In its edition of October 4, 2011, the weekly newspaper in the town where I serve as a pastor published a paid column with the title "Ask Your Preacher." A local church, Monroe Valley Church of Christ, paid to have the column run. The column is a classic example of Christian gay bashing. It labels all homosexual acts as necessarily sinful. It claims that sexual orientation, or at least the decision to act on it, is a choice, thereby denying the conclusions of contemporary psychology. It refers to what it calls the "vileness" of same gender sexual relations and blames all sexually active gay and lesbian people for failing to have the strength of will to resist what it calls a temptation to sin. When I read this crap I just want to shout: Really? Still? Why do we have to keep fighting this battle? We know that the gay haters have lost this fight, that their bigotry against God's gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people will go the way of biblically justified racism, the way of well-deserved oblivion. Yet they keep spewing their hatred, and they keep justifying it in the name of the sacred Christian faith and its foundational scripture. It's enough to make anyone who truly loves Jesus Christ and understands Jesus' ethic of love weep.
In response to that column I wrote two letters to the editor of the local paper. One I wrote for my congregation, and more than twenty members of our small church signed it. I'm sure more would of had they been in attendance this morning, October 9, 2011. Here is that letter:
Ms. Polly Keary, Editor
The Monroe Monitor & Valley News
125 E. Main St.
Monroe, WA 98272
Re: “ Ask Your Preacher” column in October 4, 2011 edition
Dear Ms. Keary:
We, the undersigned pastor and members of Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ, write in response to the hateful column your paper printed under the rubric “Ask Your Preacher” in your edition of October 4, 2011. As an Open and Affirming congregation that accepts and values all of God’s children, including those of minority sexual orientations and identities, we appreciate your editorial in that edition of the Monitor in which you identify yourself as an ally of gay and lesbian people in their struggle for equality. However, we cannot let the hurtful vitriol the “Ask Your Preacher” column spews at gay and lesbian people go unanswered, especially since that column is a paid piece put in your paper by people at Valley Church of Christ, a name that creates the possibility that the church sponsoring that column could be confused with us, a congregation of the United Church of Christ. We too support freedom of speech, but speech made in the name of our sacred Christian faith that is profoundly hurtful to a great many decent people simply must be answered.
The paid column in question begins with a patently untenable assertion, that no one is born with a homosexual orientation. That statement perpetuates an ancient understanding of human sexuality and dismisses with a stroke the findings of modern science. Suffice it to say that the American Psychological Association removed homosexuality from its list of psychological disorders in 1973. No one who knows and loves gay and lesbian people as we do at our church can believe this unscientific assertion. Sexuality is an important and God-given part of human nature, and today we understand that human sexuality comes in many different varieties. The very few references in the Bible to homosexual acts reflect not the word and will of God but ancient cultural and anthropological understandings that have long been superseded by scientific understandings. Those scientific understandings better reflect human beings as God created them than do the ancient understandings and prejudices that the human authors of the Bible included in their writings. One need not close one’s mind to new learning in order to be Christian. At Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ, we don’t.
Beyond that, whether you intended it or not, your raising the standard of love in your column reflects the true Christian understanding of the issue. Jesus Christ said nothing about homosexuality, but he said a great deal about love. Jesus rejected the purity code of the book of Leviticus as the standard of faith and replaced it with the standard of love. The primary biblical condemnation of homosexual behavior appears in that purity code that Jesus rejected. Perpetuating that purity standard, as the “Ask Your Preacher” column does, is nothing less than a rejection of the teachings of the one we call Lord and Savior.
At Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ we know that many gay and lesbian people are loving parents and committed partners, beautiful models of family life that many of us who are not gay or lesbian would do well to emulate. We are pleased and proud to have them as fully accepted members of our congregation.
Sincerely,
Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson, Pastor
I then wrote a personal letter that says something I didn't say in the letter I wrote for my church. Here's that letter, which is addressed to Ms. Polly Keary, editor of the local paper as is the first letter:
Dear Ms. Keary:
As pastor of Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ I have written a response to the appearance in the Monitor last week of the hate-filled paid column of Monroe Valley Church of Christ. Many members of my congregation have signed that letter along with me. I will deliver it to your office tomorrow morning, Monday, October 10. However, I feel compelled to say a bit more in my personal capacity than I said in that letter.
I very much appreciate the editorial you published in which you distanced yourself from the hatred of gay and lesbian people expressed in the "Ask Your Preacher" column. You say in that editorial that you published the letter because of a commitment to freedom of speech. I too am committed to freedom of speech, but freedom of speech in this country has never been completely without limits. Is hate speech that has the potential to incite violence, as the "Ask Your Preacher" column in question undeniably does, protected by a commitment to free speech? I can't help but ask: If the paid column had attacked Black people, saying that their skin color showed that they were cursed and claiming some biblical justification for that attack as many Christians did for many centuries, would you have published it? I doubt it. As much as I appreciate your editorial, I wish you had recognized this column as the dangerous hate speech that it is and refused to publish it.
Sincerely,
Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson
And I just want to cry: At long last can't we be done with the gay bashing masquerading as Christian faith? Let it be, Lord. Let it be.
Thank you.
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