more than 5,000 such denominations in modern Protestant Christendom — I have studied each verse and have become convinced that there is no more Bible-based justification for discrimination against homosexuals than there is discrimination against people of color, who were once kept out of white Christian churches by "good Church people" citing verses about "slaves." The latter battle was fought and won back in the '60s and '70s. Those who fought church racial integration and who are still alive today are now embarrassed that they did so — or ought to be. They don't want to be reminded of it at any rate.
Now, here we are with another generation of church men and women fighting a similar battle over "sexual orientation." Sixty or fewer years from now, those still living then will be as much embarrassed, I predict, for, as before, they are trying to stand in the face of cultural, legal, and political change.
Why do we learn so little from history? Why are some politicians now trying to "protect" our children from even learning in school the facts about racial and sexual history in Alabama and in America?
The present policy of my church is so misguided on this subject that it is contradictory. On the one hand, it welcomes and affirms the inherent worth of members of the LGBTQ community, while, on the other, it denies them full participation in the life of local congregations. It is attempts to reconcile these purposes by welcoming them into full participation in the UMC that has caused the disharmony in recent years in our denomination, as it did earlier in the Episcopal and Presbyterian denominations, and caused my local church to "disaffiliate" from the UMC, although its members cite other reasons, even before the contradiction has been finally resolved. So my wife and I have opted to disaffiliate out of it.
The tragedy in all of this is that such unloving conflict in the church over an unjustified, contradictory set of policies is that it continues to provide "cover" for those willing to attack and beat and murder members of the 1.5 percent of our population who do not express the "sexual orientation" of the majority of Americans. After all, God made us all "in his image" and the way we are, we say. So if anyone has a bone to pick with anyone about homosexuality, it's not with homosexuals; it's with the God who said the ultimate commandments are but two: Love God with all you are and love others at least as much as yourself.
Dr. Jim Vickrey is a retired lawyer, college professor, and university president, who writes from Montgomery and who invites replies to jimvickrey@gmail.com
This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Two millennia of discrimination against LGBTQ community is enough
