Awww, shut up alread

http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2&entry_id=3390

James Martin provides a link to an editorial in First Things about the question of tolerance. Spurred on by high profile incidents of gay teen suicides and a vicious act of violence in New York, it would appear that more and more Christians are asking themselves what they can do to stop the violence.

I have a few suggestions:

One, you are talking about the Church in many of these cases of LGBT youth killing themselves. LGBT people do not exist outside of the Church, but are a part of it. I think everybody who writes sentences along the lines of "what can the Church do for LGBT people" should re-examine their sentence. The real issue, is what the church can do for its own members who are either contemplating suicide or attempting suicide. We can no longer allow the Church and its followers to talk about us - they need to talk to us. This has been an ongoing situation of rhetorical dishonesty for far too long. If you want to compare my marriage to adultery or my sexual orientation to drug addiction do it to my face and don't talk about me in the abstract. If you want to talk about reaching out to me than reach out to me and stop talking about me as if I am not in the room.

Two, LGBT Christians have to stand up for themselves in the public square and stop allowing the proponents of hate to dominate the conversation. This means being vocal, this means writing, this means coming out of the closet if you are a lesbian or gay religious.

Three, demand honesty. The bishops have lied about us for far too long. The pope lies about us and the Christian right lies to us. We don't need to defend ourselves, we need to put their hate speech in the spot light and make them logically defend their arguments. What the Church teaches is very different from what many in the Church are teaching.

I think it was Jesus who said something about throwing pearls before swine. We need cut the trolls off cold. We need to deny the Donahue's and those of their ilk the attention they seek. We need to tell our on-line friends that we will no longer support their homophobia even if that means removing them from our Facebook or whatever. We need to tell our family members how they have hurt us and be willing to cut them off if necessary. I don't think we are teaching homophobes any lessons by being friends with them. I think the reverse is true, we become the gay friend they use to justify spreading hate, "I don't hate gays, some of my best friends..." Don't give them the ammunition.

At the same time, we need to demand that LGBT adults within the Church be honest about who they are. We need to be willing to take heat, if that's what it takes.