For Your Reading Enjoyment

I slept late this morning. 3:58am. It’s a weird level of existence when that is late. I’ve been waking up around 2 or 2:30am (Not on race day, race day I slept until 4am, thank God) the last week or so. My brain just decides that’s the time to get up and I can’t turn it off. Part of it is stressing about real stuff like work or selling our house, but most of it is stressing about stupid stuff like what the chlorine is doing to my kid’s hair this summer. Why 2am is a good time to worry about that stuff, I’ll never know.

(What should I do for my kid’s hair? It’s like STRAW.)

But – I have two amazing links to share with you today about religion and gay marriage. The first one is a writeup for Mormons. I have very close friends and family who are Mormon, all who also support gay marriage, and I know it’s tough to try to be patient and wait for your church be on the same page as you are. I often think about how jealous I was when girls could become alter servers a few years after I was too old. WHY DIDN’T THEY CHANGE EARLIER? I know gay marriage is a lot different than Catholic alter servers, but I remember knowing the church would change eventually, and being irritated it wasn’t soon.

Maybe the sea change has already happened. (source)
Right now we’re in an awkward, in-between place where we’ve made this significant change in what we understand homosexuality to be, but have yet to follow through the consequences of that change. The Mormon Church has acknowledged that gay people are real and sexuality is not “curable,” but has yet to offer a tenable way for gay members to remain Mormon (or, for that matter, a reasonable public stance on what the Church imagines that non-Mormon gay people should do). Our current position is implicitly that gay people can stick around as third-class citizens, objects of suspicion and pity with limited opportunities for service and deficit social capital, and this simply cannot be sustainable–not if we want to be a church that offers everyone equal access to God and exaltation.

I’m optimistic, though, because I think the harder change is the one we’ve already made, in shifting our view of the ontological status of homosexuality. We now believe gay people are real, and I think we can sidestep the consequences of it only for so long. Telling gay people to just not act on their homosexual desire made a kind of sense as long as those people were imagined to not actually be gay–to be recoverable as straight people–but if gay people are actually really and truly gay, then this sort of policy starts to look like the whim of an arbitrary and cruel God. If we don’t believe in that God, perhaps it’s time to be praying for further light and knowledge to see our way out of this intolerable status quo..

I haven’t perused the comments this morning, but yesterday there were some great comments in her comment section as well.

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The second link is just a Christian stance towards the “Persecution Complex” referencing the recent SCOTUS decision. There’s so much wisdom in this article and it actually spoke a lot to my heart and a lot to what I loved about being Christian. It made me miss the church for the first time in a long time. (Not miss it enough to return, I’m too far gone – grin, but I do miss some of the amazing messages I received from excellent interpretations of the Gospel.

For the sake of the gospel, drop the persecution complex (source)

Where is the concern for gay kids getting kicked out of their homes to live on the streets? Where is the opposition to LGBT bullying and housing discrimination? Why remain silent when Christian leaders speak in crude and hateful terms about LGBT people or support the criminalization of homosexuality overseas?

What the persecution complex suggests is that conservative Christians only care about bullying, oppression, and discrimination when it happens to them. If it happens to LGBT people, or to people in other religious minority groups, it is of little concern (or is tacitly supported). Compassion and advocacy are rooted in self-interest alone and Christian privilege is guarded ruthlessly, even if it comes at the expense of others.

The entry is long but you should read every word. It was hard to pick just one to quote. I just loved it so much and her description of her Faith and the Gospel and how she wants to live her life…that is what I love about Christianity. That’s what I want my kids to learn about the Church. In my community the few church leaders who have stood up for the LGBT community have faced backlash from their own churches and congregations and it breaks my heart. I wish more church leaders would take this stance because I still know of a kid know too long ago who went to a reparative camp. That’s still happening here. Kids are still afraid to come out or are still being shunned by their families. It’s not everywhere anymore, thank goodness, but in my state it’s still happening with regularity.

So! Enjoy those two readings while I get ready for my run. It just so happens one of my good running buddies needed early runs today and tomorrow, the two rare days my husband has off since he has a huge Tri Camp in Chattanooga this weekend. So! I’m looking forward to running WITH SOMEONE for a change! It’s been so long!